Jack walked out the door and stopped at the top of the steps that led to the entrance to her 42nd street row house. It didn’t close behind him; she didn’t bother to follow him out. He turned and looked for a moment, waiting for a shape to emerge, but he couldn’t see anything except the flashing digital display on the microwave at the far end of the hall.
He wiped her tears from his palm onto his shirt, reached for the knob and pulled slowly until he heard an audible click. His face was dry, but sore from the strain of trying. He tried to remember what it felt like to love her, but the encounter had been so practiced, so ruminantly rehearsed that he had processed the emotions long before he was supposed to feel them.
He said the words, went through the motions and let her emotions flow over him like a cold breeze. It wasn’t her fault that he’d gradually pushed her to the margins of his life, but fate conscripted him into a life she could never understand, something she couldn’t possibly relate to. It’s why he took night shifts, why he responded to her compromises with countermeasures, to keep the gulf between them as wide as possible until confrontation was unavoidable.
He hung on because she was the last shred of his humanity left, the last thing that kept him tethered to a world with a living future. He had to leave her behind, or he knew he would just drag her down with him. At least that’s the line he repeated every time he ignored her messages or conjured a phantom appointment.
His jacket was still damp, but the early morning air was warm, so he slung it over his left arm, trotted down a dozen concrete stairs and began his trek back to his apartment on 29th. The sun would be up soon, and Jack needed to shower and get a full day’s sleep before his next shift. He crossed 42nd street at 77th and strained his neck to take one last, long look at her front door before it slid out of view forever.
—
The setting fuchsia sun cut across the bedroom, forming a corrugated wall of glowing weightless dust that illuminated the bathroom mirror just enough to interrupt Jack’s late-stage slumber. Within minutes he’d thrown on his windbreaker, slung his single-strap bag over his shoulder, slid his phone into his pocket and swiped his coffee off the Keurig before stumbling his way down and out to the street below. His gray, late-model, rental-fleet-veteran compact was parked at the curb halfway up the block. In a single motion he tossed his bag onto the passenger side floor and sat down hard behind the wheel. The windows had been left open to let the day’s heat pull out some of the moisture from the previous night’s misty shift. Jack removed his phone from his pocket and placed it onto the dashboard mount. He tapped the app and a series of statistics faded in and out of the display while the UI waited for the crit list to sync properly.
Total Collections…
Collections per hour…
Somebody named Bobby Grimson had bagged “Most Collections in One Stop”: seven at an abandoned warehouse in the middle of Old UpTown. He didn’t have to strain his imagination to guess what that probably was. Jack easily fell within a standard deviation for every tracked category, which was the sweet spot if he wanted to be ignored by management. He’d heard about guys that let their stats fall off, but only because that’s the last anybody ever hears from them.
His personalized crit list finally loaded, and it was exactly what he expected midway through a Friday commute – an extended trip down I59. He was already halfway there.
Jack made it to the scene of his first crit slowly, but with little resistance, as he was authorized to drive with emergency lights and use the shoulder to bypass inevitable backups. The condition of the vehicle surprised Jack, and he thought he’d seen everything. A red chevy Trailblazer was propped on the guardrail, upside-down and backwards, wheels still spinning. He pulled off the road as far as he could, left the car running, and stepped out.
He placed his bag on the hood and pulled a black fabric mask out of his pocket, stretching the straps around his ears and adjusting it with its hand to assure a proper fit. He lifted the hood of his jacket over his head and reached back into the car to remove his phone from the mount. Jack then unzipped the bag from which he pulled a small, ovular spring-snap case. He opened it and carefully lifted out a black glove. It was made of a very fine, reflective metallic material. He put it gingerly on his right hand, flexing to fill the snug fingertips. He began to stroll toward the wreck as another pair of emergency vehicles pulled up to the opposite end of the site.
The first responders and paramedics acted as if Jack wasn’t even there, but he knew they could see him coming. They ignored him because it was their job to.
