Authors: Sarah Langan
SCRITCH!-SCRATCH! SCRITCH-SCRATCH!
She turned to the corner behind her. Because of the mind game she was playing, everything seemed dark. Something twitched. She closed her eyes. When she
opened them, it was bright again. Her imagination? The OCD?
At the far end of the table, Mortimer wrapped his slender knuckles against the teak table. He wore red Santa Claus suspenders under his blue wool jacket, and they made him seem deranged.
What seventy year-old man wears suspenders?
“Go on,” he said. “We don’t have all day.”
She continued, trying not to look in the corner. Not to look anywhere. “What the client liked about Jill’s proposal was its unique style, but…” the words left her. She focused on her hands, whose wrinkled knuckles looked like newborn gerbils. Jill’s boxy, Brooks Brothers jacket was too big. Its sleeves met her fingers, and it smelled like a hospital, which of course reminded her of Betty.
Scriiiiitttccch! Scraaaaaaaaaaaaatttccch!
She couldn’t help it. The sound was too big to ignore. She jerked her head toward the corner behind her, and
saw.
The man from her dream. He stood with his back to her, and he appeared as a shadow, only darker; the reverse outline of a sunspot when you blink.
She broke out in a quick sweat. Can OCD make you hallucinate? Can you get flashbacks from hash? She looked away, hoping he would disappear. No one else was reacting, which she knew meant he could not really be there…right?
“Practical considerations…” she said. Sweat dampened her temples. She tried to remember those considerations, but her mind drew a blank. Her team was boring holes through her skin with their eyes. Little lasers of humiliation. A few looked nervous, like her discomfort was contagious, but most were openly hostile. Limping chickens in coops are always the first to get pecked to death. Nobody likes the weakling of the pack.
Scritch!-Scratch!
She couldn’t help it. She looked back into the corner.
The man’s shape had gotten more distinct. Pieces of the plaster wall fell to the floor as he worked:
scritch!-scratch!
To dig, he was using his index finger, which he’d worn to the bone.
Another tap from across the room, and then, “Ms. Loomis? Lucas? Is something wrong?”
SCRITCH! SCRATCH!
SCRITCH! SCRATCH!
She covered her ears with her hands. The scratching got faster. His bone wore as he worked and left a chalky residue.
SCRITCH! SCRATCH!
SCRITCH! SCRATCH!
SCRITCH! SCRATCH!
There was a hole in the plaster now. She remembered the article she’d read, about the doors of chaos that civilized men had no business opening. The thing in her stomach slopped. The hole the man had made was black and deep. If she looked hard enough, she thought she could see something on the other side of it, peering back at her.
Above the hole, he began to scribble with his chalk bone. His body bent and jerked as he wrote, and he worked inhumanly fast, like time moved differently for him than for everyone else in the room.
SCRITCH! SCRATCH! SCRITCH! SCRATCH! SCRITCH! SCRATCH!
His hair had gone gray, and his sharp teeth fell out one by one. Not a dandy, anymore. His three-piece suit was worn to threads. When he was done, he stepped aside to let her see his message. In blood and bone above the black hole, he’d written:
Build the Door
As she read, the hole underneath the letters expanded like a breath, and the void inside it widened. And
then, oh, no. Out from the hole, a swarm of red ants crawled.
“Stop it!” she cried.
The entire room jolted. She turned back to the boardroom table, where shocked faces peered back at her. She faced the man in the corner again, but he was gone. So was the hole.
Ragged breathing, she closed her eyes. Opened them. Nothing there. Not even a crack in the plaster. A bead of sweat rolled over her brow and into her eye. The salt burned.
Scritch! Scritch!
This time, the sound was Mortimer, scratching his manicured fingernails against the wooden table. She realized he’d been doing that for a while now. The blood rushed to her face. She looked in the corner again. Nothing there. Could she really have imagined such a thing?
“Are you ill, Miss Loomis?” Randolph asked.
Audrey blinked. The room was bright. A sunny fall day. Twenty rich people with good jobs sat at a long teak table, politely observing Audrey Lucas have her first psychotic break.
Mortimer glared, like he wished his eyes would burn holes through her skull so she’d keel over, and he could kick her dead body. Jill was up and heading in her direction. There were tears in her eyes, and Audrey wasn’t sure whether they contained self-pity or sympathy. Randolph pushed out his chair as if to stand, excuse her from the podium, then insist Jill continue. Do the honorable thing and put her out of her misery. She’d be fired if that happened. Maybe not immediately, but eventually, because screwing up a major meeting wasn’t something anybody was going to forget. She couldn’t let that happen. Not without a fight.
