Stacey Levine - Dra-

“Yes,” Dra— said, with a crushing rush of empathy.

“And we can’t ever assume our friends will understand why we’re upset, can we?” Marla shook her head. “I hang in there no matter how I feel, even if it’s a gray, awful feeling. Do you? Are you the sticking sort? I am. I’m a good cook and I stick around. I’m older than I look. People who can’t stick around aren’t really cut out for a relationship.”

Finished with the phone call, Slim stood and pulled Marla by the shoulder, drawing her back, as Marla whispered on, “I bet you know what it’s like to be depressed and have all sorts of awful, negative thoughts that just coincidentally happen to be true.”

Slim said, “Stop talking, girls. Marla and I have places to go, and so we say goodbye. We’re off to eat. Tamales! As were prepared decades ago, stored in jars. They’re in a locker very far from here — too far for you to walk. Drop us a line, sometime, dear—”

“Yes, address it to ‘The Misses Paul,” ’ said Marla, and the two women took up their things and left.

Standing alone on the vast roof which was now emptied of airplanes and noise, save for an echoing, windy sound high above, Dra— felt the familiar and strange, shadowy pain resurface in her back. Clucking to herself, she headed back to the toilet, the place where she would feel best right now, she decided, for the toilet’s close wooden walls were dimly comforting, as was the idea of stubbornly sitting there for hours with no results.

Shutting herself inside the room, sitting, she sighed, pondering her problems with a silence like nails, far in the distance hearing a door bang shut. She imagined jumping up to race after Slim and Marla, and that upon hearing her approach, the two of them would turn and laugh gladly, welcoming her, saying that they had intended for her to join them for lunch all along, that it had just been a kind of oversight that they had forgotten to invite her, and that they would then exclaim with pleasure and take Dra— into their arms; and these thoughts were so compelling that she did, in fact, jump up, smooth her skirt, and run from the toilet after Slim and Marla, mouth watering at the thought of the tamales.

Winding softly down the stairwell, she glimpsed them a few floors below her, walking arm in arm. Perspiring, afraid to make herself known, Dra— trailed behind, taking care so they would not see her or hear her footfalls. Suddenly she had the distinct impression, as if from an objective, telegraphic source, that her future, though probably to include a good, dependable job, was certain to be brief and senseless.

Following Slim and Marla, she watched as they turned into a hallway then leaned toward one another in an ugly display of public affection. She raced ahead, hard prickles of anger on her scalp, not wanting to lose them, still hearing, almost in her bones, the vibrations of the indoor airplanes several floors above.

But she was not able to catch up; the two were distant now, difficult to see, and they passed through an enormous steel doorway at the end of the hall, which for some reason fell shut after them with a drastic, reverberating bang. Dra— sprinted toward the door, fearful that the Administrator would at this point likely banish her for her lateness, and finally reaching the door, she flung herself upon it with a sob. She tried to open it, though it had no handle, but suddenly it swung back from the other side, revealing a man in suspenders.

He stood opposite her, hands on curved hips, his hair consisting only of a few dark strands upon a bare, peeling scalp, although a strange, stiff, matted hair shadowed his forearms almost completely, with the likeness, disconcertingly, of a protective shell.

The man ushered her into a series of small rooms, speaking in a reprimanding tone that was in curious contradiction to his round, childlike face and rocking gait.

“That’s a key, isn’t it? It’s not a good idea to walk around with a key ring, because first of all, it looks so sloppy,” the man said, pointing to her skirt, where she kept pinned the small key to her old school gym locker, a souvenir kept from a single experience long ago.

“Most employees around here would never be seen with a key ring,” he continued, still extending his finger. “I’ve heard some departments are lax in their rules and whatnot, but my thinking is, if you hold a set of keys, why walk around with them for the whole world to see? I don’t like things seen,” he concluded, glancing into the hall behind her and bristling.

She tried to move through the doorway, but the man stopped her with a large rubbery hand to her shoulder, and this angered her, but he smiled so ingratiatingly that she somehow wound up giving him a similar smile.

Shamefacedly, she explained that she wanted more than anything to find Slim and Marla, the two women she had recently met and just as suddenly lost, and that afterwards, she must find her Administrator, for whom she longed even more shamelessly, if that were possible; and then gasping with a cry — easily the loudest sound she had produced in months — she realized that she had made a terrible mistake and actually had missed the appointment with her new Administrator, that she had forgotten to go meet the woman at the train station as the Employment Manager had directed. And now, it was too late; sick in waves at the thought of this failure, uselessly puffing a hot stream of air from her mouth, the terrible finality of this error settled into her heart and she sank to the floor, raising her arms to her face, moaning softly, beyond tears.

“Don’t you know anything about keys? A key should never be visible through the pocket,” the man continued monotonously. “In my day, keys were kept by machinists, and we knew the worth of a key. We knew what badness was, and we knew that even pure nothingness exists right alongside everything else in the world, except we didn’t make a big deal of it. Nowadays, there’s so many mixed-up people who think they’re fancy, tripping around the hallways talking about so-called new ideas and so forth, but most of them couldn’t even lift a scrub brush if you asked them to.” The man wiped his eyes, which were seeping, with a hand that shook slightly, not from emotion, it seemed, but from some sort of physical stress.

“Here’s my question, Miss: how is it that you carry a key so late at night, when the men in charge of keys are all asleep?”

But Dra— was low against the doorframe, wiping tears, all disappointed emotions refracting and settling into a brackish mask across her face, for Slim and Marla would have walked far ahead by now, into any of many rivulet hallways where she would never find them, and worse, she would never find the Administrator, not at this point. As the man continued speaking, the grating below her feet, concealing an amassment of machinery, expelled a low, hollow whistle, and she pressed her mind toward a colorless horizon and managed to have no thoughts at all.

“You’re coming to work with us, then, I suppose?” the man asked, turning around nervously. “We make our own grout here, and use it every day. We go slow. We don’t stop working, and we don’t talk about any wild ideas. We don’t get fancy, and we don’t hanker over the world as it might have been if people were different from what they are.”

Looking at her, he gestured at the rooms around them and the long hallway leading away. “You’ll see that when you work here, it’s hard to imagine any other departments exist at all. You stop being able to remember the other places you used to know, or if you do, you think they’re dumb. Do you know why that happens? I sure don’t.”

The man helped her up, biting his tongue in between his lips in a gesture of distaste, then he led her into a musty adjacent room with empty shelves around its perimeter and a table of pastries in the corner.