Liam could not imagine how the angel tipped over and angled itself through the hatch door—and then to land on its feet. Still, the intervention of a hearty breakfast set him about installing his newest ornament on the perimeter of his field at daybreak.
Its hollow base was weighted with bricks, and a forty-foot extension cord tethered it to the nearest outlet. The radiant seraph, flecked with gold, teal, and red violet, blazed under a gloomy morning sky, and dominated the view from every window on the north side of the house.
Beyond this act of affirmation, the curator’s energy that morning was more tetchy than productive, and he was eagerly away by noon.
David was not on post when he entered the tower, but this was no cause for worry. The arrival knocked on the bathroom door, as this facility within a facility was the morning observer’s home away from home for much of his workday.
The colleague grunted from inside and made his usual complaint about constipation.
“It’s all those antacids you eat,” Liam warned. “They throw off the acid-base ratio in your body.”
David flushed the toilet, although this gesture was likely symbolic, or intended to dissuade lectures. He emerged from his morning constitution tucking in the last of his shirttail into his pants. “Do you see any difference?” he mumbled toward the window.
“I see no difference,” answered the relieving observer too quickly.
“The male mannequin’s head has been moved—again.”
Liam nitpicked. “Then his head is in the same position it was the last time I saw it.”
“Well, I saw his head yesterday, and it was in a different position.”
The relieving observer glanced futilely over the log, knowing Howard marked nothing down.
“What about this blind person on payroll?“ David mentioned nervously.
“What about him?”
The questioner jabbed the windowpane. “What if that person on the couch is this new hire?”
“You were certain only yesterday that the guard was a zombie.”
David jettisoned one theory for another. “You think our bosses have employed someone to sit in enemy territory and gaslight us?”
“Someone who pretends he is dead?”
Hearing it said aloud did not improve the persuasiveness of the argument. The departing observer grabbed the remains of his sack lunch, yet offered an obiter dictum from the doorway. “If that place over there is a theater, then it’s Kabuki.”
On this his replacement did not disagree.
The brothel was effectively deserted, and, after an hour of staring out the window at this desertion, Liam compared the silence to the silence of the tower, which matched it in every respect. Both buildings were ghost ships moored together, and the shadow that grew and darkened between them throughout the afternoon hours resembled a gangplank.
Liam did not have Howard’s gumption for invading private spaces, though he was not opposed to peeking through the door of the main office while rehydrating at the drinking fountain. This was less an undisguised intrusion than an assessment of an unsecured location: The door was neither locked nor pulled to.
He was no more than a minute away from his desk, and left the door to the observation post open behind him. Perhaps it was due to his guardedness, but something transpired in his brief absence; and with far less ambiguity than the impression made on him that morning by the inanimate plastic angel met in his hallway.
Returned to his chair, 1136’s slack mirror was reexamined with the field glasses—but Liam was certain of what he saw. A figure had stirred in its reflection while he was away from his post.
This conviction was reinforced on thinking the motionless guard’s feet were crossed differently, although the rearrangement of feet was a matter of conjecture since the observer could no more swear to it than he could swear to the prior positions of the bedded mannequins’ heads. Yet what lay beyond conjecture was what his binoculars made indisputable: how perfectly symmetrical the seated body’s attitude was in view of its nonchalance possession of the couch. One side of the guard was an exact recreation of the other half, even down to folds in the coat sleeves.
This impossible symmetry would explain the observer’s continuing unease about the guard’s face, and why David’s comment about Kabuki resonated: All human faces are asymmetrical, with eyes of different size and even crooked noses. The unconscious mind anticipates these deviations.
The unreality of the face extended beyond this symmetry: Were it to display normal life and expression at that moment, Liam would describe the effect as neither normal nor expressive. Should the guard lift his eyes and stare directly at him, he doubted he would perceive a stare. It would be like gazing into the branches of thick trees, where wind created a moving shadow. If what lurked in these notions was not a marionette, then it was surely the work of necromancy.
Howard was reticent while his coworker censured him for his undisciplined attitude toward log entries. His pensiveness might be mistaken for boredom (if never contriteness). Eventually he mumbled, “You assume these changes occur on my shift, but what about David?”
