Naja Aidt - Rock, Paper, Scissors

Maloney’s standing outside the store eating fried onion rings from a brown paper cone. The store looks like something found in a war zone, with the rough-hewn boards they’d hammered in place the day before.

“How do we even get in?” Thomas asks, short of breath. He sets his duffel and his sleeping bags down on the sidewalk. Maloney pulls a crowbar from a plastic bag. “With this,” he says, handing it to Thomas. “I’ll let you play thief.” Maloney steps aside with his onion rings.

There’s a certain pleasure in yanking off the planks. In that moment right before the nails slip free, the thrust in his biceps and hands feels good. Sweat dribbles down his skin. He licks salt from his upper lip. The planks give one by one, and with a loud crack each falls onto the heap. When he’s done they enter the store, crunching on glass shards. “Fuck,” Thomas mutters. It’s as if they’re seeing the mess for the first time. As if they’ve repressed what happened yesterday. Everything’s ripped from the shelves and trampled on. The glass case is open, the keys are missing, each and every one of its twenty-six small windowpanes have been smashed in the same manner. For a moment the two men simply stand, staring. Thomas traces his index finger along the carving on the countertop. Someone had stood here with a knife in his hand. Someone left this message. “Look,” Maloney says, pointing at the mountain of silk paper. “And there,” Thomas says, nodding in the direction of the expensive gold leaf lumped in a huge ball on the floor, which looks more like a curvy, gilt-metal sculpture cast in the light from the doorway. Maloney chucks his greasy cone onto the floor angrily and walks into the hallway. A terrible wall of heat slams into them when they open the door to the office. The plastic binders with all the balance sheets lie stacked like a colorful mountain. The lamp has been yanked from the wall, the computer screen destroyed. It looks as though someone shattered it with a hammer. Two wounded chairs with broken legs that jut pathetically this way and that. The air is thick, almost sticky, and the dust billows like a swarm of bees as they step inside the office. Thomas falls despondently into the boss’s chair. Maloney tries to turn on the fan, but it doesn’t work. The cord has been slashed. Instead he opens a window, but the window sticks. Thomas experiences it in slow-motion: Maloney’s hand coaxing the hasps and jostling the window until, finally, it slips free with a plop. Maloney sinks onto the edge of the desk and swings his head back and forth, back and forth. “Oh, God,” he moans. “What’re we going to do?”

“The basement,” Thomas mumbles, his voice thick. He’s already out in the hallway. But the storage room is intact. No one has been in here. Everything’s neatly and tidily stacked on the shelves. The large, rectangular room is cool and comfortable. Maloney sits determinedly on the floor, extends his legs, and rests the back of his head against the smooth wall. “Let’s think,” he says, his eyes closed.

