Christopher Hebert - Angels of Detroit

McGee remembered him having said the exact same thing the night he broke it off with her, too, that maybe now his problem was solved. She hadn’t believed it any more then than she did now.

“Yesterday I got home from work,” Darius said, “and I saw something in the stairwell. One of those things you put in your hair, you know what I mean? One of those things.” He made a vague circle with his hands. “It looked like something I’d seen her wear. I thought maybe she’d dropped it. So I brought it upstairs. I wanted to leave it outside her door, but I don’t know,” he said. “I must’ve hit the knob or something.”

Right, McGee thought. Or something.

“She must’ve heard me. She opened the door, and then I had to go in, and …”

He trailed off, but McGee had no trouble filling in the details he’d left out.

It seemed to McGee as if they were hours into his sordid soap opera before Darius finally excused himself to go to the men’s room. In the sudden silence, she thought she could feel her nerves stretching out, returning to a state of calm. Each breath seemed to carry all the way to her toes.

Knowing she had only a minute or two, she moved quickly, hurrying from the lobby to Ruth Freeman’s corridor. Past the old lady’s office she went, past the photocopier room.

She let herself into the main filing room with her key. She flicked on the light.

She’d been here before. She knew what the room contained. But she needed to see it again. She needed to see it now, to measure it, to think about what it would really mean to try to find something here. A couple hundred cabinets, at least. Labeled, but the labels helped only if you knew what you were looking for. Even if she managed five hundred pages a night, it would take her decades to get through it all.

She made it back to her cart just ahead of Darius.

She let him load the heavy bags of trash into the elevator. Once they reached the basement, he picked them up again and carried them out to the loading dock. As he tossed the trash into the Dumpster, McGee stashed her papers underneath.

For a moment afterward, while Darius collected a few Styrofoam cups and candy wrappers from the pavement and tossed them into the bin, she allowed herself to watch him with a smug sort of pleasure. No matter how close he followed, he’d never catch her.

As he came toward her now, she gazed at the files just visible underneath the Dumpster, daring him to look. But was that it? A game of chicken, until hopefully, maybe, she got lucky? Found something useful?

Darius sat down beside her on the loading dock. McGee sucked on her cigarette as if it were made of pure oxygen. But no matter how deep she pulled the smoke into her lungs, calm kept eluding her.

“She came downstairs again.” Darius toed a loose bolt onto the railing at the edge of the dock. “This morning.”

McGee inhaled again, let the smoke linger even longer.

“I told her, ‘I said you shouldn’t come here anymore.’ And you know what she said?” Darius paused, shaking his head. “She said, ‘Yeah, but you came upstairs yesterday.’ ” Darius gave the bolt a solid whack with his heel.

“I said, ‘Yeah, but that was different.’ ” Darius looked again at McGee, as if waiting for her to agree. “I told her, ‘That was because I needed to return your thing, your hair thing.’ But she came in anyway, and I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know how to make it stop.”

McGee was glad she couldn’t speak, that she didn’t have to be the one to point out the obvious, that he didn’t actually want it to stop.

It was a strange thing, though: on behalf of his wife — on behalf of women everywhere — McGee wanted to punch him. But he was so helpless, so pathetic. A grown man undone by a girl barely out of her teens. He was a child, sitting beside her with a loaded gun.

He was still fidgeting. “See that light?” he said. He was looking at the parking garage across the alley, pointing toward a gap between the garage and the building next door. “It’s hard to see. That one right there. The red one.”

Perhaps half a mile away, a red light flashed, high in the sky, attached to a smokestack or some sort of tower.

“They used to have factories all over the city,” he said, gesturing to the building at their backs, HSI.

No kidding, McGee wanted to say.

“The stuff they sell,” he said, “they made it right here. Washing machines, laser beams, I don’t know what all. You can still see what’s left of it. The factories, I mean. Ruins.”

McGee flicked her butt off the dock, and Darius watched it go, grimacing. For a moment he seemed to be debating whether to go retrieve it.

“They found cheaper places,” he said. “Cheaper workers. That red light,” he said, pointing again, “that’s the last one. I don’t even know what they make there.”

Compressors, McGee said to herself, lighting another cigarette. They make compressors. She knew more about HSI than anybody. For all the good it had done her.

She breathed out a heavy column of smoke, and the red light briefly faded.

Darius picked up a pebble from the loading dock and tossed it into the alley. He seemed to have given up on the bolt. “They’re shutting it down, too. The last one.”

McGee lifted her eyes to his face, forgetting to hide her surprise. No, she wanted to say, you’re mistaken.

“It’s true,” he said, as if he could hear her thoughts.

She took another drag. No, it wasn’t.

Whatever else she thought of it, the company was too smart ever to leave the city completely. Even if the factory was a money pit, it was HSI’s one token gesture to the place it’d been fleecing and poisoning for generations. That factory wasn’t going anywhere.

“China,” Darius said. “They say it’s moving there by the end of the year.”

Of course, China. It was always China’s fault.

“Another ruin,” Darius said, and then he turned to face her. “Where’s the future in it?”

She was surprised by how sincere he seemed, as if he were genuinely waiting for an answer.

“My friend Michael Boni,” Darius said, “he’s got a plan. He says we should clear it out, all these ruins.”

Plans, McGee thought. I had a plan, too. And there it lay, under a Dumpster.

“Enough’s enough. That’s what Michael Boni says.”

Off in the distance, the little flash of red was all there was to see.

Darius rose to his feet. “A clean slate, he says.”

McGee thought again of the file room the size of her apartment up on the third floor. In her head she counted all the cabinets it contained. Hopeless.

Darius was walking past her now, back to the building.

“How would you do it?” she said.

Darius stopped midstride, and he remained there, frozen.

“How would you do it?” she said again. “Clear it all out?”

When he turned to face her, Darius’s expression was perfectly blank. “Michael Boni knows.”

“This stuff about the factory,” McGee said. “Where’d you hear it?”

He blinked at her slowly. “I don’t remember.”

So much for clever plans. She got up, brushed off her pants. She might as well keep going, not stop until she reached home, leave the useless file where it lay with the rest of the trash.

“Everybody knows,” Darius said. “I heard it from everyone.” He was staring at her now, trying to process what was happening.

Well, that made two of them. After everything she’d gone through, after all the chances she’d taken, here with a stricken look on his face was what she’d been looking for all along. This guy — who treated his wife so abysmally, who spilled his guts to strangers, who cared so irrationally about the cleanliness of a stupid building — he was the one with the answers.