Jacked stopped at the passenger window, bent to one knee, and tipped his head slightly so that he could manage a look at the crit still trapped in his vehicle. He was still upside down, suspended, wedged in place by a combination of steel, glass and dashboard. He was a twisted, quivering mess, sputtering and ghostly white. His blond hair was stained red, a thick crimson stream pooling on the ceiling below him. Jack made eye contact, but nobody was there to look back. Jack blinked and lifted his phone to confirm the man’s identity. As the notification sound pinged in affirmation, Jack was already sliding the phone into an inner jacket pocket and reaching toward the crit with his glove hand. He cupped it softly around the man’s carotid artery, counted down from ten, and then quickly retracted. The shuddering stopped, and the muttering sputtered out.
Jack stood up and walked slowly back to his car. He removed and replaced his gear, then sat back down behind his wheel and clicked his phone back into its mount. He checked the box next to “Collected” on the crit’s profile, his entry disappearing to slide the next name to the top of the list. Jack pulled away from the shoulder and pulled up the directions to the next crit. As Jack sped away, the paramedics still desperately scrambling to revive an empty shell.
—
The waitress was bussing Jack’s plate as he wiped ketchup from the corner of his mouth and swiped from the payment processor app back to his crit list. It was almost midnight, which meant it was time to visit the residents of Riverview Terrace. Jack couldn’t forget one of Dr. Moore’s most saccharine assurances from his cloying recruitment schtick,
“Jack, you’ll get to play a very special role in the lives of our most cherished citizens when you get to be the last, most reassuring face they’ll see before they’re whisked off to heaven to be reunited with their long-lost loved ones. You’ll get to share in their final words of wisdom, and be present when they say their final, heartfelt goodbyes. You’re lucky, Jack – few get these privileges.”
Jack couldn’t recall the last time he saw anything in a collection other than loneliness, pain and fear. Men don’t get to leave on their own terms, and places like Riverview Terrace were designed specifically to avoid heartfelt goodbyes. They are little more than depositories for the pre-dead, a purgatory for the living.
Jack parked in the middle of the dark, empty lot, gathered his gear, and walked toward the brightly lit entrance. The flat, beige-brick building had four stories and four wings, the main entrance a cylindrical segment nestled between two of the latter. He glancingly surveyed the building. The few units that weren’t totally dark were peppered by frequent flashes of blue light, comfort to those residents that cannot sleep without that familiar, rectangular-faced companion in the far upper corner of their sterile rooms.
He displayed a QR code to the lock panel on the front door, entered and nodded politely to the orderly at the front desk who failed to return a greeting because she was engrossed in her phone to stay conscious. The crit profile said that the collection would be in room 321.
After a quick elevator ride, Jack walked into a cramped room, one of the many illuminated by reruns. A man, alone, was still propped up in a chair watching muted canned laughter, hopelessly against his will. His jowly face appeared halfway melted off his skull, exposing the bright pink flesh of his lower eye sockets. He had no teeth and was unable to close his mouth, with large patches of yellow bubble-spittle collecting at its frowning corners. He was overdue for a shave and his hair was a series of crispy gray wisps, with two furry black caterpillars resting below his forehead. His hands were petrified talons and his clothing hung off his body as if a gust of wind had slapped it onto him in passing. His breathing was loud and labored, his skin glistening with a thin film of panicked perspiration as his body strained just to carry out the most basic functions of living.
Jack made the final confirmation of the man’s identity, knelt to his eye level, and reached out with his gloved hand to complete the collection.
SNAP! The man’s head jerked suddenly, and Jack was so startled that he nearly fell backwards, but he was able to keep balance by shifting his weight and bracing himself on a nearby end table. The man’s bloodshot, faded-blue eyes were boring straight into Jack’s skull. Though the expression on his face had been of stoic, static fright for decades, some small collection of muscles where his cheek met his upper lip managed enough sinewy spark to tighten and narrow, synchronous with the outside edge of his eye, all taken out of context with the rest of his expression might’ve led one to believe what he was rigorously attempting a smirk. Jack instinctively reacted by returning a smile. A wave of guilt seemed to catch up with Jack from somewhere just behind him, and he looked away, ashamed. He finished the extension of his arm and completed the collection. Jack rose and walked out of the room without looking back at the old man. He was gone now, anyway.