Thomas lies down on the cold cement floor, and during the next twenty minutes, when they’re about to doze off, neither say a word. Thomas doesn’t even think of Patricia now, and after this silent, refreshing pause they get to work. Thomas balances two boxes filled with black trash bags up from the basement. They begin in the store. Sweeping everything into enormous piles and shoving it into the sacks. Under some crushed pink pencils with small pony-erasers, on the tips of which have been added lilac-colored manes, Thomas finds the key to the display case. Three hours later they’ve cleared it all up, and it’s evident that nothing has been stolen. Everything has been destroyed. Only a few metal pencil sharpeners and four boxes of ballpoint pens are undamaged. As is the display case with the expensive fountain pens. The vandals must not have seen those. They set the trash bags on the street. They sweat and moan. Maloney gets sodas. Thomas fills out the paperwork for the insurance company. They put on music and turn the volume all the way up, and for a moment the atmosphere is almost like when they’d just purchased the store and were fixing it up: bristling with hope for the future — it was energizing and very exhausting. Maloney repairs the ruined lamps and the fan. He fetches the tall ladder in the basement and straightens the chandelier. It really glows when they turn it on. It’s as though it brightens the entire situation. The chandelier is their mascot and they love and admire it as though it were a goddess. They consider it a figurehead, like on the prow of a ship, proof of their success with Lindström & Maloney, and have done so since that late evening when they found it heaped on a pile of garbage in front of a mansion in one of the well-to-do neighborhoods in the northwestern part of the city. A weak yellow light shone on the first floor of the otherwise darkened house. They imagined the mansion was occupied by a brittle old widow. They imagined her husband had just passed away. This was soon after they’d concocted the name Maloney. Because Maloney’s real name wasn’t Maloney. He took the name when they finished their studies. Thomas studied architecture, half-heartedly and restlessly, and dropped out after two years even though he’d gotten a scholarship. Then he began taking classes at the business school and met Maloney. They managed to stay in school for a year and a half, but they quit mid-semester. They had outlandish dreams. A chain . A long string of pearls, of beautiful, unforgettable stores like pins on a map stretching across the entire continent, the entire world. A simple concept: Lindström & Maloney. And it would be much more than just office supplies, paper — much, much more than that. The name that Maloney’s religious parents had given him out there in their oh so pretty white wooden house in the sticks, so many years ago now (Tim Stürtz, nickname Timmy), was too trivial, and they agreed that they needed something more mystical: a name that was deep as a well . It was Thomas who came up with it (both the well metaphor and the new name) after they’d been drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes and joints for several hours on the twin bed in his room, scribbling down all the names they could think of in a notepad. Suddenly it came to him: “Maloney!! You’re Maloney! Yes, you are! Don’t you see it? Lindström & Maloney! It sounds — like a threatening dream, you hear it?! It sounds like something you can’t resist. Noir. .”

“Noir?”

“Yes! Secrets. Rainy weather. Darkness. A well, Maloney, a deep well!” Thomas sucked hard on the last of the joint. At first Maloney looked down at the mattress, then he turned toward the window and stared into the far distance, and at last he leaped to his feet and shouted, “Jesus Christ, you’re right! We’ll use Maloney. MALONEY!” And it was as if the name was created just for him. Even when Thomas thinks about their friendship before that afternoon — when they sat bent over the notepad, each nibbling on a pencil, on the bed in the dying, weak light of the day, in the messy room, high as kites while the upstairs neighbor argued with his wife and the radiator dripped — he thinks of him as Maloney. He no longer believes the pairing of their names has anything noir about it, but Maloney fits Maloney perfectly.

The office isn’t missing anything, either. But all their financial documents were riffled through, and some bank statements from the last two quarters were ripped out and thrown on the floor. Thomas gathers the loose papers, tries to smooth them, return them to the folders. It’s clear that someone wanted to check their deposits. He doesn’t say anything about it to Maloney. He carries the smashed monitor to the street and sets it down next to the trash bags. The sun’s high in the sky, and people hustle past, lightly dressed and full of purpose. The stench of the trash bin on the corner wafts toward him. He lights a cigarette and sits down amid the glass shards on the stoop. He hasn’t told Patricia about the break-in. Now he sees it as an opportunity to connect with her. He texts her, and to his surprise she replies at once: “What?? Why didn’t you say anything??” “We’re cleaning up now, all’s well.” She doesn’t respond. “I love you,” he writes, feeling for a moment like a traitor. The feeling passes. Maloney buys shawarmas with pickled chilies and sits beside Thomas. The sunlight blinds them; it flickers through the leaves of the chestnut tree; it sparkles off the shiny hoods of cars and women’s hair as they bike past in their colored skirts, their scarves fluttering, shoulders bare. Maloney whistles at a long-legged brunette. She flips him the bird. They laugh. They finish eating. They sit shoulder to shoulder, and Thomas feels the heat from Maloney’s big body. We’re sitting shoulder to shoulder like brothers, he thinks, and the heat sweeps through him, as if the temperature in his blood has been turned up. Then he stands up and grabs a broom. While he sweeps up the shards, the glazier and his assistant arrive in a dented, yellow van. The glass panels are lashed to the side of the van, in a wooden frame. “And you’re certain you don’t want thermal windows?”