“I should explain. I had light surgery over the weekend. Nothing serious, just a polyp, but the doctor gave
me Vicodin. I think I might be allergic because—I’m dizzy, and a little confused. But I’ll stop wasting your time and get going now. Okay?” The lie came out in such a nervous rush it sounded natural.
Nobody moved any closer, and she seized the opportunity to continue. “Now…Where was I?” she asked while unrolling the plans. The lines on the page were a jumble. She fixed her eyes on them and shut everything else out. The shuffling papers. The eyes, watching. The sound of her own rapid pulse. The thing in the corner. Was it invisible, and still watching her even now?
She counted backward quickly from ten. Imagined the shapes of the numbers as she thought them. Moved her gaze from left to right, small to large, and willed herself to
see.
After a few seconds, the plans coalesced. Right angles and arcs, beautiful straight lines. They intersected, and spoke.
“It’s a maze,” she said. Mortimer narrowed his eyes. Randolph shrugged. The middle men shuffled their feet. She realized they thought she’d said
amazed.
She looked at each person in the room, one by one, so that they knew she was back in control. She started with her team. Realized that they hadn’t been hostile before, just concerned. If this went badly, Audrey wasn’t the only architect facing an unemployment line. Then she nodded at Jill to reassure her. The underarms of her frilly blouse were wet with sweat. Then the department heads. Finally, Randolph, then Mortimer. Dead in the eyes. She’d be damned, after all she’d done to get here, if this was the way she was going out.
“A garden maze in the clouds.” She let this sentence hang for a while, because she liked the sound of it, and she suddenly realized that she was proud. These long, late hours, she’d extended Jill’s idea into something new, and good. She’d been so busy working and looking for a place to live that she hadn’t noticed it until now.
She cleared her throat. “Tragedies happen. But life
goes on. Buildings go on, too. They have to, or else they’re shrines to the dead.”
A few people shifted uncomfortably, and the Pozzolanas returned her gaze with something cold. She’d hit a nerve. Since the recession, architecture firms, unable to build, had gotten into the business of grief. Angel-faced memorials were popping up like weeds all over the country, and Vesuvius was responsible for a lot of them. It had become a commonplace Sunday afternoon hobby for people to visit the memorials of people they’d never met and leave flowers. And not just soldiers who’d died in war, either. Plane crashes, car accidents, stray bullet shootings. They were all marked with stone angels, slabs of marble, or plaques posted to trees. The grief industry was burying the country in white baby’s breath flowers, and the scent was sickly sweet.
“New York is about the future and living your dreams. Nobody left Omaha because they liked it. Or Sioux City. Or Des Moines. Or Portland. Pick a Portland. Any Portland. You can have ’em. I’ll take Manhattan.”
A few people chortled. She smiled, because she knew they’d decided to give her another shot. “So! We designed an outdoor roof garden. Like flowers, it’ll be an offering to those who died, but it’ll exist for the living, too.”
She looked down at her hands, which she’d squeezed into fists so she didn’t have to see her knuckles. She straightened them now, so her audience didn’t mistake the habit for hostility. The thing about her work was, she loved it. She was never more comfortable, or happier, as when she was designing, or seeing her plans come to fruition. What could be more satisfying than changing the architecture of the world, and maybe even making it a better place to live?
“We’ve done something new here, and I think you’ll be pleased. Instead of low-lying plants or grass, we chose six-foot-tall hedges. We’ll assemble them into a winding
maze, not so different from cubicles, with fixed places for benches and picnic tables. At the center of the maze we’ll place a mourning wall, where the names of the victims will be carved in marble.” She lifted her copy of the plans, and pointed with her pen. “You can see these will be areas for reflection, but here and also here”—she pointed while holding up the plan—“we’ll place sculptures and picnic tables. Finally, we’ll dedicate the mourning wall to ‘The Good Samaritan,’ and the inspiration he has been to all of us. And now, for the really good news: we’ve made preliminary inquiries, and so long as AIAB green lights the fee, Joseph Frick is on board to carve the wall. He’s the same guy who built those steps in New Orleans after the second levees broke.”
A few people sat back in their chairs. Randolph smiled. Her team smiled. Jill smiled. She exhaled with relief so pleasantly contagious that Mortimer finally stopped glaring.
She went for gold, delineating the structure of the roof and the floors below, for the next half hour. When she was done, the room stayed quiet. Her cheeks burned like a fire lived in there. She’d screwed up, yes. She was nuts, maybe. But at least she’d come through when it counted.
The seconds passed. Jill’s eyelids fluttered, and Audrey realized she’d fallen asleep. Randolph scribbled something into his paper datebook—the last man on earth to own one. Mortimer tented his fingers.
