by Nina Post
“I want to talk to you,” Af said, his sonorous voice sounding like the earth itself was speaking.
The guru looked around as though saying he couldn’t be talking to me, right? “Wh-what… are you?”
“I’m the angel of destruction,” Af growled. “And I want my five thousand dollars back.”
“Y-y-y-y… your what?” The guru backed up hard against one of the mirror walls, cracking it behind him.
Af came closer, but his mind wasn’t focused on the task at hand. Why hadn’t she called him yet? The guru went slack-jawed with terror and wet his cargo pants, but Af barely noticed.
“I paid you five thousand dollars for a mantra that didn’t work, and I want my money back.” This was far less satisfactory than he anticipated because all he could think about was Kelly. Fired? How could someone like her be fired?
“Y-y-y… oh, you use money?” the guru said.
“Do you have it?” Like the voice of the ocean, or the Grand Canyon.
The guru could barely move or speak. “N-no. I don’t have it. I don’t have much money at all.” Shaking, he reached for his wallet, holding his other hand up, and showed him the billfold. There wasn’t even fifty dollars in it. “S-see?” The guru dropped the wallet but didn’t take his eyes off Af.
Af felt like a bully, and questioned his decision to confront the guru in his original, extremely intimidating form. He sighed, but it sounded like a volcano erupting and his breath came out as hot and pitch-flavored, searing a big, black circle in the glass that looked like a full eclipse.
The guru fainted.
After a couple of minutes of consideration, Af got his own wallet and put all the money he had, four-hundred and twenty dollars, into the guru’s wallet. That would buy many pumpkin lattes.
He left the House of Mirrors and went all the way down to the beachfront, where he stepped onto the sand and considered the water, reflecting the colors of the setting sun.
It had been a long time since he’d been in water, in any form.
No, it was silly. Look at him.
But he really wanted to, so he ignored his critical voice and walked in, to his ankles at first, his huge feet with their obsidian black claws creating deep furrows in the wet sand. The sun began its descent over Playland as lights on the rides grew brighter, glinting off the taller rides—the tower, the spinning yo-yo, the pendulum, the gondola wheel.
Af walked in deeper from shore, his huge, red body creating boat-like wakes in the water behind him. He stopped when the water reached his waist and twisted around a little, running his claws through the Atlantic waters. He laughed and seagulls scattered, squawking.
He swam out far and tread water. The lights glowed in the distance. He felt like a part of the same cosmic dust and star matter as everything now and that had ever been since time began, important but insignificant—and the only thing that mattered was that he loved Kelly.
Eventually, he swam back to shore.
A pasty-faced, blue-eyed SP wearing a blue cotton flight suit and a plain navy-colored baseball cap waited for him on the shore. Af wondered if this SP talked or not. He also wondered if Kelly had sent him, or had him sent. Actually, he didn’t wonder that, he knew that she had one of the SPs contact someone who could come check on him.
“Who are you?” Af asked.
“Sorael.” His dry tone indicated he didn’t suffer fools. “I’m in charge of sixty gates and of talking sense into people.”
Af was dubious. He kept walking. “You can tell her that I’m changing back.”
“Why haven’t you?”
“I was in the water, and I lost my phone.”
“I’m under instructions to see you change form.”
“Or what?”
“Or I suspect you’ll be sleeping on the sofa?”
“We don’t live together. We can’t.” Well, she could live with him, but didn’t want to live in Amenity Tower.
“Perhaps you should,” Sorael said.
“I’m bound to a condo building. Normally.”
“Couples have overcome greater obstacles.”
“You’re really intrusive, you know that?”
“I have a task, and I take my job seriously.”
“I don’t have any money.”
“So?”
“So I can get home in this form without any money,” Af said, “whereas I can’t in my other form. If I change back here, I’ll have to hitchhike or get a job for a week.”
“They told me to make sure you change form right away.” Sorael handed him a folded wad of bills, held together with a clip. “Here’s some money to get home.”
Af held up the money, minuscule in his enormous red hand. He closed his black claws over it. “Whatever you say, gate boss.”
“Do it.”
Af sighed, and burned a two-foot perimeter of grassy sand into a solid black disc. “How am I supposed to get back home?”
“I don’t know. Train?”
“I’m famished,” Af said. “Can we go get a pizza?”
“Why don’t we find something by Penn Station.”
Af begrudgingly changed back into his human form.
Sometime later, in a hole-in-the-wall close to Penn Station, Af and Sorael had thin slices, each the size of a comic book. He bought a ticket to the Pothole City station, waited twenty minutes with Sorael, and got on the train by himself.
He egressed at the next stop, still in human form, fully intending to change back to his original form as soon as Sorael looked away or left, but wanting to stretch first.
As he stepped onto the platform and got his bearings, a strange thing happened. One of the Cluck Snack chicken mascots, a seven-foot tall chicken, came skipping down the platform between the benches and the rails, wings flapping gently. A man waiting on a bench to Af’s left raised his head, made a face, and went back to his phone; a woman waiting to Af’s right held her child closer to her.
The chicken stopped in front of Af and held out his wing.
