Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters (8 page)

Underneath Me, Steady Air
Carrie Laben

Rosemary’s is always this dark, but it’s a good dark. If you come here at night to drink with the hipsters and hipster-watchers, it’s illuminated by strings of year-round Christmas lights and the dull glow of the jukebox. If you come in the afternoon to drink with the old men with tracheotomies and slumped backs, the sun never reaches the third bar stool. Squint a little and you can believe you’re in a bunker underground. I still feel safe here, after everything.

I drank at Rosemary’s with Ginger and Carol and Steve the night before. I started around five with the vague plan that I’d cut it off and leave myself plenty of time to sleep, since I had to work the next day. Then I started drinking to forget that I had to work the next day. Then I did forget that I had to work the next day.

This is a long way of explaining why my story might sound unfocused, spotty. And, let’s be honest, self-centered. There’s nothing that inspires more self-centeredness than a hangover, and I was shitty hung over that day.

I made it out of the house on autopilot, it hit me in the subway: tightness in the skin over my skull, feet irritable in my cheap-cute rubber rain boots, and most of all the blue pain of hunger in a slightly nauseated stomach. But I was two trains into the commute by then, which made it harder to turn back than to go on.

The rain had mostly stopped by the time I got there. As I emerged from the subway station, I caught a flash of movement and looked up. I would have split my skull on the sun if it hadn’t been for a little cloud—a scrap of fog, really—just above the building that turned the light all pinkish-gray.

As it was, I winced and blinked and, seeing nothing important, turned my focus back to the pavement and cigarette butts and sodden pages of the
Post
.

The elevators in that building were saunas, prone to breaking down. I remember thinking that I could maybe claim that I’d been stuck in one; I looked shitty enough. It was something I often thought about trying. But I figured they could check with the maintenance guys, I’d get busted, which would be even more embarrassing.

As soon as I stepped through the door of the office I was struck by how quiet it was. To the point that I wondered if I’d somehow forgotten a day off. But Rosemary’s redecorates for every holiday known to humankind, including Arbor Day. I’d have noticed.

I came around the corner of the first row of cubes and spotted my boss and my boss’s boss. They couldn’t miss me. I tried to brace myself, but that would have required something to brace, and I felt invertebrate.

Neither of them said anything as I approached. Neither of them even looked up. They weren’t talking, I remember thinking they both looked sad, sore. I wondered if they’d decided to fire me.

“Hey,” I said, trying to sound casual, actually sounding dehydrated. “Good morning.” And they each nodded slowly, but neither of them replied as I entered my cubicle. By the time my computer finished starting up, a peek over the wall revealed that they’d drifted away.

I figured something in email might account for their behavior, but no—the company hadn’t been sold, or sued, or the server farm set on fire, there hadn’t been any layoffs. There were no new emails at all except the autogenerated one I got every Monday reminding me to update my time sheets.

I got some coffee, read some blogs. The worst of the pounding and lurching inside faded away. By lunchtime, I was ready to risk the break room.

As I came back along the corridor, I heard a dull hiss, the sound of something scraping over the dense industrial carpet. A moment later the receptionist, Jeannette, came around the corner pushing a box of printer paper along the floor.

It started my brain and stomach pulsing again, the way she was bent like something out of Bosch with her knees crooked and her bowed back in the air. Normally she could lift three of those boxes. She was flushed a shade of orange I’d never seen on a human being before, beyond the worst nightmares of spray tan, and the tip of her tongue was protruding from her mouth.

As bad off as I was, I knew I needed to help her. But before the words could wriggle down from my brain and through my clamped jaw, she fell over. Not collapsed, not fell down—fell over, to the side, stiffly.

I knelt on the floor beside her, put my coffee against the wall—where I promptly kicked it over—and felt for her pulse. Her wrist was slick with greasy sweat and I couldn’t find it. But she was still alive, because she was still breathing, because something was making that moaning noise and pushing the horrible greenish foamy drool out.

I couldn’t figure out what to do, and then I thought she might be contagious, and I was kneeling in now-cold coffee-damp pants on the now-cold coffee-damp rug. I reached in my pocket for my phone, but of course I’d left it in my bag, back at my desk.

