Kid Cape wobbles, his secret identity exposed. He sets down the oversized bag. He examines his hands, the bag’s owner, his hands again.
Mr. Suitcase raises a lone finger to his lips, agreeing to keep the hero’s secret. Mikey smiles and dashes back past me toward his mother’s squeaky voice.
I fixate on the bag. What the hell’s in there?
We coast into the airport stop. End of the line. The incomprehensible announcements never wake anyone up — the final jolt of the car does the job. Passengers stand and check boarding passes, wristwatches, belongings. A series of paranoid pats. Mr. Suitcase’s smile grows.
I make for the other door. He’s the last person on the train. A fresh set of suitcases with peeling luggage stickers squeak onboard.
I exit. He doesn’t.
The doors stay open. Soon after all the arrivals board, this train will turn around. I stand with one foot on the platform, the other still on the train, waiting for his move.
Mr. Suitcase steps off the train and I’ve got him in perfect profile.
His eyes close. He inhales and pushes the air out like an old steamer. And before I can make any sense of it, he turns around and drags his suitcase back onto the train. Mr. Suitcase pulls and grimaces like a kid didn’t vault that bag over his head with ease. Its pipsqueak wheels yank my attention down as they cross the rumble strips. I favor the foot inside the train, lean in as the doors close.
Mr. Suitcase sits opposite of where he just was.
I lean on the handrail to his left.
His face has transformed — dimples gone, mouth relaxed, eyes sloping down in satisfied rest.
He raises his wrist and fiddles with the ring on the handless watch, rotating, rotating, perfect. New time zone, of course. He heaves the bag onto his lap and holds on to the zippers with both hands, like doorknobs he’s not quite ready to twist.
Z-z-z-z-zip. The watch comes off his wrist and goes into a suitcase. An empty suitcase.
A grin tucks itself into my cheek. I need a better way of picking targets. I should walk away, call this trip a wash, try again next week. Disappoint another kid in another cape by being a petty—
“Do you need a suitcase?” Mr. Suitcase asks.
I glance around. He’s staring at me. “Me? Why would I need a suitcase?”
“You seemed more interested in it than that kid was.”
He made me. This is more humiliating than losing my badge.
“Are you in the market for one?” he asks.
“I don’t need your suitcase, man.” Bailing — the fastest way to seem guilty. Stay put.
“Maybe you can take it on a trip somewhere?”
He’s seen me on this train before. He knows. “Me? A trip? Can’t recall the last time I could afford a fancy trip.”
“Well. You don’t have to travel to travel,” Mr. Suitcase says.
I slump into the seat across from him, nothing to add, no one to blame but myself. I need a better way of picking targets, I do. But I can’t list my criteria. Can’t decide which stop to take, where to go. I forget the map, stop profiling people, return to the same damn stations.
Third stop from the airport. An old woman yelps in German and something sends a jolt up my foot before tumbling down. The thief’s on the ground with her purse and the guard’s got a knee in his back before the doors close. Did I...? I’m noticed and cheered and thanked with fancy chocolate. Do they even know what I am?
Mr. Suitcase isn’t around to notice.
I remember asking my little girl why she wanted to go to space camp. Duh! Because here is boring, Daddy. I bob my head with the tracks like a little kid and stare, stare at the constantly shifting sky, finding the new in the familiar.
Harley Jane Kozak
The Walk-In
from For the Sake of the Game
It’s not every day that you walk into your apartment and find that your cat has turned into a dog.
Okay, it was London, so it wasn’t an apartment but a flat; and neither the flat nor the cat was mine, they were my brother Robbie’s. But the dog was unequivocally a dog.
It was my second day in town, and because my brother’s flat was new, and lacking pretty much everything — including my brother — I’d been out buying random moving-in things: toilet paper, dish drainer, red wine. I was in the hallway juggling these and trying to get his door open when I heard a clickety-clack on the wood floors on the other side of the door. Inside the flat.
Clickety-clack?
I glanced at the gilt number near the keyhole: 2B. Right flat, wrong sound. Touie, Robbie’s annoying cat, padded around on silent paws. So who was this? Setting down my packages — parcels, as the Brits would say — I worked to get the door unlocked. At which point I was assaulted by the dog. A twenty-pound bulbous-bellied dog.
He — the gender was glaringly obvious — was corpulent, gunmetal gray, and so hair-free he appeared to have been skinned. His legs were stubby but his ears were large, and sticking straight up, rabbitlike. His face was all frowns and folds, a canine Winston Churchill digesting bad news. But he greeted me like I was a giant dog biscuit: when I bent to rescue my stuff from the floor, he launched himself at my chest, tangled himself in my crossbody bag, and slathered me with saliva. For a small dog, he had a lot of saliva.
I pushed the dog back into the flat and got the door closed behind us. “Robbie?” I called out, but my voice echoed through the bare rooms. No surprise. Robbie was my twin; I could feel his absence like a tangible thing.
I pushed aside thoughts of Where’s Robbie? and made a grab for the dog’s tag. “So who are you?” I asked him.
His collar looked just like the one Touie, the cat, wore: scarlet leather, the perimeter dotted with faux gems. One of Robbie’s extravagances. Strange.
“Sit still, Dog. Let me read this.” But when he did and I had, strange turned to bizarre.
The tag said “Touie” and the number on the tag was Robbie’s cell phone.
My first thought was WTF? followed by Where’s Touie? I wasn’t her biggest fan, and she was definitely not mine, but I’d just spent five days relocating that cat from New York to London, a feat, on the misery meter, right up there with digging graves in winter. It just wasn’t possible that she’d disappeared. I went through the flat, checking under the comforter where I’d last seen her, inside closets, and even the microwave, which Touie was too fat to fit into. There were limited hiding places. The only things Robbie had brought in, before disappearing, were five boxes of books and a bed, its toxic new-mattress smell wafting through the flat like bad air freshener.
The real Touie, like Robbie, was gone.
“Now what?” I asked, and the dog responded by sniffing around in a distinctive manner, suggesting a bladder situation. I unclipped the shoulder strap from my pink carry-on bag, fashioning a leash, and let the dog lead me outside. He had strong opinions about our route, one block to Baker Street and then a left, and another left, until I lost track of where we were.
The October day was murky with fog. And cold. I was wearing Robbie’s red rain slicker, but it wasn’t enough. How’d I gotten roped into doing this favor-turned-into-an-enigma-wrapped-in-a — Twilight Zone episode? Robbie had a lifetime of practice getting me to do stuff he didn’t like doing — pet immigration in this case — but I’d had the same lifetime of practice saying no. Yet here I was, and minus the pet in question. How had it happened? What had happened? And why? And where was my damned brother? Seriously, what was I supposed to do? Call 911? Was the number even 911 in England? And then what? I wasn’t one to chalk things up to supernatural forces, but it was a stretch to assume a criminal act. What self-respecting thief would want a plump, elderly cat? And why leave in her place this wheezing dog, straining at his makeshift leash, pulling me through London?