1 #5
A truck was pulling up, and she saw the way Felix’s attention was drawn to it.
She sat on the plastic lawn chair by her door, and carefully didn’t look at the two men who got out of the truck, although she felt their eyes on her.
They disappeared into Felix’s room, emerged a short time later with two black duffel bags, and drove away.
The truck was painted with the thin blue stripe of the Blue Night Militia—why were they called that?
Some long-dead meme, probably—and then after some time Felix came back out.
“Guess I missed the sunset,” he said.
“I’m afraid so.” Ari angled her chair to face him. “Felix,” she said, “obviously I don’t know the details of your operation, but if you happen to be hiring, I’m looking for a job.”
“I’m not hiring,” he said, “but as it happens, I know someone who is.”
“Militia?” she asked.
“That a problem?”
“No.”
“Tell me about yourself,” he said.
“I’ve been living this version of my life for a few months. Living in motels, working retail. But I got laid off and I need to find something else.”
“And before that?”
“Retail. Waitressing. Dishwashing. Whatever I could find. But there was another version of my life, a long time ago, where I had an interesting business in New York City.” All these years and lives and collapsing versions of the world later, it was like talking about a stranger.
“It wasn’t that long after the 9/11 attacks, so immigration was a problem for a lot of people.
I provided my clients with US passports. ”
Felix whistled softly. “Tell me more.”
“Do you have a passport?”
“Sure.”
“Then you know how it works. How it worked, I guess, when the United States was still a country. Wherever you went to get your passport, the human element was important. A clerk signed off on the application, checked your ID, and confirmed that your photo matched your face.”
Felix smiled. “So a single clerk was all that stood between the State Department and chaos, is what you’re saying.”
“A single fallible human, with considerable discretion. So if you could find a clerk with a debt problem and a weak moral character, well, that’s an opportunity.”
“I have a working theory that almost everyone has a debt problem and weak moral character,” Felix said.
“I don’t disagree. It wasn’t that hard to find the clerk.”
“And you made some money.”
“Yes, I did.”
“Until . . .”
“Until I paid someone to kill my cousin Anton.”
Felix’s eyes widened, just slightly.
“He survived,” Ari said, “and it was a mistake. It was an evil thing to do and I will always regret it.”
“Why did you do it?”
“He was obstructing me in a way that felt existential. I overreacted.”
“I see. And you need a new job.”
“There isn’t enough work in retail or waitressing. It isn’t sustainable.”
He nodded. “Difficult landscape now,” he said, “economically speaking.” They were momentarily silent, to let the understatement settle around them.
“What did you do,” Ari asked, “before whatever it is you’re doing now?”
“Here’s something unfortunate,” Felix said. “I’m going to tell you what I did, I’ll be speaking sincerely and telling you the truth, but you won’t believe me.”
“How do you know?”
“Because my previous job sounds like some kind of utopian fantasy at this point. I was a professional ballet dancer,” Felix said.
“You’re right,” she said. “I don’t believe you.”
“No one does. Did you ever go to the ballet?”
“Once,” Ari said, and was ambushed by memory.
Sitting between her parents when she was six or seven years old, feeling grown-up and pretty in a stiff new dress, waiting in the hushed dark for the New York City Ballet’s rendition of The Nutcracker to begin.
A feeling of joy. Where were her parents?
Could they possibly still be alive? She pushed the thought of them away and tried to concentrate on the present moment.
There were bruised colours on the horizon, and night was coming in across the sky.
Could Felix have been a ballet dancer? It seemed improbable.
The streetlights flickered on, then off, then on again.
On the other hand, there had been ballet companies, which of course meant there had been ballet dancers, and they had to have gone somewhere.
“Ari,” Felix said, and rose from his chair. “I will tell my friend about you. He’s looking for an assistant, and I believe he’ll find you interesting.”
“Thank you,” Ari said.
Three hours later she was sitting in her room listening to Bach’s cello suites with her eyes closed, visualizing her lost apartment in Manhattan, from the years just before prison.
Almost everything in that space had been white.
Her cousin Anton had called it sterile, but it had felt at the time like living in some pristine kingdom high above everyday life, or like living in a cloud.