“What about him?”
“He spends a goodly amount of time in the bathroom. I would say as much as I spend napping. I contend that David is punctual in his habits, and predictable in his prolonged absences. The Koreans can exploit his delinquency as readily as mine.”
Liam might cavil about work ethic, but choose against it.
“I am not so derelict in my duties as you may believe,” rallied the indolent colleague. “I’ve been conducting my own experiment.”
“What kind of experiment?”
“Last night I removed a roll of caution tape from the storage room and used it to mark my path into the brothel.”
The listener thought this admission odd. “Why should you carry caution tape? That is not a roach motel over there, or a baffling maze. Your danger is one of being shanghaied, not of getting hopelessly lost.”
“ And yet I found, to my surprise, other tape already laid for me when I arrived at the front door.”
Howard’s surprise was joined reluctantly.
“I did not employ the tape in my possession,” he continued, “but followed this recommended path. It led me to 1136’s doorway, and to the sofa, which was unoccupied. I looked toward the room’s window and saw, across the divide, a figure in the observation tower’s bright window. This individual openly mocked me by pretending to be asleep on the desk. While regarding this strange development, I wondered if the sleeper on the desk was, in fact, our imposter guard. I returned to the tower at once yet found no one inside the tower. Nor did I cross paths with anyone leaving it. The guard was returned to the dark sofa in 1136, and in very much the position we see now.”
Liam responded incredulously. “You were dreaming during one of your naps.”
“Am I dreaming now?”
The colleague mildly laughed. “We’re paid to keep track of scantily clad mannequins in an uninhabited building, but perhaps we are the guinea pigs.”
“Guinea pigs for whom?” questioned the friend. “The Koreans or our employers? Or do you think they’re in cahoots?”
Liam stuck to generalities. “In sitting here, an obligation is met. It’s like I’m holding up the wall for an hour, or keeping some malignancy, some wasting disease, at bay.”
“What would this malignancy be?”
The complainer could not name the virulence. “This scene before us reminds me of those Japanese monks who assiduously self-mummify their living bodies: first by starving themselves, and then by lacquering the insides of their intestines with a potion, all while assuming a lotus posture in a crypt barely large enough to accommodate them. Each morning they remained alive, they rang a bell; and once the bell ceased to signal, tomb and mummy were sealed off with a heavy stone.”
The coworker was equally somber. “I see a similar consensus forming where gravediggers gather around us with shovels.”
Neither man could follow the fatalism better. Less trouble was needed in apprehending the dismal view that inspired it: From a distance, the mannequins seemed like so many load-bearing beams in a half-built cathouse. It was comical to appreciate how, once essential elements were in place, the Koreans bored of the finishing touches: Slabs of sod were brought in on pallets for landscaping, yet were never removed from their weathered tarpaulins.
The doomsayers looked ghastly tired under the desk lamp, as each resembled a vampire’s sapped victim: two pints shy of an unholy conversion. Liam was not disposed to judge his friend’s shortcomings harshly. “Perhaps you’re right… about David,” he conceded.
A nod stood in for a reply, though it might have been a shrug to be rid of more questions.
The topic of the napping friend’s dereliction was broached one last time from the doorway, diplomatically. “No wind-walking tonight.”
Quitting the post, the observer glanced back once from the road on his bicycle. No light was seen in the tower window, which meant his replacement had ignored his directive.
The rigor of their jobs was now as lax as what was perceived on the other side of the fence, and the fleeing employee suspected this truth ran straight across the building to his supervisors, as fewer cars were on the lot these days. Nothing would likely become of a promised holiday office party. With searching, Liam could not remember the last time a new announcement was posted on the office bulletin board, or he waved insincerely at someone wearing a necktie in the shared hallway.
This blind employee also vexed him: Where was this person to be slipped into the schedule? While the Koreans were cutting back on the number of lights used to illuminate their building after dark, perhaps this unsighted individual was brought in to work reconnaissance, given his stealthy ability to negotiate unlit stairs.
Copyright © 2008-2022 Michael Teague. All rights reserved.