“I’m sorry,” I said to Jeanette, though I doubted she could hear me, and heaved myself back to my feet. Walking backwards, unwilling to take my eyes off her, I found myself among the cubes of the QA team.

“Someone better call 911.” No one answered, and for a moment I wondered if I’d only thought it, but then I turned around and saw Angel slumped at her desk and Karl at his, both foaming and staring blankly, both as orange as Jeanette.

I don’t know how I made myself reach across Karl and pick up his phone. I don’t remember what I said to the woman who answered. Sometime between when I hung up and when the EMTs arrived, I got back to my desk. I even retrieved my empty mug along the way.

Yeah, some inspiring story of survival. Honestly, it’s probably a good thing that I lost so much of my hospital stay. I’m not sure who broke it to me that I was the only survivor to come out of the office. I have vague memories of people interrogating me and yelling about bioterrorism. And then later different people telling me that it had all been some kind of weird gas leak, and that I didn’t need to talk to the press if I didn’t want to, and that, by the way, I definitely didn’t want to. That I might be confused or have hallucinations. That they’d given me some kind of weird experimental drug that was supposed to prevent PTSD but also fucked with my short-term memory kind of a lot.

But I remembered enough to bet that what I’d seen wasn’t a gas leak, even before the weird crap started happening.

You’d think I wouldn’t keep coming back here, wouldn’t you? I was on this exact fucking stool the first time I got one of those calls. You’d think I’d have the good goddamn sense to be creeped out. But I get angry and think, why
should
I let them scare me off? It was my bar first.

Yeah, the calls were what started it. They didn’t start until almost three months after I got out of the hospital, but then again, for most of that time I didn’t have a phone. My old phone, along with everything in my bag and my office, my wallet, my keys, my coffee mug, my boots, got swept into the maw of evidence control and were never heard from again.

If it hadn’t been for Ginger I’d probably still be living on cash and self-pity, but she got me through the convoluted process of getting everything back in order. Out of all my friends, she was the one who kept up with me instead of coming to visit a couple of times and then getting weirded out by the hamster wheel of no explanations that my brain was on and drifting away. She was the one who told the reporters to fuck off and leave me alone when they tracked me down. She was the one who smiled at the cops when they came by after the reporters left, and assured them that everything was just fine, officer. She listened to me when I explained what I’d seen, or thought I’d seen. And then when I didn’t want to talk about it she didn’t bring it up.

She also let me stay with her, which was really key because I wasn’t sleeping so great in my old apartment by myself. Her place was right on Bedford Avenue and we came down to Rosemary’s almost every night, to take the edge off.

One night, when the edge had been blunted, my phone rang.

At first I thought I was just confused by the noise of conversation and the blaring jukebox. I shouted “Hello” three times, then realized I was talking to a recording. But it wasn’t about one of my many unpaid bills or a political candidate. It wasn’t about anything, it didn’t make any sense no matter how I tried to push through the beer and concentrate.

The voice didn’t have a gender or age that I could pin down, and it didn’t sound like any machine voice I’d ever heard either. When I tried to understand it, the syllables slid away. Yet there was a tone of urgency that made me keep trying. I finally got up and left Ginger watching my drink and took it outside.

On the sidewalk the words were still evasive, but eventually I got them. That didn’t really help, though.

Numbers. No nouns or verbs or context, no discernible pattern. Just an endless string of numbers in that slippery voice.

I don’t know how long I stood out there, waiting for it to end or say something else or for some kind of pattern to emerge. Eventually I felt a tap on my shoulder, flinched away, and turned to find Ginger behind me.

“The hell?” she said. “Are you ok?”

“Listen to this.” I shoved the phone at her, and she put it to her ear and frowned.

Then she laughed and hung up. “That’s the stupidest prank call I’ve ever heard. Do you even know anyone with a” she glanced at the phone, “406 number?”

I shook my head.

We went back inside and ordered new drinks. It being a Tuesday, we were even able to get our stools back.

