First Draft Preview: “‘Every Man Knows in His Heart,’ He Said, ‘That Nothing is Worth Doing’”

On the corner of 7^th and Blake the sidewalk broke open, a wound dressed in steel railing, exposing a descension of concrete incisors that lay underneath a humid breath issued constant into the chill of the night air, as much a product of the incessant shuffling of trains as the hot crush of people beneath the streets.

The wind took the steam up and along with the snow, drawing it like a veil across the buildings along the street, obscuring them almost entirely. From inside The Station it was as though the street had erupted, and only the thin windows kept the ash and smoke from sweeping in and suffocating the quiet patronage as they sipped at their coffee and considered the pastries they had bought on a whim, absent of any real desire. 

If The Station were famous, which it was not, it would be so for its comfortable size, its bitter but reasonably priced coffee, and perhaps as well for its lighting, which dwelt somewhere between dim and funereal. If it were infamous, which it was not, it would be only for the tendency to attract a crowd perhaps too interested in politics, and certainly convinced of their own relevance. It included, but was not limited to, the outspoken, the poetical and the romantic, and rarely but not unheard of, the perilous.

To restate: if infamy were to be The Station’s fate, then it would rest in its clientele. At the particular moment, that infamy, hypothetical or not, could be traced and attributed to the man dressed in black, with his frivolous gestures and frenzied writing. His name was Lucian Bugnon, and he had attributed to him exactly six bombings, all of which were considered to be of some significance- three statues, two memorials and one monument. 

In Which Last Words Are Well Chosen

Every morning that I wake up is another morning that I wonder how I’m going to avoid dying today. It’s routine, like anything else, I suppose, and though some might call it morbid I consider it as practical as, say, writing up a grocery list, or making sure to drop off your laundry.

It’s not an upfront process, is what I guess I’m getting at. I don’t stare at every passerby and wonder which one of them has cholera. I’m not crazy.

But it’s something I think about, nonetheless, something that is always whirring along in the background, occasionally slipping forward but mostly just a quiet hum at the back of the mind.

Funny enough, then, that it had come to the fore in purely theoretical terms as I stepped off of the street at 47^th and Blake, dodging a kid on a bike and walking smackdab into oncoming traffic.

I’d like to say I wasn’t alarmed. I’d like to say that it’s exactly the sort of slipup I’d been waiting for. I’d like to say that I’d kept my cool.

Mostly I felt surprise. Not pain, my body took care of that, mostly. Enough adrenalin to keep me alert and peppy for the whole experience.

I’m embarrassed to say that I didn’t perceive the gravity of my situation, so when the E.M.T.s finally scraped my broken body off the pavement they didn’t understand what I was saying. “It wasn’t a hit and run,” they said. “We got the guy.”

“No,” I was quiet and coughing. “No, one second. Did you get-” and I coughed again, “Did you get the license plate number?”

And then, you know. Poof. Gone.

Magic.

In Which a Joke is Safely Racist

“Okay, so you wanna hear an Olie and Lena joke?”

Marcus could only stare blankly at Jones. “A what joke?”

I was leaning against the wall, watching the ceiling fan turn. “It’s a sort of Polish joke.”

“Oh,” said Marcus. “Sure, why not.”

Jones nodded at me and launched into it. “So, Olie is on his deathbed, right? And Lena drags the whole family over, makes a big affair of it, every one of Olie’s relatives is there.”

I rolled my eyes, and sat down at the table, in between the two of them. Marcus had his elbow on the documents. I swatted his arm aside and pulled them towards me, then proceeded to shuffle through the stack of manila folders.

“So every one is over, and Olie is there in bed and he turns to Lena, his voice all quiet and asks ‘Oh, Lena, is my brother Jacob in da room?’ and Lena says, ‘Yes, Olie, Jacob is right over der,’ and Jacob takes a wave at Olie.”

I found what I was looking for, the beige folder marked “Security and Maintenance”. It was overstuffed, and papers were sliding out the sides. I flipped it up, so Jones could see it. “Maybe we should worry about this?”

Jones ignored me. “And then, Olie, his voice even softer as death approaches, says: ‘Lena, Lena my dear, is Uncle George in da room?’ and Lena, her eyes full of tears, nods and says, ‘Yes, Olie, Uncle George is right here,’ and Uncle George puts a hand on Olie’s shoulder.”

I opened the folder and glanced over the sheets. It was what we needed, mapping out every square inch of the place and how it worked. I stopped at a map of camera locations, hoping to find something heartening. There wasn’t. It was a pretty tight setup.

“And then, Olie, poor thing just barely alive, says to Lena, ‘Lena, oh my Lena, tell me please, is my whole family here, all of dem in da room?’ and Lena, holding back a sob, says ‘Yes, Olie, yer whole family is here.’”

I slid the map over to Marcus. He didn’t notice so I tapped him on the shoulder and pointed at it. He picked it up and gave it a one over, frowning as he did. I could tell by the look on his face that I didn’t miss anything.

