by Alexandra Soiseth
“We have to decide, Mike,” Angela says again as their Metro North train passes over the Harlem River. Of course they have to decide, but he has a breakfast meeting, a root canal this afternoon, and a lunch where he has some very bad news to deliver. He doesn’t feel like cluttering his mind with anything else right now.
“Let’s just shelve it until the weekend.”
“We’ll lose it,” she says, making her lips disappear. But she takes a deep breath, trying again. “It’s a fire sale, Mike. They’re on the brink of bankruptcy; we’ll never get a deal like this again.”
His cell phone rings and he pulls it from the breast pocket of his suit jacket. “Yeah?”
Angela turns to look out the window. It’s a grey day in early fall and she can see her faint reflection in the window superimposed over the Harlem apartment buildings. She closes her eyes.
“Where are you?” his assistant asks. “It’s after 8.”
“I told you yesterday I have a breakfast meeting.” He knows he sounds irritated, but he did tell her. He thinks it may even have been twice.
But there is silence from Judy, a long suffering silence it seems to Mike, until she finally says, “Clark’s been asking me what you’re doing about Ben Silver.”
“Tell him I’m taking care of it at lunch.”
“You’re going to tell him in public?”
“Judy do you have anything important to say or can I get off the phone?”
“He’s going to freak. I’m telling you.”
“Bye.”
He closes the phone and puts it in his pocket. The train is humid and his skin feels damp beneath his collar and under his arms.
“I thought you wanted to do this, Mike. Why are you dragging your feet now?”
“Because we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars. For recreation! Jesus H., we get to take a minute to think about this.”
His phone rings again.
“Don’t you dare answer that,” Angela says. “We’re in the middle of something here.”
“Yes, and I have a lot of money to make if we’re going to buy this boat,” he says and pulls out his phone. But they slip underground, into a tunnel, the lights flicker, and when he says hello, the signal has dropped, and he speaks into dead air.
The train sways gently through the darkness, the lights and a/c cut in and out as they move along. Passengers gather their belongings.
“We haven’t made a dent into what we owe on the house; we have two car loans; and I know it’s old fashioned but, maybe we should save some money, just in case, in this economy…”
“Please Mr. Gloom. We’re going to be fine.” Angela turns her back to him as she takes her briefcase from the rack over their heads. “We’re getting plenty soon.”
Yes, they were getting plenty, when her father died.
It had seemed to him vulgar, over the years, the way she and her siblings talked about his death and all that would come from it. Then again, their father encouraged them, listing in detail what he had and how it would all be theirs once he “kicked the can,” as he liked to say. The first time Mike heard this, he leaned into Angela and said, “Isn’t Kick the Can a kid’s game?” Angela whispered back, her breath soft on his ear, “Yeah, he’s a funny guy, my dad.”
The train eases now into Grand Central and they gather at the door with the other passengers then flow like water out onto the platform as the door slides open.
They walk in silence beneath the soot covered walls and ceiling—grey and blackness and warm air—the sound of hundreds of foot-steps echoing around them. The lines and lines of tracks and trains beside and behind him give Mike the feeling of being compressed by straightness, pressed down upon and pushed forward.
“We work really hard, Mike,” Angela says as they climb up out of the track tunnels. When they emerge into the sudden coolness of Grand Central Angela takes his arm and pulls him to the wall near the track sign where the names of the towns they have just passed through are listed. She uses her soft convincing voice. “I miss you. We hardly see each other.”
Mike sighs.
“Don’t do that. Like I’m such a burden.”
“Then don’t make everything about my work.”
“I’m talking about my work too.” She shakes her head at him. “I just want some fun with you.”
“But why does fun have to be so expensive?”
His phone rings again.
“Jesus!” Angela turns as Mike drops her hand to fish for his phone. She looks up at the star-covered ceiling, then so does he. He thinks how the constellations stretch so far above them it is almost as though they are standing beneath the real night sky.
“When are you dealing with Ben?” Mike’s boss asks, his voice fading in and out with the bad reception.
“Lunch today.”
“Legal told you what to say?”
“Yes.”
“Fine, come see me after.”
“I have a root canal.”
“Then come after that.”
Mike closes the phone against his chest.
A year ago, he and Ben got into the elevator together. They didn’t know each other well. Ben worked two floors down. He was head of product development, a quiet man, thoughtful, but stubborn once he’d made up his mind, a trait often discussed by the men Mike worked with upstairs.
Ben was going back to his office, Mike to the lobby. The doors closed as they asked each other how they were. The elevator jerked, there was a snap that was partly a sound and partly a vibration the men felt in their chest. Then they were in free fall.
“Holy fuck,” Ben said.
Mike couldn’t move.
Ben pressed the red button on his side of the elevator and the alarm rang around them. Mike jumped at the sound, found himself moving, ripping open the door beneath the button panel on his side. He yelled something. Gibberish, he remembers now—he was too panicked to be coherent. This was all in seconds, mere seconds.
Then from above them and below them, metal breaks clamped into place and like a car skidding on ice then hitting a snow bank, the elevator stopped, pulling the men to the floor.
