But not everyone ignored the blond boy. Alex began to watch the other man in the room, geared up in fatigues and twitching every time this youngster ran this tongue about dropping bombs. Al offered up Alex’s food and he turned back round to face the TV.

  “Got to show them we mean business,” the younger man snapped. “Only one thing they understand. Boots on the ground. Bombs in the air. It’ll be glorious.”

  And on he went, on and on as Alex chewed through the food, watching the older man’s fists clench and unclench, knuckles whitening and then rushing with blood. A vein throbbed on his forehead, each boisterous syllable causing it to swell a little more.

  Then, the older man snapped.

  There wasn’t a shout, there wasn’t a warning.

  He simply got to his feet, walked across the room, and grabbed the back of the blond kid’s neck and smashed his face into the counter.

  As the younger man writhed on the ground, Al shouted over his grill, the older man dared his opponent to his feet, and the man with the plateful of fries just watched. Alex got up. This had all happened before. Not just in this diner, but everywhere. The same scenes playing on different stages, up and down the nation.

  Alex stuck a ten-dollar bill by the door, making sure Al saw it. He stepped out into the night again. Someone else could deal with the fallout. Al would sweep up the debris, making the most of whatever was left.

  The sounds of the fight spilled onto the street. The light from Al’s diner was interrupted by the shadows, the men moving fast behind them. People on the other side of the road were stopping to watch. Alex left them be. He walked home.

  * * *

  The last two blocks were the hardest. It was cold now and nearly midnight, the last warmth of the day having risen up into the sky, and the wind off the lake blowing in low and hard. Alex had his bag slung over his shoulder, the sleeves of his T-shirt billowing about his arms. Just two blocks to walk, though, and then he’d be home.

  Across the flat side of a concrete tower block, a person had crawled up to the gutter with a spray can and written the words APOCALPYSE NOW SEPTEMBER 2027. Alex had no idea what they were worried about now, the unseen graffiti men. Kids, probably. They’d crossed out the month regularly, different dribbles of paint poking out from beneath the month. It had been January, then March, then May. Always worried about something.

  At least it was up to date.

  At least it was better than all the gang tags.

  Alex walked in silence. He was quiet, at least, but the city offered no such option. There were sounds everywhere. The ambulances, the squad cars, the freeway–it all came together in one chaotic din, mixing together along the length of the street and emerging as a single, untidy racket.

  It was the sound of the city, as Alex had come to understand it. Different than life on the farm, for sure, but not worse. Just different. If the sounds were out there, he thought, it meant people were busy living. Going about their business.

  Even now, Alex could remember the shroud of silence which settled over his parents’ farmhouse every night. Nothing for miles, nothing but rustling corn and calling birds. It was never quiet but it was silent. Anything could have happened on the other sides of the fields and no one would know any better.

  Instead, the hum, the drone, and the noise of the city was reassuring.

  One street from his house, a cop car pulled up alongside Alex, siren blaring.

  The officer stepped out. Tapping his pockets, searching for his documents, Alex began to worry. They weren’t in his front pockets, or the back of his jeans. Had he left them in his car? These regular stops weren’t too tricky to navigate but if you were one piece of plastic short, you’d be spending a night in the cells.

  “Sorry, officer,” Alex said. “I just need to search my bag. Is that all right? I just want to reach inside.”

  Bending double over the bag, Alex watched the cop’s face for permission. The man said nothing. His uniform was crisp and his dark trousers had a crease which could cut cold butter. Alex took the silence as agreement and began to unzip the bag. The cop’s hand moved to his hip, unclipping the button beside the gun.

  Alex continued, slowly.

  The bag was full of junk. Not stuff he ever needed but stuff he’d regret not having. Cables for this or that device. Old work for the office. Pens. Paper. Keys. But not the documents he needed right now. They were buried somewhere, underneath the dirty laundry. Alex kept fishing around.