“So then, Olie, his hands trembling, points behind the whole family, and with the cold rasp of a man about to slip away, says ‘Den Lena,’ he says, ‘Why is dere a light on in de kitchen?” Jones spread his hands out over the table, his eyes lighting apprehensively on Marcus’ face.

Marcus looked up from the sheet and shrugged at Jones. “I don’t get it.”

“What do you mean you don’t get it?”

“I mean that I just don’t get it.”

I grabbed the map from Marcus’ hands, passed it over to Jones. “It’s because Polish people are cheap,” I explained. Jones grabbed it and did a quick replay of mine and Marcus’ reactions.

It still took Marcus a second. “Oh,” he said carefully.

Jones continued to study the map. “It’s more funny if you don’t, you know, have to have it explained to you.” He picked up the folder and put the map back in, set the whole thing back on the table. “We may be fucked.”

I nodded. “Maybe.”

In Which the Boy Fails

The boy was wrong, as he had been before and would be again, the endless cycle of failure always seeming to run its course around him- a horse race that he bet on endlessly, over and over, and always lost.

This time was worse though.

“What do you mean the orange button?” he asked tenatively.

He had pushed a button, and it was orange, but the klaxons had started up along with the lights and it didn't really seem to be the signature of success. The boy kept his face contritional as he stood in front of the console, but his hands were fidgity, and he ran his thumbs across themselves in a constant nervous motion.

“I meant the orange button, what do you think I meant? The hell did you do?” Karen said, the patience she had been trying to muster failing entirely. “I mean, Jesus Christ, what did you do?”

To be fair to all parties, orange is a word that could possibly describe a great variety of shades, from saffron to red-orange, but this was the boy, and the boy will be wrong, so of course the orange button was not the orange button he thought it was.

The correct button was what might be referred to as tangerine yellow. The boy's choice had been a safety orange.

Karen shoved the boy aside and sat in the chair. The console was wide, wide enough that one would have to lean over and stretch out to hit the farthest buttons and levers, a designer fault that was corrected in later models, but Station Seventeen was long overdue for an update. She began typing furiously with one hand, reaching out to strike buttons that to the boy's untrained eyes appeared as random as the toss of a die.

“Is there anything I can do?”

Karen didn't bother to turn around. “You can shut up and stand aside.”

So he stood and he watched, as Karen worked as quickly as she could.

“Which button did you push?

The boy ran his eyes along the rows, but could only reply with “The orange one.”

Karen muttered something coarse under her breath, but whatever extended curse she had begun was cut short by cold tones of the Station's computer. A hologram blinked into existence above the two of them, big imposing numbers, and both were silent.

“Fifteen seconds.”

Karen spun the chair around and stared directly at the boy. “What. Button. Did. You. Push.”

“Um.”

“Ten seconds.”

“Think.”

The boy thought as hard as he could, the glow of the hologram painting his face a sickly shade, but (“Five seconds”) nothing was coming up but orange. He shrugged, a small pathetic gesture, the last thing he would ever manage to screw up.

Karen looked at him, her face in a dangerous calm and her eyes ablaze. “Are you serious?”

There was no noise, but the light from the station's explosion lit the terrestrial sky, a bright plume of white that burned into a slow yellow fire, a fire that might best be described as a mellow light of golden poppy.

In Which Gerald is Not Sure How to Feel

There had been no one in the house, thank God, when the letter bomb had exploded, but Gerald didn’t feel anything resembling relief as he stood outside of the building, watching scattered papers and sparks drift out of the shattered window where his room had been. He felt, in fact, quite the opposite. He felt a looming sort of dread, not at all glad that he had in fact avoided the explosion, instead feeling like perhaps he would have been better off, no, should have been better off, in his room, spread out across the walls and floor as an ashen smudge to be later collected and disposed of.

The package had arrived about an hour earlier with no return address and a name only superficially resembling his own, but the phone had rung so Gerald had grabbed a cigarette and left, standing out on the sidewalk and pacing. It was his girlfriend, Susan, and she had called and said hello with the uncomfortable gravity that a speaker takes before saying something truly overwhelming.

“Hello Gerald.” Susie had said.

“Oh God,” Gerald had replied, and then a noise like nothing either of them had ever heard, like a team of trucks all colliding head on like an asterisk, or maybe like a safe, falling from some great distance through a long series of plate glass windows. Gerald had been thrown off of his feet and yet somehow the cell phone landed next to his head so he could hear Susan say, her voice the very encyclopedic example of bewilderment, “What the hell was that?!”

Gerald took the phone up, still lying prone on the ground. He ignored his injuries as best he could. (His estimation: one twisted ankle, two, maybe three broken ribs. Numerous cuts and bruises.) “Susie,” said Gerald. “I think my apartment just exploded.”

In a rush to say her piece, Susan either didn’t hear or simply ignored his words. “I’m breaking up with you.”

Gerald paused, unsure of what to say, and then repeated himself. “Susie,” he said. “I think my apartment just exploded.”

