Michael’s first impulse was to cover that opening with plastic and masking tape, but he hesitated.
He pulled a chair to the wall and got up on it so that he could stand face-to-face with the brass plate.
“Who is that?” he asked.
“Mike?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s Tommy Rimes from the apartment next door.”
“The tall guy with the mustache?”
“No,” the voice said. “I’m the guy who goes bowling all the time.”
Michael remembered the squat middle-aged man with the potbelly and the red bowling-ball bag.
You wanna go run down some pins? he’d once asked Michael.
“What do you want, Mr. Rimes?”
“They got you all over the news, Mike. From Occupy Wall Street to the Wall Street Journal, they all been talkin’ about you. You went viral on the Internet now that the cops couldn’t beat down your door. Fisk, the guy with the mustache on the other side a’ you videoed it and put it up on YouTube. You’re a celebrity.”
Michael was peeling the wax from his fingers and wondering what notoriety would get him. Would it hold the hurricanes back or keep the Communists from conquering themselves with capitalism? Would it get Melanie to take him back?
“Mike?” Michael had all but forgotten that Tommy Rimes was there.
“What?” the newly minted celebrity asked.
“Can you take off the ventilation plate?”
“Why?”
“I’m gonna push through a power strip and this aquarium hose I got. That way you can have power again, and if they cut off your water you can have that.”
“Why?”
“This rich guy from uptown put what you said to the city psychologist up on a billboard down the street. I like it. I mean, I think you might got somethin’ there. And even if you’re wrong, I like it that you’re stickin’ it to the landlord.”
By morning Michael had light, and once he powered up his phone he found that it was still working. There was an e-mail from Melanie telling him that she had paid his phone bill. On his tiny phone screen he could see newscasts covering a thousand people in the streets outside of his apartment building protesting the police, the mayor, the landlord, and everyone that uses the law to keep people apart.
“I believe that Mr. Trey is trying to speak for all of us,” a young black woman with braids that stood out from her head like spikes said to an interviewer. “I mean, here we are working hard and barely able to live. We eat junk food and watch junk TV and our schools are being closed down because they’re so bad. The police will frisk anybody, except if they’re rich or something, and we’re fighting a war without a draft. Mr. Trey has just stopped. He’s saying that he doesn’t want to be a part of all this [bleep] and that we should all do the same.”
“I’m a conservative,” a white man in a dark blue suit told a camera. “I believe that we have to fight the war and bail out the banks, but I still wonder about what this guy says. I think he’s crazy, but you can’t deny that there’s something wrong with the world we’re living in.”
Both the liberal and conservative press praised Michael. They called him a people’s hero who was refusing to take one more step before the other side made changes. They bent his words, however — that’s what Michael thought. They didn’t understand that the whole idea was not to have a hero but to discover a natural credo to unite people and keep them from destroying themselves.
“We love Michael Trey!” two beautiful young women shouted at one camera.
The city or the landlord cut off his water; Tommy Rimes turned it back on through the aquarium hose.
The iPhone sounded.
“Melanie?” Michael said, after seeing the screen and answering.
“They’ve closed down the street in front of your building,” she said.
“The police?”
“No, the protesters. They want the city to leave you alone. One group is raising money for your rent, and four lawyers are working for injunctions against the landlord. Other tenants are making complaints against health and safety infractions. A journalist asked President Obama about you, but he refused to comment and it’s been all over the news.”
“What has?” Michael asked his ex.
“Obama not saying anything.”
Michael tried to remember why he had decided to stay in his apartment. It was the storm. He was just too afraid because of the threat the news media made out of the storm. He was afraid, not heroic.
“Michael?” Melanie said.
“Uh-huh?”
“Max Strummer, who owns Opal Internet Services, wants you to do a daily podcast from your phone. He wants me to be the producer. Isn’t that great? You could make enough money to pay your rent and lawyers. He said that if you couldn’t think of anything to say that we could send you text files that you could just read.”
“I have to go, Mel,” Michael said.
“What about Mr. Strummer?”
“I’ll call you later,” Michael uttered, and then he touched the disconnect icon.
After turning off the sound on his phone Michael went to sit in his favorite chair. It was extra wide, with foam-rubber cushions covered in white cotton brocade. There was a lamp that he’d plugged in to the power strip hanging halfway down his wall from the ventilation grate hole. The light wasn’t strong enough to illuminate the whole room, just the area around his chair.
Reclining in the oasis of light, Michael tried to make sense of the storm and his street being closed down, and of the young women who loved a man they’d never met and Melanie who had changed from an ex-girlfriend to a maybe producer.
When no ideas came, he turned off the lamp, hoping that darkness would provide an answer. It didn’t. He was trying to recapture the moment when everything had made sense, when he took action without second-guessing his motives.
Feeling lost, he looked across the room and saw a blue luminescence. It was the phone trying to reach out to him.
Half an hour later he went to see who was calling. There had been a dozen calls. Most of the entries were unfamiliar, but one, instead of a number, was a name that he knew.
“Hello?”
“Mr. Balkan?”
“Mr. X?”
“No, no, this is Michael.”
“Oh.”
“Did you call me on city business?” Michael asked.
“They wanted me to call, but this is your nickel.”
“I’ve been looking at the Internet,” Michael said. “People all over the place want to protect me. They’re offering money and legal support. One guy named Strummer wants to hire me and my ex to do a podcast for him.”
“That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”
“No.”
“I thought you said that you wanted people to realize what they had in common.”
“But between them,” Michael said, “not through me.”
“I don’t get you.”
“Not like a natural disaster or some enemy,” the young bearded man replied. “I don’t want to be the discounted meal at the fast-food chain that you can buy in Anchorage or Dade County. I don’t want to be anything except an idea.”
“But you’re a man.”
“Thanks for that, Bob.”
“For what?”
“I needed to talk to somebody about these thoughts in my head. I couldn’t get them out if I didn’t have anybody to talk to. I know that you’re working for them, but right now they don’t know what to do. In that little window you helped me. You really did.”
“Helped you what?”
“I got to go, Bob.”
“Where can you go, Michael?”
“You always ask the best questions.”
The next morning Michael was standing in his kitchen eating from a can of pork and beans with a teaspoon when he noticed that the spigot had a slow drip. Michael wasn’t sure if it was the dripping or his talk with the city psychologist that made up his mind.