Just cold enough
Every morning and afternoon that long summer weekend, we jumped off the dock into the black lake beside a forest farther north than we’d ever been before. The water was just cold enough, and no matter the time of day or angle of the sun, we could never see beneath the surface. We tread water and forced ourselves to think about the creatures that might be swimming between our legs, the beasts that might be awakened from sleep by our motion, the monsters that might be hungry for our flesh. We let irrational fears overtake us for moments at a time, our chests tightening and our lungs convinced for oxygen-starved seconds that we would never breathe again, and waited for the panic to ease. Unconsciously we kept trying to escape the fear, gazing upwards at the clouds to forget what might be below us or taking long strokes through the water as though we were safe and chlorinated in blue, but we forced ourselves again to think of the monsters, the creatures, the beasts, the things that splashed sickeningly, skin-creepingly all through our nights in the wild, unable to sleep, unable to see, unable to leave. We needed to make ourselves comfortable in their home, knowing that they wanted us to leave and never return. The night never seemed to leave the lake.
A vague chill fog
We were still a little drunk on New Year’s morning while preparing for our next assignment, so the schematics were a more accurate reflection of the bottles we had emptied and the glasses we had broken over the holidays than of the route by which we planned to carry out our task.
We arrived at the wrong end of the industrial complex, where centuries of air pollution had created a unique weather system separate from the rest of the city. It was absurdly hot and sunny; our heads steamed as we carried our parkas rolled up on our backs with the rest of the gear and took shallow, measured breaths. We walked for hours, days perhaps, before the real atmosphere came into sight, a vague chill fog in the distance beyond the relentless sunbeams.
The weather had been calm when we left the hotel, but as we emerged into winter zipping up our coats, a snow squall hit us full in our faces and we bent over backwards trying to stay upright. We pushed toward the nearest building and took refuge in a doorway.
The door had no handle. It originally served as an emergency exit only until they realized during the first evacuation that the door opened in the wrong direction. There was a sign hung too high for any of us to read, its message scratched and faded.
We gathered close together on the threshold, shrinking back from the reach of the wind. We kept our arms stiff at our sides, pretending nonchalance. The closeness of the space slowly warmed us, but we couldn’t look at each other’s faces. We turned our eyes outwards to watch the storm, but we leaned hard against the door and not each other.
Someone opened the door from the inside and we toppled to the ground at her feet in a heap. She held an empty coffee cup in one hand and gazed at us from behind thick glasses with her tiny black eyes like a mouse’s.
“Whoops,” she said, “wrong way,” and tried to close the door. But our bodies were in the way, piled on the ground, half-inside, half-outside, links of sausage coming unstuffed. She let go of the door and it swung away from us. She retreated into the darkness, wheezing or whistling, we weren’t sure which. We exchanged looks and scrambled to our feet and went inside.
Cruel summer weeds
We stood on the sidewalk in the light cast from the opera house’s bright lobby so as not to seem like we wanted to hide. The floor-to-ceiling windows afforded us a view of every corner of the space, which we watched with care between the movements of bodies, our eyes at the level of their knees. The confused winding of legs beneath skirts and trousers had suggested how this evening’s events would proceed. The night’s opera was about a timid and ultimately useless love.
We waited for Sebastian and his angry companion to hurl themselves from the full house and into the empty lobby. It seemed to take longer than expected but only because we had expected there to be a bus stop with a bench where we could sit and wait, but it seemed to have been moved to a different block. We weren’t wearing the proper shoes for standing around all night. They pinched, as though we were teenagers at our first dance.
Sebastian’s date appeared first, releasing a gesture of fury to the open space. He trailed behind her, whispering apologies. As she looked at the ceiling, her eyes sparkled as much as her gown, and as she spun to face him the tears were released into the air in a spray of splendid sadness. Her hands covered her face and she hid it against his chest, her shoulders shaking in what we could only see as deeply exaggerated pain.
I had been thinking over the last few days what I would have to do to ditch the boys and strike out on my own. I had been thinking about starting to want to work independently. I had thought through the equipment, the expenses, the connections. But when I saw Sebastian’s hands reach up to touch her shoulder blades, I realized that I could never play both their parts. I could never do this on my own.
As planned, Sebastian’s companion broke away from him and ran for the exit. I bumped into her at the door as though by accident and slipped an electronic device into her bag. I apologized and kept walking down the block, but she took the opposite direction and Archer followed her down the street and into a fast food restaurant. He would approach her with every kindness for her distress and buy her a milkshake and maybe a tiny carton of fries for them to share. She would feel better about how the evening turned out. He would drop a key card into her bag when she wasn’t looking, perhaps peering into the carton to grab the last fry. Johan met Sebastian in the lobby of the opera house and they went in a different direction for drinks.
I had to wait for Johan and Sebastian to return, so I sat on a concrete block on the edge of an empty lot overgrown with cruel summer weeds. The concrete was hot and dry, and I willed its dust to coat my surface. I hoped they wouldn’t recognize me beneath a layer of dust, behind the wall of cicada song, would walk right past me and keep on looking for me for the rest of the night. I could remain immobile as long as I needed to, as long as they couldn’t see me.
