The guy was still talking, his hair still nibbling away at his face. “The young boy wanted the umbrella so badly that he became the first boy ever to take part in the village custom of the men hitting each other with sticks. His opponent kept hitting him and hitting him, but he stuck it out to the end without uttering a single peep. Young boy—not a single peep. Got that? When his towering opponent finally gave a groan at the pain in his arm and conceded, the boy collapsed, and lay still. That’s right: he was dead.
“Can you guess why that young boy wanted the umbrella so badly?”
At the sudden question, I shook my head, and said, “Um, no, sir, I don’t know.”
“He believed that umbrellas could make you fly.”
I was relieved that the story seemed to be over, but at the same time I was a little bit disappointed. Somehow, I’d been hoping for a more inspired ending. I was starting to wonder where my mom was, and about possible ways to safely remove myself from this conversation, when the guy pointed to another drenched man desperately holding his umbrella open. “They still believe too.” Then he counted, “Three! Two! One!” like before—and I couldn’t believe my eyes.
The man, who’d been getting buffeted along, holding aloft his nearly closed umbrella, stepped onto the guardrail and springboarded off, catching the wind and soaring up high into the air.
“All right!” The old guy looked to the sky and pumped his fist. “He really committed, kept his center of gravity nice and low—I knew he had a good chance!”
I stuck my head out from the bus shelter and looked in the direction where the man in the suit had flown off. Wiping the hair and the rain out of my eyes as I scanned the sky, I spotted loads of tiny human figures floating among the dark clouds. I stared, mouth wide open. All of them were hanging on for dear life, writhing and flailing, trying to keep a grip on their umbrellas. Fifty of them, at least, or a hundred, or even more.
I could have sworn the old guy was still right behind me, but when I snapped out of it and turned around, he was nowhere to be seen. Or at least he wasn’t in the bus shelter anymore.
“Catch ya later!” I heard a voice say from above. It was the guy, sounding exultant. “Catchyalater! Catchyaaa! Laterrr!”
I don’t laugh anymore when the news shows drenched people whose umbrellas flip and turn to bones. I don’t belittle their mental capabilities. When I pass people on the street who insist on trying to hold their umbrellas open on a stormy day, I know they are far more attuned to things than I am, that they’re fearless and dreaming big. And if I ever meet a boy looking cynical during a typhoon while sheltering from the rain, I’ll be ready to offer him some cookies and say, “Try these. They’re really delicious.”
On my way home from the bus stop, I gingerly tasted one of the cookies he’d given me. It was crisp and delicate, and better than any other cookie I’d had in all my eleven years.
The old guy was found on the pavement all flattened out the next day, but I still tell this story anytime I’m out drinking and need something to entertain the group. If I tell it right, the part that goes, “Catchyalater! Catchyaaa! Laterrr!” is always a real crowd-pleaser.
I Called You by Name
All through the meeting, I was so distracted by the bulge in the curtain I could hardly sit still.
Why wasn’t it bothering anyone else? The light green drape pooled so unnaturally at the side of the window. No generous depth of pleating could cause a bulge like that. We were seated around three sides of a table, and I was the only one directly opposite the bulge. No matter how many times I told myself to forget it, no matter how hard I tried to concentrate on the discussion, the curtains came into my sight every time I looked up, and there was just no way I could focus on my team’s proposals.
Should I tell them? Maybe say, Look, someone’s in there, make it sound like a joke. But I didn’t know how; I hadn’t established myself as the kind of person who could say that sort of thing. Plus, this was an important meeting for me. After more than six months of strategizing and ingratiating myself, I’d finally won the advertising contract for a major telecomm firm. I was staking my career on my promise to deliver on the client’s request for an “eye-catching stunt that would get people talking.” I had to focus. My team was all men, all younger than I was. If that bulge turned out to be nothing more than a swell in the drape, they’d decide they couldn’t take me seriously. Just a woman after all, they’d think, even though I was better at the job than any of them.
The room was a big one. I hadn’t been able to reserve any of the upstairs spaces, so we’d ended up in the conference room on the ground floor, which held forty people. The distance between me and the window was the length of four long tables, at least. That made me even less confident about what I was seeing.
The first member of my team finished presenting his idea. I said, “I see. Not bad, but don’t you think it’s a little… run-of-the-mill? Who’s next?”
As soon as the next guy stood up to explain his idea, my attention was back on the drape. Perhaps the suspicious bulge was just a trick of the light and would disappear if I got up close to it. Perhaps I’d pulled too many all-nighters and was starting to hallucinate. Perhaps…
Yes, I’d always been easily frightened, ever since I was small. I was much more prone than the average person to experiencing pareidolic phenomena, which is when any grouping of three dots starts to look like a pair of eyes and a mouth. I’d see it everywhere. Three wrinkles on a suit in my wardrobe would easily reveal themselves to be a face, and I couldn’t look at wood grain for longer than three seconds. It was only recently that I’d found out there was a name for this. It had come up as a question on a quiz show I was watching: “What is the name of the effect, often seen in photographs purporting to show ghosts and spirits, in which a set of three marks is perceived to be a human face?”
That probably explained it: Drapery Bulge Effect. I’d nearly convinced myself I was just imagining things, but then I thought I saw the bulge move. My mind went blank. There was definitely someone in there. I didn’t know why, but they were hiding behind the drape.
I reached for my bottle of water to steady myself. The awareness that I was supposed to be chairing this meeting stopped me from crying out, but I was terrified by what I was seeing. Was it a criminal? A naked person? Who are you?
The second presenter sat down. I said, “Very interesting,” and nodded, pointlessly stroking the cap on my bottle of water. For a moment there was a strange silence, and I worried that I’d said something odd, but then everyone started talking among themselves, and I calmed down a little too. I could probably afford to wait a little longer. If it came to it, as long as I was decisive in giving the evacuation order, my team and I could safely escape. I wanted to examine all the possibilities first, rather than bringing the situation to my team’s attention prematurely.
“Who’s next?”
I thought back to when I went to a furnishings store to look at curtains with my boyfriend, when we were planning on living together—my ex, whom I’d broken up with just last month, when I found out he was seeing someone else, even though we’d discussed getting married one day. Maybe some part of me wished that it was him hiding behind there, and this was making the bulge look tens of times bigger than it actually was.