Af took it, and disappeared.
Without talking to anyone, Kelly took the elevator down to the garage level and walked to the SSI building in the blowing snow and the streetlight glow of sidewalks. She was in a daze, like she had also caught the zombie fungus. Maybe she had. Would she even be able to tell? Did it matter?
Out of pure muscle memory, she took the old, art-deco elevator up to the top floor.
When she hung up her coat and hat in the warmth of home, she no longer felt under attack, but wanted to crawl into bed. All of the SPs were dressed in matching soccer uniforms: black and white striped shirts branded with CLUCK SNACK on the chest, white shorts, and knee-length white socks.
They kicked a ball around the walkway that encircled the central steno area, where office workers used to process papers for Special Situations International. It wasn’t a soccer ball, though; it was, the best she could tell, a ping-pong ball, which made for some confusion.
She did a quick head count: Tubiel (small birds), Rochel (lost objects), Firiel (fungus), Morris (HVAC, pipe, and duct work), Ilaniel (fruit-bearing trees), Kermit (three a.m.), Achiel (home appliances), and Dave (water insects).
If she had been alone, and if she didn’t have something she had to do, she would have gone straight to the bedroom. But she dropped off her bag by the desk in Mr. Black’s old office, where she had the painting the Jackal had given her, the melancholy cowboy; and the oil portrait of the three executives of Special Situations International: Mr. Black, Mr. Yellow, and Mr. Orange. Her favorite pose was the kung-fu punch.
“Can you all come over here for a minute, please?”
They all gathered in the office. “Af reverted back to his original form again, but he’s somewhere in New York, and I lost track of him. I can’t go out there, and he’s not picking up his phone. Do any of you know any SPs who can help?”
Rochel raised his hands. Both of them. “You do, Rochel?”
Dave spoke up. “I think he has to contact them first.�
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“Great, thank you. I would really like to get someone out there, so let me know the minute you find an SP that can help.”
They ran out of the room.
Kelly went over to Mr. Black’s sofa and stretched out. Everything in her life was actually someone’s else’s life. And she was fired.
She didn’t care anymore.
Let the board figure out a plan of escape. Let them unbind themselves through the vending machines or the networked fire alarm system or the electrical system or the water/sewer system or the natural gas lines.
Let them open portals to other dimensions where monsters could fly in.
Let the zombie fungus claim the building and everyone in it.
Let the flashing fall off the exterior of the building.
Hell, let the Enim giants use the equipment in the fitness center.
Let the reserve get to zero, and let the residents get hit with a special assessment, and let that motivate the board to destroy everything, including Pothole City.
She’d worked so hard, and she cared about the residents, and she wasn’t a bad boss, and she got fired. What was the point?
Tubiel brought her a potted bird’s nest fern, followed by a plushie penguin, and a Cluck Snack Meal’n a Box Totez.
Eventually, she got up and shambled (zombie-like) to the kitchen to make tea, filling and starting the kettle. Outside, it was a classic wintry mix of snow and sleet and wind, coming down stronger than before, spattering thickly against the frost-rimmed south window.
Despondent, her self-esteem like a squirrel after a hawk picked it apart, Kelly shuffled aimlessly around the perimeter of the top floor like a sad, extremely slow version of a five-hundred-meter dash. As she walked, the SPs peeking out around doors to watch her, she drank her tea and read more of Roger’s journal, after he’d been on the job for a few months.
Bred’s Rising
elly read excerpts of Roger’s journal out loud to the SPs.
“I am desperate for an assistant manager. I can’t do all of this myself. The constant infighting, the passive-aggressive demands on me. Every day, it feels like every single resident and staff member wants a piece of my flesh. (Kelly wondered if they’d had a zombie outbreak of their own.) C&C told me that “none of the other buildings this size have asked for assistant managers” (This fallacious argument enraged her). I practically begged them. They suggested that I “organize my time better.”
She also found that Roger wrote some kind of action-adventure thriller for men called Bred’s Rising, about a bounty hunter named Bred. The SPs walked behind her and next to her, listening attentively.
“Bred wanted nothing less than to be the best at what he did, and considered anything that didn’t help him achieve that to be an unacceptable distraction.
“He had stripped his life bare of connections, hobbies, relationships, unrelated pursuits, furniture, most food, his collection of porcelain Staffordshire Cavalier King Charles spaniels, and clothes that were not his uniform. He did not “enjoy” things: life, the process, the journey. He did not “hang out” with people. And he did not “relax.” He was about winning, and nothing else. He never questioned his decisions and he never, ever second-guessed himself. He did not mix emotions with work, and he never let anything interfere with his priorities.
“So much for ‘show, don’t tell,’ right Roger?” She kept reading out loud as she walked, passing Mr. Yellow’s old office.
“He had designed his life to be so, and that was why he was the world’s best bounty hunter.
“After his pull-ups (“Obligatory pull-ups,” she muttered) and perfunctory shower, he combed his hair, used a blow dryer to dry it how he wanted, and sprayed it into submission until it was incapable of moving, as though it were afraid to move.
