Fiona Maazel - Woke Up Lonely

Jerry laughed. Said, “Ooowee,” and mopped the windshield with his palm.

“What?”

“Nuthin’.”

“What?”

“Well, I weren’t sitting on yer bedpost, but with your attitude like that, I’m not surprised she left.”

“My attitude? I thought you were ex-Helix.”

“I am. But I ain’t stupid about life, neither.”

Olgo pressed his eyes closed with his fingertips.

Jerry nudged him in the arm. “Don’t let the bear getcha. It’s gonna be all right.”

They pulled into the grounds, and when Olgo stepped from the car, the condemnation of landscape into which he’d been cast was staggering. The trees were bald and black and immobile despite the wind galloping down the riverbank. The snow was two feet deep. In the distance: a trestle for the freight that rolled through every day and the skeletal remains of a holding tank that looked, for its imposition on the sky, like a gallows befitting the evil of mankind. He breathed in deep, coughed it out. The snow was colored urine and coal, smelled it, too, and everywhere you looked: garbage, like someone had leaked the bag from one end of the grounds to the other.

The only building alive was the boiler room. It was up on cement risers, maybe fifteen feet above the ground where Olgo and Jerry hid. Light blazed through the windows, which were two banners of glass come down the facade. It was behemoth, imposing. Olgo did not want to go in there at all.

Jerry said, “You go up the front; I’ll circle round back. I seen your wife on TV. I’ll try to separate her from the others.”

“Why can’t I talk to her and you distract?”

“’Cause you’re a threat now. A floe.”

“A what?”

“An outsider. Now come on.”

“So you’re just going to talk to her? How are you going to talk her out of there in two minutes if it’s really as bad as you say?”

“Can’t. I’ll need about three days.”

“We don’t have three days.”

But then even in the dark, Olgo could see the denture whites of this man’s smile and something of the Black Lightning sobriquet flash in it. “Leave that to me. You just keep the others busy, act like you ready to join.”

“How?”

“Just tell ’em your story. You don’t even have to lie — it’s Prereq enough. That’s what they in there call a past you want to leave behind. Good Prereq. ”

Jerry tiptoed off, under the building, into the dark. Olgo looked at the twenty steps he’d have to mount to get to the entrance and sat on the bottom one. He might not be able to endure the experience of Jerry talking to Kay, reasoning, and exposing the manipulation to which she’d been subject. If reason could turn his wife, love had no role to play in her decision. And if love had no role to play, maybe she had never loved him at all.

Olgo took the stairs like an old man. His knees cracked. The space between his toes was crammed with ice. But for feeling this dreary, would being eighteen again make any difference? He reached the front door, and because he was exhausted and cold and defeated even by the prospect of having to steal his wife back, he forgot to knock, just walked in.

“Hello?” Because while there were fluorescent work lights clamped to the lintels overhead, there was no one around to make use of them. “Hello?”

He looked around. Brick walls, peeling paint. The floors inches thick in debris, which crackled and skittered underfoot. A toilet moored in junk; machinery whose purpose he’d never know, rusty, limed, a tetanus party. It was like the industrial revolution had come to this place to blossom and die. He slipped, fell, and the plaster dust came over the sides of his legs like waves into a boat.

Laughter from the other end of the floor. He picked his way across. A wall, half-crumbled, hid his approach. He scanned for a breach, eye to the hole. And, wow, what a difference a wall makes. On his side was the collapse of industriousness in America; on the other was an IKEA showroom. Navy-blue couches with white trim, Chinese lanterns chandeliered from the pipes overhead, twenty people arranged around a table, cast in haloes of light, sipping tea. The floor, overspread with quilts; and in a corner, a wood-burning stove going full blast. Everyone shoeless, in bright wool socks that bunched at the toe, symbol of Christmas comfort the world round. Olgo could smell the tea, an herbal blend, sleepy and sweet, and felt his tongue unstick from his palate. He scoped the room for his wife and, not finding her, began to pay attention to the scene, which was the group listening to a speech by Thurlow Dan. Listening rapt, listening whole. Faces angled at the CD player as though it were the man himself.

Olgo tuned in. “It’s like this,” Dan said — assured but tender—“every person on earth is always, every second of his life, and in one way or another despite his good deeds, shackled to himself and suffering for it. We default to egotism and isolation. We default to the loneliest place a heart can go. But you know what else? Every one of us, consciously or not, also lives the lives of his generation and his peers — friends and family, the people we love — and so the task here is simple but huge: to rise above ourselves and see each other.”

The track ended there. No one said a word, but all eyes shifted at what seemed to Olgo to be Olgo. Stares funneled and condensed in his peephole. He had not known he would show himself until this moment, when he was to be their star. His feet were asleep. Threads of wool cleaved to his neck as sweat watered his armpits and inner thighs, and it seemed from one second to the next that the blood was either draining from his limbs or storming through them. He was about to stand when a voice belonging to a man pressed against the other side of the wall began to address the group.

Oh, how stupid, these people weren’t seeing him at all. His heart lunged at the speaker through the brick. It was Jonathan, of course, which meant that when Olgo rounded the wall, he seemed to be looking at not just Jonathan, but at Jonathan with Olgo’s heart flopping around his feet like the day’s catch.

No one was startled to see him. Jonathan put out his hand and said, “Ah, great, you’re a little early, we weren’t expecting the pledges for another hour, but welcome! We’re so glad you came.”

Olgo, who had sunk his fists into his coat pockets, removed one for a quick shake hello. He didn’t want to blow his cover, though it was hard. Jonathan was depressing. Not especially young or handsome — he wore jeans and a hooded sweatshirt; his hair was thin and straight and piebald; no feature stood out for its beauty or size — which meant he had less tenable and thus more winning qualities to offer Kay Panjabi.

Jonathan said, “Come meet the others,” and introduced them one by one. A mixed group of men and women, midthirties, forties, fifties, with nothing shared in their lives but the joy of their comportment. One gave him her seat on the couch. Her name was Teru. Used to be an accountant. Came into the Helix three years ago. Was thirty-five but looked eighteen. “Here,” she said, and she passed him a mug of tea. “You look exhausted. Let me take your coat — my God, it’s freezing!” He did as told — the coat really was cold and wet — and when she gestured at his boots and then at a corner where everyone else’s were gathered, he let her have them, too.

“Fresh socks,” she said, and she held up a pair — thick, woolly, ecru with blue heel and toe. He said thanks. The socks had been beached on the stove; they were warm to the touch. Teru vanished with his old pair like a nurse with the offending bullet.

A woman bearing a tray of peanut butter cups and caramel popcorn drizzled in chocolate and coconut shavings walked by. Olgo noticed a dish of oatmeal cookies on the table. This new woman, whose name was Myla, sat next to him. Tucked one foot under her thigh, put the dish between them, and said, “Whatever it is, don’t worry. You’re in the right place.”