“What?”

“My apartment. It- it exploded.” He suddenly felt very ridiculous and unsure of how to continue, tried to further emphasize his point, saying “As in, like… boom.”

She said nothing in response, but Gerald could hear low, throaty noises and the tiniest sounds he imagined was the sound of her grinding her teeth. He thought about how her face scrunched up when she was angry, how her eyebrows remained level as her eyes squinted, the mouth a thin line below. He imagined she was doing the little twitchy thing she did with the corner of her lips that he found extremely cute for no reason apparent to him and had learned to never mention.

Susie hung up the phone, and Gerald, lying on the ground, gave it a look of utter and complete confusion before shutting the clamshell with an audible click.

He didn’t get up, choosing instead to continue lying on the ground as the breeze scattered ash and soot around him.

At the End of the Day

"Things were better before,” Roxy said, sitting on the ground and poking at the coals in the makeshift fire-pit with a sprig of bent metal. “Before the sun exploded, I mean.” She prodded at the smoldering lumps, turning them over and over again in pointless motions until the chewed logs above them collapsed, sending flecks of red-hot sparks up to wheedle and disappear into the air.

“Oh you mean, do you?” Roxy’s mother was standing above a scratched and dented steel counter some short distance away in the tiny metal box of a room, impatiently stirring the too-hot soup she had taken off of the now dying fire. She didn’t turn to Roxy as she spoke. “I suppose you’d have us back out there in the freezing cold just for sentimentality’s sake.”

Roxy sighed. “It’s not that it’s, just, you know.” She lay the stick down now and drew her legs up against her chest, wrapping her arms around her knees. “It was better.” Though she couldn’t see it, her mother’s head dropped a few inches, her neck bent into a nearly ninety degree angle. She said nothing.

“At least the bamboo was alive,” Roxy continued, which was not altogether incorrect- though the bamboo was not dead, it was dying slowly in the ceramic basin in the corner of the room, and though the bamboo had been livelier under the last bits of sunlight, it was unfair to blame the UV lamps that now stood above it. Roxy had slowly lost interest in the plant as the sun faded, watering it less and less often, and she had ceased talking to it altogether. The case once was where she would tell the plant everything (especially after the baby had died), but in the cramped tin of their living quarters her mother’s near-constant proximity discouraged her.

Before her mother had woken that morning, Roxy had spoken to the bamboo, the first time in months. She had crouched low, and whispered something secret.

Roxy’s mother put a hand close above the pot, and sensing that it was cool enough, poured two portions out into bowls, and carefully covered the pot over before placing it into the freezebox. Passing a bowl to Roxy, she sat down next to her daughter on the floor and the two of them sipped carefully at the thin soup, and stared into the glowing coals.

They ate their soup in silence, and Roxy's mind fidgeted. She finished her soup set her bowl aside, and putting her hands to the back of her neck in fear and frustration, she spoke.

“I think we should do it.”

Her mother said nothing, looked nowhere and was still. She blinked slowly, watching the coals of the fire hiss and snap and finally she stood up and placed her empty bowl on the counter.

“No.”

“Why not?!” said Roxy, turning her head towards her mother, fast as a whip, as though her mother's response had not been unexpected but unimaginable. “This place is empty. No one is here anymore and no one is going to-“

Her mother cut her off. “They will,” she said, not sharply but quietly and slowly, a new gravity in her voice. “They will figure something out.”

Roxy said nothing. She had nothing to say. Defeated, she turned her head back to the fire, and again taking up her scrap of metal, she pushed the coals around and watched as the sparks scattered into the air.

In Which Derrick Refuses to Watch Blade Runner for the Sixth Time

“Come on,” says Derrick. “This is ridiculous.” The look on his face is a cautious, like he’s really become quite afraid of the situation, but you press on regardless.

“This is ridiculous? You’re being ridiculous! Just drink it!” Your enthusiasm has lit up your face and made you mostly oblivious to the obvious danger of the whole thing. Derrick eyes the glass on the table, the blue liquid within. It’s becoming clear to you that his claim that he would “rather drink Draino than watch this fucking movie again” may have been colorful hyperbole, but you’ve never been one to let these things go.

“How do you not want to watch Blade Runner?” You had been calm and patient to start, but quickly realized that the time of reason was growing short. Six times in a week was too much, he had said, but you would have none of it.

So now, the Draino.

“I’m not doing it,” says Derrick, and this time you believe him, but the whole thing has gotten out of hand and you refuse to let this pass. You shout “fine!” and hammer the glass back, downing approximately a cup and a half of the stuff in one go.

Derrick’s eyes are wide, but you’re not worried. “Dude,” he says. “I don’t think that was a good idea.”

“Yeah, well,” you start, but you interrupt yourself, coughing up a thick syrup of blood and stomach lining. You can’t think of anything good to follow that, so you squint through the blood that’s started welling up in your eyes and try to maintain composure despite the retching.