“His specialty was chasing down employees: employees who had embezzled, employees who had stolen office supplies and went on the run, or employees who held corporate intelligence. No embezzling employee was safe from Bred.”
“Not that I expect it to be autobiographical,” she said, “but this sounds like Roger wants to be more like this kind of person.”
“It sounds like you,” Dave said, not looking up from his Cluck Snack comic with a golem on the cover.
Kelly snorted a laugh. “I’m Bred? I don’t think so.”
“Except for the hairspray part, and the porcelain spaniel collection.”
“Don’t you have a water insect to save?”
Dave shrugged. “Maybe he wanted to be more like you.”
“Roger? More like me? I seriously doubt that.”
“Why not?” Dave asked.
“Because, he’s… Roger.”
“You know, you were like Bred when we first met you.”
She paused by the pneumatic tube room and noticed Ilaniel reading the third journal. “Yeah, right.”
“Very Bred-like,” Dave said.
She made a dismissive noise, tossed that journal on one of the desks in the middle of the long room, and kept walking. She flipped through the earlier journal, which turned out to be from Roger’s previous position at a smaller residential building.
I put together a draft of comparable building analyses of similar condominium buildings in Pothole City to show that they all have one or even two assistant managers. I’m going to present it at their offices next week.
Something snagged at her attention and she slowly flipped back, trying to find it. Blabbity blah, the outgoing mail slot is NOT an amenity no matter how much my boss tries to make it seem like one, blah blah… and was taken aback to see a reference to Charlotte.
I gave my presentation to C&C, stating that I need an assistant manager to help me run this 300+ unit building, and that the cost should not come out of this building’s HOAs! But they smacked me down and punished me even more—C&C hired a “fixer,” an annoying woman named Charlotte, who’s supposed to make me and everyone else here more efficient. Why don’t they put me in a spacesuit filled with mosquitos? You know how we can be more efficient? With an assistant building manager!!!!!
At the bottom of the page and for the next two pages, Roger furiously scrawled some violent doodles, including, presciently, a dragon.
Several days later, Roger wrote:
After being at this job for some months now, I suspect that money is being funneled. I think that someone at Claw & Crutty is embezzling funds from the client buildings.
Reading Roger’s journal gave her two ideas. One, that she would find and use his analysis of comparable-sized buildings in Pothole City, bolstered by her own research, to make her case for an assistant manager. Two, that something was up with Charlotte, and she was going to find out what it was.
Ilaniel tapped her back and showed her a page in the third, most recent journal.
I’m receiving strong indications that Claw & Crutty are going to promote me to regional soon. In preparation for my ascension, which I’ve discussed with them, I’ve placed a kind of avatar of myself in the lobby plant using the SP in charge of transmogrification and manifestation. (“I knew it!” Kelly shouted) Thanks to some pretty adept negotiation on my part, Amenity Tower has an interminably long lease on that plant; it’s not going anywhere. And whenever the residents start veering off course from what I’ve taught them, which is inevitable, a small part of me will be there to get them back on track.
As she passed the main floor bathroom, she said, “I’m wondering whether or not I should present this information to the Plant Lease Crisis Committee.” She looked at Ilaniel, walking behind Tubiel on her right. He shrugged. Tubiel shrugged.
“I value your counsel,” she said dryly.
“I say don’t tell them,” Dave said. “They need all the help they can get.”
“Yeah. They would get rid of it—or someone would steal it, so they could have a part of Roger for their own.” She made a face. “I’m definitely not telling them.”
She went into the TV room along the south wall, where some of th
e SPs were, and sat cross-legged on the sofa there and thought about her future. What would she do? Should she find another job at a different condo building?
There was nothing like Amenity Tower, though.
She didn’t want to work at Ultra-Amenity Tower, as nice as it was; the residents there would probably make her despair over humanity on a daily basis.
Should she go back to tracking down monsters for a living? In that case, what about Af, and the SPs—would they go with her? Af was bound to Amenity Tower like the rest of the board, and his original form was not tenable for a relationship (a deal breaker, really). And having to use a ferryman or a chaos demon wasn’t good for Af’s sanity, and by extension, hers.
But if she couldn’t work at Amenity Tower, why stay in Pothole City? The SPs didn’t have to stay in any particular building or city.
And what about her father? Maybe they should get one of those touring buses, or an RV, and set up her father’s lab in there, and she and Af and a ferryman and the SPs could travel the country making Cluck Snack flavors and products, and tracking monsters for bounty money.
A dangerous amount of her self-worth was tied up in work. Getting fired, although part of her kind of expected it given Charlotte’s threats, was an awful feeling, as though she had no value to anyone or anything. As though she had somehow ceased existing, rejected and forgotten by the world.
She was still in her work clothes, so she went into her bedroom, showered, changed into her blue pajamas, and called Tom on his cell phone.
He answered in a whisper. “What happened to you? Hold on, I’m going outside.” A moment later, he said, in a normal voice, “What happened? Charlotte came out to the front desk, almost spitting fire. Actually, at first I could have sworn she did spit fire, but you know my imagination.”
“Charlotte fired me.”
“Fired you?!”