  The cop’s radio crackled into life. Still rummaging, Alex couldn’t hear all the words. They were drowned in static, lost to the ether. But the cop seemed to understand. He called in his position, told them that he was waiting on a “possible perp.”

  “Gangs out tonight?” Alex tried a hollow laugh. “I saw a guy earlier that-”

  The officer kicked the bag, cutting the conversation short, and folded his arms.

  Alex dug harder down into the bag. The radio continued. The words were scattered. Hospital kept coming up. Doctors. Ambulances. A siren sounded in the distance. Gunshots, too. Disease, Alex was sure the radio said. Back-up. Roadblock.

  He stopped, looming over his bag, listening to the radio. Bag searches happened enough times that he knew how to handle himself. It didn’t take a genius to work it out.

  The cop kicked the closest pocket, jerking Alex back to attention. With frequent apologies, the search began again, fingers finally falling against something laminated and hidden in a corner of the bag. That had to be it. Looking up, making eye contact with the cop, he began to remove his hand unhurriedly from the bag.

  “It’s my ID. I’m just taking it out now,” Alex said. “Is that all right?”

  The cop didn’t say a word. Alex pulled out the object and, without looking down to check, pulled it up and presented it. It was his ID card. It would suffice. The cop ran his eyes over the picture for half a second, turned around, and walked away to his patrol car.

  As he left, he began to mutter something into his radio. There was no way to hear what he was saying, but it didn’t matter now. The ambulances were crying again, closer this time. Something was brewing up inside of people. Even though Alex wasn’t far from home, the journey had taken far longer than he’d expected.

  * * *

  There were three locks on the door but only two really worked. The third, the biggest, was mostly for show. But, even when standing at the door, Alex made a spectacle of unlocking it. It was all theater. The entire world was a stage, even this boring, bland Detroit street where Alex happened to live.

  Once inside the building, Alex began to walk to the second floor. It was an older building, built in the seventies. But it had been built well back then. There were three floors. He lived in the middle. His apartment was four rooms, sandwiched between two neighbors he barely knew. It was good. Their homes provided insulation.

  Not just the heat–though that was welcome during the Michigan winter–but the sound. The fury of the city life was blocked off well inside Alex’s apartment. It was why he loved the place.

  Alex undid the final lock on his door and entered the dark rooms beyond. He didn’t turn on a light. He didn’t need to. There wasn’t much furniture and he knew the layout. There was the sofa, the book shelf, and the cabinet with the broken television.

  He’d never gotten around to getting it fixed. Back when it had worked, he’d only used it to watch old movies. They didn’t make anything good anymore. Besides, he appreciated the quiet inside the apartment. It made a nice change.

  Throwing his bag beside the door with an annoyed grunt, Alex showered and readied himself for bed. Walking home had taken an age. It was already so late. So many interruptions. No time at all to think. He’d have to take the bus to work the next day, have to get Timmy to drive him out to his car. The chores just piled up, one after another. As he prepared himself for bed, he opened a window. It was cold out. No wonder people were sick.

  Through the open gap, he listened to Detroit singing its song one last time, reveled for a moment, and then shut the window and went to sleep. He didn’t dream.

  There was something happening in Detroit. In America. The country was far beyond dreaming now.

  Chapter 6

  Alex sat at his desk and tried not to think about anything. The cubicle was small. The computer in front of him was loud and cheap. All around the office, the sounds of a hundred fingers hitting a thousand plastic keys sounded like a million drops of rain against a tin roof. A thunderstorm, really.

  There was a coffee cup, now empty, and a selection of pens. Papers were stacked in trays. Certain pieces had to be stamped. Certain forms had to be signed. The name above the office door was an acronym. No one seemed to know what the words stood for.

  Alex stared at numbers in a spreadsheet, as he did every day. If he stared long and hard enough, they became shapes. If he stared even longer, he might be fired.

  Alex had his phone balanced on his lap. The computer had been gutted, locked down and prevented from accessing the outside world. A security risk. But Alex could still read on his phone, when the device decided to work. Today, it was well behaved.