Cross the street
It was early spring. The sky was cloudy and the earth was settling into its warmth. There had been a thunderstorm that morning while we were waiting for a bus we knew wouldn’t come. When we couldn’t hear each other anymore over the thunder and wind and shouts of fright, we took a silent vote to give up our task for the day. We felt like worms, damp and muddy, emerging from the drowning world into our hotel, where we wouldn’t drown but we could get flattened. By the time we were dry and comfortable again in our room, the sun shone and the wind died and I couldn’t work in the quiet. I took my portable audio player and went for a walk, leaving the others to their own work, immovable as rocks.
Even from the lobby I could see that the wind had picked up. As I exited onto the street, I braced myself for its sharpness, but it greeted me with a warm embrace. I leaned into it, pressing against it as it pressed against me. I held my headphones tight against my ears and listened to the latest message from headquarters. The voice spoke quietly about the city we were to visit next, but I couldn’t hear it over the wind, and I didn’t care to risk raising the volume above regulation levels, however unlikely it was that I was under surveillance. I walked towards the city centre, where people with bare arms and legs congregated in groups to squint into the sun and wind. As I waited for the light to change, the sky dimmed under a sudden layer of cloud. Everything dripped.
Samuel stood on the opposite street corner, his hands in his pockets, his hair stuck out in all directions. The earth surged up against the concrete under my feet, sending my heart into my throat. I willed the wind to throw something up between us to hide me from him. I thought of the opposite corner, and of that corner’s opposite. I wondered if any angle was safe. I could feel the mud shifting and slipping beneath the sidewalk. The sky grew darker. I saw a flash of lightning, but heard no thunder.
I waited for instructions as the wind urged me toward the road. The crosswalk light changed over and over again, in high speed, and people began to disappear. As they disappeared, they pushed against me to cross the street, but I held still. They tried to pull my hands away from my headphones, but I crushed my skull between my hands and strained to hear. For several moments the quiet of the latest message from headquarters had been as unbearable as in the hotel room, releasing silence enough to suspend the noise, but then I heard clearly, “Cross the street.”
Those were not the right instructions. I turned around and walked back toward the hotel. Rampaging umbrellas led me, litter pursued me, and a car threw itself into reverse. Lightning flashed and the rain again began to fall. I hid myself in a doorway to snatch off my headphones and replace them with earplugs, denying any further guidance. Before I could release the tightly-held breath of my escape, he appeared in front of me, bringing with him a greater silence. His shirt was soaked and his hair was slicked back. He raised his hands, showing me his palms before flattening them against the wall behind me. He mouthed words at me that I could not hear but understood. He moved closer, and a bead of water fell from his chin onto my neck. I shivered as it travelled down my spine.
Nothing happened
We caught them coming out of the boardroom together late one Friday evening after everyone else had left for the weekend. We had stayed on late, cleaning up the mess we had feigned that day. They wouldn’t hire someone else to do this part. Some nights we played it up for the security cameras, but today we pretended to be real employees, reading novels hidden inside binders of SOPs, talking to phone sex operators on our headsets, visiting websites disguised as the company intranet.
I was the only one among us expected to produce output that would pass the scrutiny of real employees, so I was revising meeting minutes that should have gone out earlier in the week. I queued the email for delivery at 9:08 the next morning. I wasn’t yet aware how badly I made myself look by appearing to work on the weekends, although I was smart enough to pretend that I took my Friday nights seriously.
We were ready to leave once the sky had turned completely dark, and as we locked up our office against housekeeping and non-existent snoops, we watched them emerge from a room we thought was empty. She escaped down the stairwell, waggling a saucy hand at us, her coat draped luxuriously over her shoulders, hair and make-up immaculate. Samuel looked happy to see us, then sheepish. I wasn’t sure whether he was putting on that look so we would think that he’d just fucked her, whoever she was, or because he actually had. I couldn’t make a call on this one even though part of my job was to do just that. At that time I couldn’t predict what Samuel would do, except that he would never again fuck me.
We exchanged pleasantries, as though we were on the job as usual during the working day, with others around us who didn’t know what we really did to earn our salaries. Then they excused themselves, one by one, moving away with their hands in their pockets and grins hidden inside their mouths, leaving me alone with Samuel. At the time I thought they did it because I, as the lead, needed to speak to him alone, but now I think they only did it to see what would happen.
Nothing happened. The words I spoke were tense, while Samuel’s were relaxed. The tighter my questions came out, the more easygoing were his replies. I asked him about his progress, about what he’d accomplished since our last meeting. I didn’t speak of the times that I had sought him out but did not approach him, feigning accident. He had no right to ask me about my progress, and he didn’t, but he had questions he never voiced about going out for drinks or a romantic dinner or straight back to his place. He didn’t have to ask them for me to say no.
Samuel left through the back entrance, his car parked illegally somewhere behind the railway tracks. I found the others in the front lobby, snapping bubblegum, throwing paper airplanes, giggling over some joke told at the expense of all of us. I knew the absurdity was hilarious, but a weight in some metaphysical region in my chest prevented any laughter from escaping. We went for drinks and left town. We weren’t coming in on Monday.