“Wow,” Ben said quietly, to himself, as they stood, holding onto the walls.
For weeks after, Mike noticed everything. It was distracting how bright the colors were; how he couldn’t get enough of Angela; how wine dazzled his tongue. He felt every water droplet when he showered. Sleep was delicious, but so was waking up. Months later, when he noticed he wasn’t noticing anymore, he sat down and focused, trying to get the sensation back, but it was gone.
He and Ben never spoke about it, though neither of them took the elevator again, sometimes meeting each other on the stairs and nodding. But it was between them. And today at lunch, Mike was charged with telling Ben that they were moving his department to the company’s newer, cheaper offices across the river in Jersey and that Ben was going to have to fire half his staff. Collateral damage in a weakening economy. “Work smarter, boys,” his boss Clark had taken to saying. “Oh, and girls too.”
Angela looks at him now, waiting for something. What had they been talking about? Oh yeah, the boat. Fun.
He starts them walking across the concourse. Mike says, “Do you remember when we used to go camping?”
“Camping.”
“Yes.” He thinks about chopping wood in the fading light, about the heat of a camp fire in front and the press of cold behind. “That was fun.”
Angela bends her head and says toward the ground. “It was a very long time ago.”
“You hated it,” he says.
“Don’t you remember how cold it was?”
“It wasn’t so bad.”
“Country boy, you never feel the cold. And it was work. Putting up the tent, cooking, dear God we never sat down.”
“I just remember the fun.”
His meeting is up at the restaurant off the West Balcony. They should be splitting off so Angela can go out to 42nd Street, but she keeps walking with him toward the west end staircase. “Don’t you have to go to work?”
“We need to decide Mike. Like, right now. This morning,” she says following him up the stairs.
He sighs again and at the first landing glances back to the clock in the center of the concourse. He looks to the star-covered ceiling again. “Don’t you remember how black the sky was? How the stars were silver?”
“What?” Angela says.
“Camping.”
“Mike,” Angela says, marching now ahead of him, onto the second landing, and on up to the top. “I’m not leaving until we decide.”
Mike thinks, You mean until I change my mind.
He is almost at the top of the stairs when he passes a woman in a grey suit, a tan raincoat over her arm and a briefcase in her hand. Her face is tense. She looks worried.
As they pass, she slips somehow, maybe she turns her ankle, Mike doesn’t know, he just sees her reach for him out of the corner of his eye but he has already stepped past, just beyond her reach. She makes a small noise, a small gasp. He and Angela turn to see her fall, arms outstretched, coat fluttering away, briefcase clattering ahead of her. She hits her head against the marble stairs then rolls limply all the way down to the landing. There is no blood, just her raincoat spread across the stairs behind her like a blanket.
For a moment, no one moves. Then a woman standing near the fallen body screams, another kneels, moving the fallen woman’s limbs, touching her frantically. Mike comes down the stairs, stepping around the jacket, and says, “You’re not supposed move her.” He can see the fallen woman is still breathing, her chest moving softly up and down, though her body is twisted awkwardly.
“Then you do something!”
And Mike does. He walks to the edge of the landing and scans the crowd for one of the cops that have been patrolling the station since 9/11. Several people have pulled out their cell phones, presumably to call 911, but he sprints down the stairs anyway, toward one of the cops, his dark jacket and hat just visible through the crowd. Breathless once he catches up to him, Mike explains about the woman, her fall, that there’s no blood. That she’s limp.
They run back together, the officer calling for an ambulance on the radio attached to his shoulder. When they get to the landing a small crowd has gathered. No one is touching her now though, and someone has spread her coat over her and placed her briefcase neatly against the banister near her body.
Angela hasn’t moved. Her hand is white as it grips her purse strap.
The cop gets everyone to move back, and the crowd does, reluctantly, but when he kneels beside her, the crowd inches closer again. Just little by little, and Mike feels himself pulled along too. The officer holds her wrist, touches her neck. Mike glances at her face and sees an expression move across it, something he can’t name or describe. He remembers the sound she made as she fell. He blinks, looks at her face again but it is still, and blank, and he knows that she has died.
The cop looks up at him and takes his hand away from her neck and leans back on his heels. The crowd leans away too, and full of sudden shame, one by one they drift away, Mike along with them and Angela too, down to the main concourse and up the ramp toward 42nd Street.
As he and Angela emerge onto the street an ambulance pulls up. The EMT guys jump out and with their latex-gloved hands push their way through the doors into the station. The wind is brisk and whirling. A paper bag twists in the air and rubbish skids along the curb toward Fifth Avenue.
They turn without talking and walk west. Their hands touch and hold.
They walk this way for blocks, on and on west, across the city to the Hudson River where the water is grey and choppy. Mike leans with his elbows on the railing and feels a cold mist on his face.
Angela puts her arm through his and leans against him, her head on his shoulder. “Oh, Mike,” she says.
Mike closes his eyes and puts his hand on her arm. Together they listen to the sea gulls screech, and then, from his jacket pocket, the jingling sound of his cell phone ringing.