—
Jack couldn’t avoid getting drenched no matter how fast he ran back to his car, but having to zig through a sculpture garden, zag around a reflecting pool and fumble with the lock on a heavy wrought-iron gate assured that no amount of layering could save his dry skin from a thorough, cold soaking. The density of the downpour made even the quaintly lit Patriarch Hill dark enough to get lost in, but Jack had enough foresight to park under the only amber streetlight visible from the estate, which made his car look like a dry oasis in a dark, wet desert. Normally by now he’d be able to see the first hints of sunrise lifting the shapes of trees and buildings out of the dark abyss of the valley below, but the night lingered with the storm and kept day at bay.
Jack whipped open the door wide enough that he could slide in sideways and slammed it shut with just enough time to avoid crushing his ankle. He paused to catch his breath after an exasperated exhale, reached over to wipe the moisture off of his phone on the back of the passenger seat, remounted it and refreshed his crit list. It was full (it was always full). He began the slow brake-riding drive down Patriarch Hill. He glanced at the crit at the top of the list. Looked like someplace on the 700 block of… 42nd street?
That number.
Her name.
That face, that brick façade, that dark hallway, all flashed before him under the fog-frosted glass canvas. His focus widened and his gaze turned inward. The images locked down into a loop and he couldn’t think, but he didn’t have to. His heavy foot sank into the accelerator as he squeezed the wheel with both hands, leaning forward until the windshield stretched completely across his visual field. He used every muscle he could muster to stretch open his dilated eyes, straining to follow the fragmented bursts of the fractured wet mirror of road racing toward him.
He sped faster, but the world moved slower. Every sign a century; every mile a millennium; every turn, an eternity. His heart was a ball of broken glass bursting in his chest, his face a twisted twitching mess.
He blinked, and then he breathed, and then he was there, standing atop the steps in front of the door of the row house on 42nd street. His arms dangled at his sides, phone in one hand and gear in the other. He did not remember grabbing the gear. He began to motion towards her lock with his phone, but stopped, and slid it into his pocket. The door had already unlocked for him. Jack pushed it open and peered under his dripping eyebrows into the darkness, hoping for her silhouette to emerge. The long hall remained dark.
Then he ran.
Down the hall, up the stairs and around the corner. He stopped himself at the threshold of her bedroom door frame. He took a wide, bracing stance as he hovered through the door in a careful, elliptical motion.
She was sprawled out on her belly, unconscious, on the far side of the bed. Her wheat blonde hair was evenly scattered across her pale face, next to which lay her hand, balancing a small cylindrical orange bottle between her palm and her ring finger. Jack seated himself on the near side, his side, of the bed. Jill always wanted him between her and the door, ostensibly to protect her if something dangerous comes preying in the middle of the night.
He touched her as if she were some delicate artifact, gently brushing her hair from her face. Her breath was shallow and distant. Jack looked down at his other hand – he was wearing the glove. He must’ve put it on instinctively, but he couldn’t recall when.
Then it hit him like a punch to the back of the head, and in a violent lurch he remembered why he was here. Overcome with rage and disgust he tore off the glove and swept her limp body into his lap. He pressed his face to her cheek and drenched her with the tears he withheld the night before. He pleaded with her for one more chance, but she wasn’t listening – she wasn’t there. Her body was a cold shell, begging him to say goodbye, to let her go. If he didn’t put the glove on, as long as he refused to collect her, he could hold onto her for as long as he wanted. He could carry her like this forever.
After a few moments, Jack opened his eyes and looked up just in time to see a hooded figure standing over him. The man knelt next to him and placed a consoling hand on Jack’s shoulder. Jack looked the man in the eye and smiled.