“I like it,” Randolph finally said.
“But no statues? No reflection pool? Is a wall enough?” Mortimer asked.
Audrey answered fast, so no middlemen cronies had the chance to chime in and blow the deal. “It’s enough. You make people feel guilty with big memorials. Besides, if it’s too big, AIAB will have to take it down one day because their staff will want something pretty. But by then they’ll have to fight the city and the fami
lies, because once they have a memorial in place, any changes they make will look like a betrayal of the dead. With this structure, you’re honestly remembering them, and moving on, too.”
Mortimer nodded. “I’m sick of these bullshit memorials, too. I didn’t get into this business to design cemeteries. When this recession is over, we’re a skyscraper-only operation. Still, I don’t like marble for the wall. Too mausoleum. I want something that blends. The maze is good, but it’s uptight. Like you, Sidenschwandt,” he said to Jill, whose eyes popped open. Next he turned to Audrey, but like his brother, got her name wrong: “And probably you, too, Loomis. Show me something better by next week.” Then he rapped his knuckles against the table, and said, “From the way this meeting started, I thought I had a lemon on my hands. Nice surprise.”
Then, shockingly, Mortimer smiled. “Next time, less pills, sweetheart. Send me the plans in an e-mail so I can run it through engineering. I’ll set up a client meeting for the end of the month. I’ve got to run.” He was standing fast and turned back once to add. “One more thing.”
“Yes?” Audrey asked.
“This whole room was waiting for you. By my watch, almost five minutes. Everybody here.”
Audrey looked to Jill. Jill looked to her hands.
He lowered his voice. “That can never happen again.”
Audrey nodded. “Yes, sir.”
Then he and Randolph, who gave her a surreptitious thumbs-up, were out the door. The rest, including the 59
th
Street team, followed slowly, like herded sheep. What surprised her—a couple of them patted her on the back. Dave Galea even whispered, “Fuck yeah! Lunch is on me.”
She and Jill were the last to leave the room. “Did you really have a polyp?” Jill asked.
Audrey shook her head. “No. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. But I had to say something.”
Jill looked at her for a beat longer than necessary. “Well, take better care of yourself. I can’t afford to give you time off.”
“Oh.” Audrey’s shirt had dried. She took off the jacket and tried to hand it back, but Jill wouldn’t accept it. “Keep it. You’ll need it.” Then she lowered her voice so that no one outside could hear. “You helped me out on that. Decent job. Thank you.”
Audrey beamed. “Yeah. Rough start, but I think they liked it. I wish you’d give me some notice next time, though.”
Jill flipped her cell phone open and began to text a message. “The nurse is sick today, and nobody’s watching my son.”
Audrey frowned. “Sorry.” They stood at the wide boardroom window overlooking downtown Manhattan. Sun-soaked tourists crowded Battery Park to ride the Circle Line, then snap photos of former monuments turned holes.
“Technically, as my second-in-command, it’s your job to develop presentations. I don’t have to give you notice.” Jill didn’t look at her when she said this, and a bolt of genuine rage thundered through Audrey’s chest. The worm inside her began to gnaw. She thrust the jacket in Jill’s direction until she had no choice but to take it back.
“Smells like sick people,” she said, and left the room.
D
avid swung by her cubicle ten minutes later, with the other members of the team in tow. “I was thinking Balucci’s, so we could sneak in a couple of beers,” he said. He was wearing a crisp blue suit and pressed trousers. He could have made the cover of
GQ.
“Lots of beer,” Craig chimed in. He was a junior designer, but he acted like an intern. His dad worked for AIAB, though, and had referred a lot of business to Vesuvius.
“What?” she asked. What did David expect her to say, that it was okay to drink on the job? Meanwhile, she had to get these plans done and didn’t have the time to swallow a bagel?
“So Balucci’s is okay with you?” David asked.
She got a little hot under the collar. “Actually,” she said. “I could use some help on this.”
David frowned. “You don’t want to go to lunch?”
Now she was more confused than ever. Rather than getting herself into deeper trouble, she decided to say nothing at all.
“Lucas,” Mark said. “It’s our treat. For the presentation. If you hadn’t done it, one of us would have been in the hot seat.”
“Really?” she asked. They’d never asked her to lunch before. Usually, they just sneaked out one by one. She never imagined they all met up at the same place. “You guys always eat together?”
Simon nodded. “Some of us aren’t machines.” Simon wanted her job, and had made no secret about sending out his résumé when Jill stopped delegating to him and hired Audrey. There was a note she didn’t like in his voice, envy or contempt or both. She decided to ignore it.
