A woman pushes her shopping cart past them, wheels scraping the loose cement. A small boy walks a few steps behind her, talking to his action figure, tugging its head to see what will happen.
Daniel waits for the man’s eyes to change.
The man jingles the change in his pockets and raises his eyebrows up and down.
Daniel says, “I don’t know why you’re—”
The man takes a step toward him. Then one more. He looks into Daniel. He says, “You want it to be one way. I understand. I do. But it’s the other way.”
Daniel feels a small vibration below his Adam’s apple, as if a beetle, nestled in the hollow of his throat all winter, is waking up.
Daniel says, “I just want—”
The man shakes his head. “It’s the other way.”
He says, “I just want everything to go back to—”
“Ssshh,” the man says.
The man says, “Daniel.”
The man says, “Knock-knock.”
Daniel says, “Who’s there?”
The man gives him another smile, slightly broader, and leaves the parking lot.
He decides to name the man Troy. He seems like a Troy. Logical, smooth-haired, stainless.
He sees Troy outside a bar one night. He’s across the street, leaning against a wall and eating what could be yogurt, using a plastic spoon. Another time, he’s at the mall, where Daniel has gone to wander, to feel other people, hear piped-in music no matter how bad, if only because he hasn’t programmed it himself. He finds something comforting in this, a freedom in the freedom from decision similar to when he comes across a movie on TV, mid-story, and it’s a movie he owns on DVD, one he could easily play on the TV himself, without commercials, and with the added advantage of being able to pause for bathroom breaks and beer runs. And yet he doesn’t insert the DVD into the player. He doesn’t opt for control.
And so the mall speakers play “Lady in Red.” They play “Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da.” They play Céline Dion and Dave Matthews and Elton John and Mariah Carey. And Daniel, who likes only one of those songs, feels buffeted.
Troy passes him and stops to smile at something in the window of the Payless shoe store. As if the loafers are particularly amusing. As if, through glass, they tell him jokes.
His ex-wife says to him on the phone, “I’m sorry you’re going through this. You’re a nice guy.”
“I am?”
“You are.”
He says, “Would you tell them that?”
She says, “They don’t listen. They’ll never—”
The phone dies.
Nothing sinister.
Batteries.
He drives out to interview for a job. He does this every day. Always with a blue Toyota Sequoia four or five cars back in traffic. He would have expected something boxier, brown, low-to-the-ground, American. No. A big-ass, bright blue SUV. With fog lights.
Sometimes they pass him. Just for shits-n-giggles, he supposes. Always back behind him when he reaches wherever he’ll interview. For jobs he never gets.
This morning, he’s in the medical district. Six hospitals in a seven-block area, connected by breezeways, connected by parking lots, a food court in the center of the tallest building so the anxious and the grieving and the doctors and the bedpan-cleaners can eat Sbarro, Au Bon Pain, Panda Express, Dunkin’ Donuts.
That’s where he’s going — the Dunkin’ Donuts. That’s what he’s been reduced to. The economy, you know. A college graduate (not much of a college, true, but just the same…) with fifteen solid years of work experience. And this is the sum total of his life. Interviewing for an assistant manager’s position. At a doughnut shop. Nearing forty.
At best, if all returns to normalcy, he will still be alone.
As he pulls into one of the garages on the eastern edge of the seven-block perimeter, a beige Volvo pulls up behind him, and then the lumpy Sequoia noses up behind the Volvo.
He takes his ticket. He pulls forward. The yellow gate-arm goes down behind his car, and he sees in his rearview as the driver of the Volvo reaches for her ticket from the machine and drops it. He watches the ticket fall to the ground and then a tuft of wind flicks it under the car. The woman gets out of her car. She seems confused as to where the ticket went.
Daniel feels a flapping in his chest, an odd and startled faith. He watches the woman peer at the ground like it contained cave drawings, sees the Sequoia trapped behind her, and he puts his car in gear and drives up the ramp.
He turns with the curve of the ramp, and he sees Troy’s smile and his wife’s trapped pity, and he sees his mother who died in this same hospital complex surrounded by beeps and blips and a TV hung above her that was void of sound but primed with image, and he fishtails coming out of the first turn and those wings flap harder.
He reaches the second floor and cuts the wheels hard and passes a DO NOT ENTER sign and drives up the exit ramp. It’s a blind curve, and he envisions the grille of another car appearing before him as if through water, and he wishes he were going fast enough for the risk of fatality to lie in the risk of collision. He wishes all light was bone white.
He comes out of the curve onto the third floor and he pins the wheels again, goes up the next exit ramp, and he knows that even if the Sequoia has cleared the gate by now, it can’t hear his tires in relation to where it would expect them to be. He begins to feel blessed.
He drives up the final exit ramp and reaches the roof. It’s near empty up here, and he parks by the first door he sees, trembling and happy. He hopes that someday he has grandchildren and lives to see them just so he can tell them that once he drove up three exit ramps in a parking garage and never hit another car.
He steps out of the car and faces the door.
There’s a sign on the door that reads TURN RIGHT, and he almost does, and then he realizes the sign could be referring to the doorknob, so he turns that to the right first, and the door opens.
Just to be sure, he turns his body to the right, sees nothing but rooftop and then a ledge and then the hospital complex spread beyond the roof in industrial patinas of sandstone and white brick and eggshell window squares.
So it was the knob.
He walks down two flights of stairs and sees another sign: CONCOURSE TO GAAR BUILDING. He likes the sound of that — concourse — so he goes through that door and finds the concourse. It’s more like a breezeway actually, and he crosses it and passes a doctor and two nurses and a guy in a johnny leading his IV-stand across the carpet as if it’s a slow relative, a pack of cigarettes and a lighter clenched in his other hand.
A few minutes later, he finds himself in a corridor with bluish gray carpet. From there, he can see the roof of the parking garage. The Sequoia sits beside his Honda, hulking. Men in ties stand outside of it. One leans into the Honda and cups his hands on either side of his face and peers in through the driver’s window.
Daniel watches, waiting for something to happen, and he begins to realize that the men are doing the same thing.
Half an hour later, a black Suburban pulls onto the roof and parks. Troy gets out of it. He crosses to the other men. There is talking, gesticulating, hands that point vaguely in the direction of the exit ramp, the door, the sky. In the pointing, Daniel can see their humanity, their frustrated ineffectuality, and it comforts him to realize that these are men who do, in fact, sleep in beds. Have children possibly, mothers who still harry them, dry-cleaning tickets in their wallets.
Daniel can’t be sure from this distance, but Troy seems angry. At the very least annoyed. He points at Daniel’s car in such a way that Daniel knows it’s no longer his. Not in any relevant sense.
They will wait by his car, he is pretty sure. By eluding them, even for a moment, he has broken the unspoken contract. They will watch his house. Tap his phones, if they haven’t already. Wait for him in bars.