  The cubicle was very open. Only three walls. Anyone walking past could look right in. But Alex had found a position, leaning slightly on his right arm, where he would hide most of his body from passers-by. To them, he might seem as though he was concentrating incredibly hard. But, in actual fact, he was reading articles, news, books, and everything else on the small screen on his knees.

  But it wasn’t enjoyable. It was worse than actually working, in a way. Flicking between stories, reading only headlines and isolated sentences. Every time he started to read, Alex felt his attention snapping to something else. There was always a more important matter, a more deserving way in which to waste his time. In the end, he tried to read everything and eventually read nothing. A Teflon attention span. Nothing stuck.

  At this moment, Alex found himself determined to read. Korea, the headline began, has today announced… As he read through the opening paragraphs, he could feel his attention slipping. Trade wars, troop movements. Always the same stores, rehashed and re-released. Alex resolved to read the rest. What had they announced? It was buried in the text somewhere. But his eyes were darting over the lines, picking out random words.

  China. Boat. Airborne. Injection. Warning. Alex was drawn in, determined to read properly. This seemed important, he told himself. He had a duty to know more. The work be damned; they weren’t paying him to think. He squinted harder at the phone balanced in his lap, his mind tracing lines between these stories and the pilot on the news and the girl in the alley and -

  “Hey.”

  Alex snapped to attention, dropping his phone to the floor.

  “What’s up?”

  It was Timmy, his flustered red hair moving into view. Alex bent down and retrieved the device. It had turned itself off. The reboot sound chimed around the cubicle.

  “Not much,” said Alex. “Shoulder’s still a bit sore.”

  “Sure thing, shooter,” Timmy replied. “You get used to it. How about that beer tonight? Don’t tell me you got your car already?”

  “Nah, I still need to collect it. Once I’m free, I can pick up whatever.”

  Timmy looked around the cubicle, eyes lingering over the stacks of paper that still demanded Alex’s signature.

  “Great. Hey, weird question. That girl. With all the… blue. Works two cubicles down. Seen her lately?”

  “Tan?” Alex said, rubbing his head. “I think that was her name.”

  “Yeah, her. You seen her around lately?”

  Standing up, head poking up above the cubicles, Alex looked out across the sea of bobbing heads. Tan had a shock of blue hair, which was easy to spot from pretty much anywhere in the office. That could be an advantage, when sailing an ocean of anonymous, damn-near-antonymous workers. Easier for a superior to pick out.

  But that could be a bad thing. For the same reason. Alex would never had risked it. Safety in numbers. Herd immunity. Better to keep plugging away. Tan’s blue hair was missing from the crowd of cubicles. He slumped back into his chair.

  “Haven’t seen her in a few days, actually,” Alex thought aloud. “Though I’m sure there’s less people working here than before.”

  “Fewer. Who raised you?” Timmy said. “Shame about Tan. Probably canned her. Thought we had a spark, though.”

  Sitting back in his chair, Alex realized that the office was quieter than usual. The stacks of paperwork were shorter than normal. He’d been having too many emails bouncing back. Out of office. Sick day. Leave me a message. A break in the routine. It might be worrying, he thought, but at least it was different. Play the same song a thousand times and a bum note starts to sound good.

  “This company’s going belly up, I guess. Hiring freeze? Wouldn’t surprise me.”

  “Hey, people hear you two talking like that, they’ll start asking questions.”

  It was Eddie, who’d wandered up to the cubicle, coffee cup in hand. Eddie had worked at the company for years. Back when it had been an entirely different acronym. He had the nicest chair in the office, a holdover from the good old days. A man devoid of any sort of hustle. A worker. A drone. A nice guy with a funny tie. Eddie was clean shaven and at least ten years older than everyone else. Alex liked him.

  “Hey, Eddie. Working hard?”