The rest of the team, Jim, Louis, and Henry, Craig, Mark, and even Collier Steadman, the head of Human Resources, were smiling…Was the watercooler spiked with liquid nitrous or something? “Come on!” David cheered.
They spent sixty decadent minutes at the restaurant. As the only woman at the table, she felt like a star. They pulled her chair out and poured a Bud for her. What could be more fun? “How do you not get caught, going out every day like this?” she asked.
Jim, whose family owned an entire apartment building in SoHo, finished chewing his food, and answered, “We just go. If you ask the bitch, she’ll always say no. So don’t ask.”
“Won’t I get fired?”
Collier from Human Resources, who was drinking his vodka-tini with his pinkies outstretched, moaned theatrically. Once, while she’d been filling out 401(k) beneficiary paperwork in his office, he’d broken down in tears because one of his poodles was sick. Bewildered, Audrey had patted him on the back,
I’m sure he’ll be
fine,
she’d promised.
These vets work miracles.
He’d grabbed her hard and hugged her as he’d wept. Crazy, but who was she to judge? She talked to a cactus.
“Audrey, darling—” Collier scolded like the grand, barrel-chested queen that he was. “You’re so delightfully green. It’s a law: full-time work requires a sixty-minute break. Also, Jim, Jill Sidenschwandt is not a bitch. Her child is dying, and she’s watching it happen. You, however, are a ridiculous person.”
Audrey smiled. Collier saluted her with his martini.
“Bi-itch,” Jim repeated.
“I second. Motion carries,” Mark said.
It occurred to her that men could be catty, too.
Collier sighed. “Repeat. Dying son.” He’d sipped a third of his vodka-tini, and looked dizzy.
“No, I’d call her a bitch,” David said. “I took this job to learn something. It was a demotion from graphic design. She promised to train me.” Audrey frowned. She’d always assumed he was idle because he was lazy. She’d never guessed he might not know how to do the job. No wonder he was always leaning over her shoulder when he bought her those lunchtime Cokes, asking basic questions like, “Which of those dots represents the plumbing?”
“I have nothing to do. It’s like I’m fucking dying inside,” Mark said.
“Kafka over there,” Louis scolded, then took a gulp of his Taj Mahal. He showed up late every morning and left early, but nobody cared, because he never did anything.
“You guys want work?” Audrey asked. “I figured you’d get pissed if I asked, because I’m new.”
“I’d get pissed. Count me out,” Craig said, then ordered a third neat gin. The trick, he’d told her when they’d sat down, was ordering something that didn’t smell.
Simon dropped his fork and knife so they made a
clamor against the aluminum plate. All eyes turned to him. He squinted at Audrey, and she could see that he was trying to contain no small measure of fury. “You’re obviously some kind of genius,” he spit. “But if you’d screwed up today, don’t kid yourself, they’d have fired you. And a few of us would have packed our desks up, too. On paper, you realize, I’m the second-in-command. Not that the bitch cares. I don’t know what she says to you in that office. None of us even know half the time whether the plans are the same from week to week. We need something to show for our paychecks, Lucas. We’ve got families. Christmas around the corner.” He glared. Nobody interrupted him. The idea that they wanted direction had never occurred to her, mostly because she’d never really believed she was in charge. Also, they were grown men: couldn’t they have rolled up their sleeves before this and simply found work that needed to be done?
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Of course. I didn’t think. I’ve been preoccupied. I’ll put something together for each of you as soon as we get back.”
“You’d better,” Simon said, and she realized that celebration wasn’t their only reason for taking her to lunch.
Collier began to clap, which broke the tension. “And that, ladies and gentleman, is our lesson for the day in passive aggression. Simon has lots of grumpy little demons to work out. And here’s my contribution in aggressive aggression: if you keep using the B word to characterize Ms. Sidenschwandt, I’m going to write you up for disciplinary action.”
David hoisted his beer. So did Collier. Then Jim, Craig, Louis, Henry, and Mark. Finally, jealous Simon. “To Audrey. For a job well done, and more work for the rest of us,” David said.
She looked around the circular table. For the most part, they were a smiling, convivial group. Was it possi
ble, after all these months, that she’d been at fault, too, and ought to have tried harder to get to know them? Further, what would that sixteen-year-old in torn coveralls have said if she’d seen this dream job snapshot of her own future? She’d have giggled with her hands cupped over her mouth, then given up the ghost of subtlety and jumped for joy.
She elected not to acknowledge that none of them seemed particularly equipped for the work, that only half had requested it, and that they’d probably resent her when they realized how much needed to get done. She decided to save those worries for later, and instead, clinked her half-drunk glass against Collier’s, then David’s, then Simon’s—one person to the next, and saw this happy moment through a certain sixteen-year-old’s eyes.