Sonovia, the bartender, smiled at me and then glanced at the phone. I didn’t remember putting it on the bar instead of back in my bag, but there it was and I was fidgeting with it.

“Everything alright?”

I nodded and managed a smile, but not a very convincing one, because the next thing I knew she was giving me a buyback on a shot of Jameson.

The calls weren’t every night, at least not at first. If they had been I would have just flushed the phone down the toilet like a prom baby, or turned it off. No, they were sporadic, and yet somehow only came when I was drunk enough to answer, thinking this time it might make sense.

It didn’t, and finally Ginger demanded custody of the phone because me running in and out of the bar getting more agitated was not the point of the exercise. I was happy to hand it over. She let everything go to voicemail.

Now we’re coming to a part of the story where I look kind of stupid. Stupider.

So, it was a week after I’d given up on my cell phone making any sense, more than four months after the gas leak, or whatever you wanted to call it. That’s when I see that asshole Doyle for the first time.

He waited until I was five beers in. Then he walked up as though he’d just come in off Bedford Avenue, he even had a foil-wrapped lamb shawarma in his hand, and he plopped down on the vacant bar stool next to me when Ginger went to the bathroom. But he blew it with his first line.

“There are tigers in the air,” he said.

He looked at me as though he expected me to supply the other half of a secret password, while the yogurt sauce dripped through the foil and onto his fingers.

“Tigers? In the beer?” I gazed into the foam at the bottom of my pint glass, then back at him. Then I decided that maybe this was some kind of PETA thing, like the sea kittens, even though I could smell the delicious dead baby sheep in his hand.

The whole point was that I was drunk enough to take the burden off of things to make sense, after all.

I didn’t want anything to do with any save-the-yeasts campaign, so I turned away and asked Sonovia for another drink. Then I turned back to tell this tiger guy to get out of Ginger’s seat. But he was already gone.

I shrugged and when Ginger got back we laughed about it. But that didn’t mean that I wasn’t irritated when I saw him again the next evening, sitting in the backmost booth. I’m sure he thought it was a good place to observe without being observed, but it was next to the bathrooms. Poor dumb fuck.

“He’s here,” I said to Ginger when I got back from the facilities, leaning over close to her ear.

“Who?”

“Tiger dude.”

“Where?”

“Last booth.”

“What, the guy with the beard and the five-head?”

“That’s the one.”

Ginger stared, so blatantly he couldn’t have missed her. I gave up trying to resist and stared too. His untrimmed beard and bulging cranium, combined with his narrow cheeks, made his head look like a giant had pinched it. His eyes were ridiculously huge, dirty-ice gray, and bloodshot. Although to be fair Rosemary’s lighting scheme tends to make everyone’s eyes look that way.

“Creeper,” Ginger said after a moment’s consideration.

“You can’t say that just based on the fact that he doesn’t own a beard trimmer.”

“My instincts are never wrong,” she said, and to be fair this was accurate in my experience. Also I had no interest in defending the dude.

We turned away. For the rest of the night my shoulders were tense waiting for him to come up behind me, but he didn’t.

That was too good to last, though, and a few days later we walked in and he was just standing at the end of the bar, grinning through his beard at us.

“Looks like someone gave him the talk about how self-confidence is attractive,” Ginger muttered.

“Look, I’m sorry,” he said as we approached, and held up his hand so that I had to stop if I didn’t want to touch him. “I’m not trying to be dense on purpose. I thought you knew.”

I was drawn into the question like quicksand. “Knew what?”

“About the air jungles. About those weird phone calls you’ve been getting. About what killed all those people in your office.”

Ginger stepped around me to get between us. “She doesn’t want to talk about that shit.”

“I’m not a reporter,” he said, side-stepping her. “In fact,” he looked directly at me again, “you don’t have to talk at all. You listen, I’ll tell you what I know. You can decide if I sound like a reporter, or someone who actually knows what’s going on.”

“Not right now,” I said, “I need a beer.”

But you can’t hear something like that and not wonder. Besides, if I didn’t talk, and Ginger was right there, everything would be fine.