“Who doesn’t?” I hissed.
The man opened his paper bag and dug around. He offered me an assortment in his palm. I took four of the red and six of the purple.
I got out two-thirds of the way up. The building I worked in was very tall, more or less exactly as tall as the tallest building in that part of the city, not counting the antenna. I often forgot how tall the building was because I kept the office blinds half-closed. If I opened them, I would get unnerved by the eye-level workers looking back at me from the building across the street.
My company occupied four floors of the building, but they weren’t consecutive. Between the lowest floor we owned and the third-highest floor we owned, there was a snack company. I had been working at my company for some time. I now worked on the top floor of the floors we owned, but I had worked on the lowest floor, and also the floor above the snack company. I had never worked on the floor that was two floors above the snack company and one floor below my current floor.
The snack company often had sample bowls set up for new products they were testing. I liked to go down there and unwrap a few when I could get away for a bit.
The older bald man was sitting in a red leather chair near the elevator. He turned and smiled up at me as I pressed the down button.
“How was the roof?” I said. “Did you find what you were looking for?”
“Oh, I couldn’t get all the way to the top. I got pretty close though. It was real nice, even not quite at the top. You could see the park and everything.” He was nodding agreeably.
“Do you have business on this floor? Those red chairs are for people who have business on this floor.” We had four red leather chairs around a coffee table in the hallway. There was also a tall, thin plant that I was pretty sure was plastic.
The man looked up at me with a cautious smile.
I looked at him in his ugly, unbuttoned suit. The top of his head shone under the fluorescent light. My face must have shown my disgust.
“Okay,” he said with an exaggerated frown. “I get it. You’ve got work to do. Maybe some other time.”
I didn’t live in the city proper; I lived in one of the outer boroughs. You couldn’t see it from my office window, on account of all the tall buildings. The buildings were much shorter in my borough.
I spent a lot of time traveling over and under water. There were many bridges and tunnels connecting my borough and the city. I didn’t like going through the tunnels. Sometimes the subway would stop deep underground, and I’d close my eyes and try to think of something other than water rushing in and drowning everyone in the car.
I’d taken the blue bridge on the subway to get to work. After work, I walked back along the brown bridge. It was a nice day, and the bridge was crammed with people. There were lots of children throwing scraps of food over the railing and down into the water.
About halfway across the bridge, I thought I saw the bald man, and I turned quickly and tried to duck. A biker was biking past me and shouted out, “You’re going to kill everyone!” He started wobbling but didn’t tip over. A few people yelled at the biker while he was yelling at me.
I stayed crouching for a few moments. I could see the cars whizzing by beneath me through the slats. There were millions of people in the city, but you just never knew.
I thought I saw the bald man again that evening. The man I saw was shouting in my direction from up the street, but he had a fedora pulled down low on his head, so I wasn’t sure.
I stepped into a new cookie shop that had opened on my corner. Before that, it had been a macaron shop, and, when I had first moved in, a cupcake shop. But it had originally been a cookie shop. Things always came around like that in this part of the city.
I was wrong about the man on the street. He must have been shouting at a cab. The bald man I’d been ducking was inside the cookie shop with a whole stack and a two-thirds empty glass of milk.
“Wow,” he said. He jumped out of his chair. “Now this is a coincidence. This has to mean something, right?”
I thought about leaving, going to the brownie shop next door, but I didn’t want him to think he had that kind of power over me.
He walked up beside me at the counter. “Hey buddy, I got an idea. Do you like ballgames?”
The woman at the counter was asking for my order. Her eyeballs rolled in their sockets.
“Sure,” I said. “Everyone likes ballgames.”
“Let’s go to the ballgame. You and me. Just two guys watching a ballgame. What’s wrong with that? I got an extra ticket.”
I didn’t look at him, but I felt his hand on my shoulder. I could tell he was going to keep bothering me. He was like a stray mangy dog I’d unthinkingly fed scraps to.
“Just this once,” I sighed. “One ballgame.”
The man slapped his hands together and walked toward the door.
“Not now. I want to finish my snack. I came here to have a snack,” I said.
The man had the door open, and he started to close it. “We’ll miss the first inning,” he said. He looked surprisingly annoyed, but then he cheered up. “That’s okay. The team never gets going until the second or third. Okay. Yeah. I’ll be sitting over there until you’re done.”
The man led me to a damp parking garage deep underground and unlocked the doors to a beige sedan. He looked at me and started to say something, but he stopped himself. He faced forward and turned on the ignition.
“Let’s just take it slow. One day at a time,” he said.
“Sure, whatever you say.”
We drove up the slanted cement. I stared ahead.
“I only thought we could go to a nice ballgame. Do you like rock ’n’ roll? Let’s listen to some rock ’n’ roll.” At first we were still a few floors too far underground. Then the static broke into clear guitars as we drove onto the street.
There were bits of trash all over the floor of the car, old snack wrappers and the like. “This is a pigsty. Do you live in here? How old is this car, anyway? It still has a tape player. They don’t even make tapes anymore!”
His face and head started to turn a reddish color, and his knuckles turned white on the steering wheel. I saw his chapped lips count quietly down from ten. “What do you think about our bullpen?” he said after a minute. He tried to smile. “Let’s talk about the bullpen.”
The ballpark was in yet another borough. The road was flat all the way there. It was a brand-new ballpark that had cost the team and the city a lot of money. It was large and open. The breeze could come in and out, and there were all sorts of food and snacks being sold, even sushi. I went to this ballpark pretty frequently with clients. I never knew where my company’s seats would be. Sometimes the clients and I were way at the top, overhanging the field. Other times, we were down low, almost level with the players.
When we pulled up, there were no other cars in the parking lot. There was no one walking up and down the stadium. It was just the quiet and the man and me in a dirty old car.
He turned off the gas and hung his bare head. “The game must be tomorrow,” he said after a bit.
I gave a laugh. I reached out and calmly placed a hand on his damp, bald head. “Isn’t this just perfect? You dumb schmuck! Harass me all day and take me to an abandoned ballpark.”
The man got out of the car, and I got out after him. He tore off his suit jacket and rolled it into a ball. He pressed this against his mouth and yelled into it.
Gray pigeons walked around us, knocking their heads down at fossilized pizza crusts. It was quiet and peaceful.
I got up behind him and grabbed his shoulder. He dropped the jacket on the pavement.