©2009Adrian Leverkuhn
Are voices the man hears coming from behind closed doors, or from a past beyond redemption?
The man sat behind his desk in an office that looked out over the city from the 82nd floor of a large midtown skyscraper. He felt empty inside, dark and empty, just as he'd felt every day for weeks. Late afternoon cumulus clouds towered over the city, threatening rain - or worse - and even from the vantage of his office the city seemed to huddle below and brace for the coming storm. Yet the gathering clouds stood in curious contrast to the emptiness he felt in his heart. The sky outside held promises of release and renewal; inside he felt only the gray of winter bearing down. Verdant parks far below, swathed in vast oceans of green, mocked the chill that held him. He felt like trees in winter -- limbs stripped bare by indifferent winds, all waiting for sleep. He had never in his life been resolved to standing naked in the cold grip of long nights - alone.
There was a pencil on his desk, a metal lance on a plane of glass and steel, a mechanical pencil made in Germany that sat atop a neat stack of graphs and spreadsheets. The papers hadn't been touched in hours, some perhaps not in days. Unlike the man, the lead inside the pencil was sharp and ready. Plants waiting to be closed; jobs shipped from Ohio and Indiana to Singapore and Vietnam. What did it matter now?
A lithe woman, the man's secretary, walked into his office. She was in her mid-30s, very trim - but there was also something very precise in her manner. Precise, but her concern for the man was evident from the way she looked at him out of the corner of her eye, from the way she shook her head at his non-response to her entry. In her experience, men rarely ignored her. Certainly he hadn't -- not so long ago.
The woman told the man that the financials from Hanoi he had been waiting for were in, the P&Ls from Dayton would be ready before she left for the evening. She asked the man if there was anything he needed, 'Anything at all...' The man continued to look out the window; he watched clouds mass on the southwest horizon. He heard words, guessed their import, and he just managed to tell the woman, "No, not a thing." She left the room quietly, pulled the door to as gently as she could, then shook her head in - what? Sorrow? Regret?
'How could I have known?' she said as she walked away. 'Why didn't he talk about it?'
+++++
Raindrops blew sideways on the glass; drops streaked across the smoothness in glittering, down-swept arcs. The man watched the arcs, followed their motion as they fell to the inevitable conclusion of their journey. He fingered the bridge of his nose, ignored the single tear that formed in his right eye, ignored the glittering downward arc of his grief.
His eye moved to a flash in the sky; he watched as lightning ignited looming grayness, shattered arcs jumped from cloud to cloud. Release might yet come for him, he thought, if there was yet some small measure of justice left in the world. But no...
...But now the man understood -- he knew beyond any doubt - that justice was a fiction, a commodity bought and sold with the currency of grief and sorrow. He was living proof of that; proof that justice was as blind to human misery as the clouds that glowed in somnambulant passage. Justice is a commodity too often forbidden the broken hearted. And to those who break hearts there is at best a shallow redemption -- in the shadows.
He opened the top left drawer of his desk, and took out the small piece of paper he kept there. It was elegant paper, handmade and thick, its edges irregular and faded toward grays and beige. He looked at the words on the paper, felt himself drawn inward as he fell into their hidden traps once again. He had no experience with the unknown emotion the words held -- emotions sharp and cold like a blade held to his throat. And yet these words felt as if they had been meant for another -- like they had been borne far away, were of a time that no longer existed:
Just in silence, a tree -
naked rain kisses the up-turned needles of her limbs
and as in the gathering of a sigh
like a breeze, death comes, and life renews the question -
she vanishes within the emptiness
of love borne on careless wings
and is gone... into the silence that remains.
The man fingered the paper as her words broke over his soul, painted their shared barren landscape once again over the cracked canvas of what remained. He found no comfort in her words -- he saw an infinite sorrow as he held the paper in his hands, a sorrow not his own but his alone. He was unaware that he held the paper as he'd held her so often -- tentatively, loosely, with no sense of being beyond the oneness of his life. The man looked for hidden logic in her words, some way out of the trap, but every time he tried he had to turn away -- as if in his own inadequacy he had nothing to give.