  “Or hardly working,” Eddie replied, apparently hoping that such a statement might contain some trace vestigial humor. He beat the funny out of the line with a bat, an old slugger who’d overstayed his retirement. Second base was Eddie’s world. Nothing more, nothing less. Steady Eddie, no one called him. Not to his face, anyway.

  “Watching the Tigers tonight, Eddie?” asked Timmy.

  Eddie patted the pocket on his shirt. Two tickets were conspicuously placed, visible behind a row of three pens.

  “Got an extra if you want one. Always room for one more.”

  “Nah, I’ll watch it at home,” said Timmy. “Got a trick to get around the blackout. You get a screwdriver, you see, and then…”

  Timmy talked Eddie through how to take the plate off the back of his television, how to fiddle with a few screws, and solder this and that. Alex tuned out. Eddie seemed to do the same, but he was politer.

  Eddie nodded and smiled. Alex looked down at his phone. Alive again. He restarted the article.

  At least, he started looking at the pictures. It was easier to focus on the photos. Images of American military ships, patrolling the high seas. They were shot like an action movie, placed near the top of the article. All those clean-cut men, it seemed to say, ready to defend the country. Probably more men like Freddy than you’d expect, Alex thought, not quite so slim and bountiful as they’d once been. Probably an army of computer geeks buffing up the men and whitening their teeth in some government sub-basement.

  Scrolling down through the pictures, the images of the military ships and men vanished. They were replaced by pictures of different ships. Cobbled together boats, made from plastic oil containers and railroad ties. Rope lashed across anything buoyant. These photos were not shot as dramatically. They were seen from afar, flotsam and jetsam bobbing on the water. Alex crouched his head down by the phone.

  There were faces on the boats, all of them lined up on the edge. Alex had never met a Korean person. Not that he could remember, anyway. In the article, in the photo, these faces peering over the side of the boat almost didn’t look like people. They weren’t happy. They weren’t smiling.

  But they didn’t look sad, either. It was like they’d never known that either end of the emotional spectrum was available as an option. Alex knew how they felt. The article captioned the images. A boat of Korean refugees, it said. These people probably had families. Maybe they were there with them. Each one probably had a story. Couldn’t tell that from the article.

  Next was a group of American fishermen. They’d been dressed up in their thick knit sweaters, their beards bustling and rustling in the sea breeze. They were posing with a group of ten stragglers. People who’d been afloat for days in the ocean. Picked up somewhere in the Pacific. Brought back to harbor. Catch of the day, the caption read. The quiet eyes of the boat people were half-closed in the sunlight. Too close to the sun.

  It was dawning on Alex, slowly, how little he knew of the world. How the cogs turned and twisted, their teeth locking together, and driving the big machine forward. How this piece connected to that, how interwoven and entwined everything had become. From tower block fires to traffic stops, GUNPLAY leaflets to refugee ships, sinking in the China sea. All that information was out there and he was immune. Inert. Passive. Maybe, he wondered, it was time to switch himself back on.

  The screen shut down. Clapping the phone against the heel of his hand, Alex tried to bring it back to life. He hadn’t finished looking at the pictures. He hadn’t even started reading the article properly. He wouldn’t be able to find the same piece again later. The news moved too fast. Cursing, he threw the phone across his cubicle.

  “Those Chinese ones,” Eddie announced, “they always were unreliable. I buy American. Only the best, they say.”

  Eddie had reached into his pants pocket and produced his own device. Even from his chair, Alex could see that it was more polished. More cared for. Probably cost Eddie two month’s wages, he wondered. And now it was just covered in fingerprints and coffee dust. What was the point?

  “Did they get a new coffee started?” Alex asked Eddie.

  “Oh, yeah,” Eddie replied. “We got that new blend in, as well. Javan, I think. Rich and aromatic. I’d get down there before it’s all snapped up.”

  Standing up, leaving his phone behind, Alex emerged from his cubicle. “I’m going to the break room. Anything I can get you?”

  “Just your John Hancock.” Eddie motioned to the paperwork on the desk. “Time’s a tickin’, Mr. Early.”

 

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