She’d returned so often in memory that certain details were beginning to rearrange themselves—sometimes now the bathroom door was to the left of the coat closet, sometimes to the right—but the tranquility of the space remained. A knock at the door made her jump.
As she opened the door, Felix stepped back. Ari was moved by the gesture. She was a woman alone in a motel room, and he was demonstrating that he wouldn’t step in uninvited. These small kindnesses mean everything, that was what she was thinking when he spoke.
“I spoke with my friend,” he said. “The one who’s hiring. He’d like to meet you.”
“Thank you,” she said, “thank you so much. Where can I find him?”
“You know the mall with the TGI Fridays? About three miles south?”
“Sure,” Ari said.
“He’ll be there tomorrow morning, he said around ten a.m. He works out of the real estate office.”
“Thank you. It was kind of you to speak with him.”
Felix smiled. “It’s not an easy time,” he said. “Helping each other where we can, well, maybe that’s how you keep mayhem at bay.”
In the morning, Ari walked to the mall to save money on gas.
She arrived early, so there was time to wander.
The interior of the mall was one of the more interesting places she’d seen in a while.
A flag and a sign identified it as territory held by one of the larger militias, Cincinnati United.
A whole section had been converted into housing for displaced persons, so there were tents in orderly rows on the two mezzanine levels.
There seemed to be an operational school in the former TGI Fridays, students grouped by age in the booths and at tables.
At the far end of the mall, the population thinned out and there were a few businesses: a grocery store where the food was kept in what looked like Starbucks pastry cases and glass freezers that had previously only held ice cream cakes, where she bought a cheap sandwich; a pharmacy that also sold clothes; a business that apparently handled wire transfers, divorces, adoptions, loans funded by individual sharks, and insurance.
After some time she found herself, at the far end of the mall, looking at an old RE/MAX office, a papered-up window with five-year-old listings still on display.
The door was unlocked. The real estate office was a dull, quiet place, just a few desks around the edges of the room and a stack of plastic crates in the middle.
It was much more officelike than she would have expected of a militia headquarters.
There were filing cabinets, a calendar on the wall, a table for meetings.
The space was gentle, that was Ari’s first thought.
Nothing terrible had ever happened here.
At the same time, the filing cabinets bristled with interest. She felt certain that she’d like to do whatever work was being done here.
There were a few people here, working at desks or speaking quietly.
“Can I help you?” a woman asked from the nearest desk.
Ari thought she might be in her eighties.
She had a benign smile and tightly curled white hair.
She wore pink lipstick and she was dressed like a church grandma, in a cardigan and flower dress and honest-to-god pearls, but an old knife scar ran down the entire left side of her face.
“I’m looking for Eduardo.”
An older man on the other side of the room looked up at the mention of his name. He was thin, perhaps in his sixties, dressed in an aggressively bland style that seemed designed to blend in.
“You must be Felix’s neighbour,” he said, and brought over two chairs. “Thanks for stopping in.”
“Thanks for meeting me.” Ari had been to more job interviews than she could remember, but never one for which she knew so little about the job. “I understand you’re looking for an assistant.”
“In a manner of speaking, yes. The job involves some errands, but mostly surveillance.”
Ari nodded. Something in the idea of surveillance appealed to her. She’d been studying other people all her life. “Why do you surveil people?”
“I’m involved in a large organization,” the man said. “You know what Cincinnati United is?”
“The largest of the local militias,” Ari said. “You control traffic on the river.”
“Correct. We hold the territory now, and it’s been a calm few months, we’ve got the local population on our side with improved security and a school, but there’s always the possibility of incursion by rival groups. I run a surveillance operation, just keeping an eye on things.”
“Detective work, essentially?” She’d thought she was long past the point of feeling excitement about a job, but the idea was stirring.
“Well, more or less. You might think of it that way. I can’t pay you a retainer, but I’ll pay you a day rate.”
“I’m interested.”
“It’s boring, most of the time,” Eduardo said.
“I don’t want to misrepresent it. It’s hanging around a given bar for hours to see if a particular man walks in, and who he talks to if he does.
It’s sitting in cars with a camera. Following people, on occasion, which means blending into the scenery while they take their goddamn time eating lunch. ”
“I’m still interested.”