"And life renews the question..." Henry Brinson said once again, lost in vast echoes of time.
+++++
He walked into that space he presumed to call home, into that other glass-lined cubist aerie high above the city that provided yet another interesting perspective on life far below. He took off his coat and laid it over the back of an Eames chair as he walked to the kitchen; his dinner was prepared and waiting in the bank of Sub-Zero refrigerators that lined one wall. He took the salad within and put it on the island in the middle of the kitchen, then fixed himself a scotch. He picked at the salad for a while but knew he was unable to feel even hunger now; he held the glass in his hand up to the light, contemplated the solitude that waited inside the smoky amber liquid, yet he found that silence wanting too. He held the glass under his nose and waited for memory to awaken, but that retreat had been cut off as well.
He put the glass down, walked through the space they had designed to the books they had collected; he looked at the wall of before him as one looks upon any wall. He reached for a book but his hand hesitated -- as if the truths within were too painful, too damning -- and his hand settled upon another. Meditations, by Marcus Aurelius. He picked a page at random, opened the book and stared at the words that leapt to his soul:
'Whatever happens to you has been waiting to happen since the beginning of time. The twining strands of fate wove both of them together: your own existence and the things that happened to you.'
The man nodded, closed the book. "Yes," he said quietly, almost dreamily. "Twining strands of fate."
He walked into his bedroom, their bedroom, and took off his clothes, got into the shower.
"And life renews the question..." Her words kept coming to him; he could not stop their haunted refrain.
No matter how hard he scrubbed the stains her words left would not go away.
He toweled himself dry, walked to his bed, their bed, and he lay his head down in hope of sleep.
And then the voices came, as they had for so many weeks.
+++++
Seven months earlier
She'd only been working with him for a few weeks but the signs were unmistakable. She was interested. More than interested. She had interviewed with him three weeks ago, come dressed conservatively but with just a little flash showing; now it was all flash, all provocation. She was an attractive woman, single and attractive. Probably a little ambitious, too. 'Be careful,' he'd told himself a couple of times already. He could already see her more overt manipulations; he'd have to keep an eye out for her less obvious maneuvers.
But she had been careful, too.
She'd watched him watching other women, watched where his eyes went and where they lingered. He liked taller women, blonds, of course, and his eyes followed legs, were drawn to the clicking of high heels on terrazzo. He easily made eye contact with most people but when these same attractive women came to see him, to talk to him; he had a hard time making eye contact, didn't he? He suddenly seemed distracted, easily flustered by these women, and she'd watched as more than one had managed him by employing a well-timed crossing of the legs or a subtly revealed cleavage. She'd almost laughed out loud!
Men were so funny, she told herself; so predictably funny. So like little boys in a candy store. All you had to do was offer just the tiniest chance of a taste and you owned them. Some men, anyway. Stupid to make generalities unless you had all the facts because, she knew from experience, some men were very hard to handle. Very hard to control. She had the wounds to prove it, too.
But for Carolyn Saunders there were few men she could not control. Her new 'boss' was almost too laughably predictable, so boyishly drawn to the impulses and desires instinct had planted in his mind. And while this need she had to control might soon be fulfilled, she held only discontent near her heart. While this new man might only be another skirmish in a greater war, she considered herself a master tactician. And she had scores to settle.
She settled-in and waited, waited for the weakness people of her sort so often seek. She was patient, and like any good predator she knew the ways of her prey. And she was hungry, always so very hungry.
+++++
Jennifer Brinson sat on the examining room table, cold vinyl sticking to the back of her thighs, the fire in her left breast still pulsing. Whoever invented the mammogram, she thought, must have been an inquisitionist. She sat with ankles crossed, arms folded protectively across her chest, but she couldn't shake the cold dread she'd felt all morning. Even the stupid magazines that always seem to find their way to physician's offices were of no use.
