Of Exiles and Saints

By Jill Stephenson

What does it mean to be exiled in America?
As young aspirants, a group of friends arrived in the city. Idealistic, talented, industrious, they transformed the urban landscape. Now the very ethos that made their city unique has attracted a new breed. New money, a new ethic, their community is under siege. Threatened by real estate moguls, chain stores and technology entrepreneurs, the friends are faced with expulsion from a marketplace that no longer requires their services.
Of Exiles and Saints is a modern morality tale of the price we pay for progress and the cost it exacts from our humanity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 16, 2019
• ISBN: 9781796059410

Jill Stephenson

Jill Stephenson grew up in Rochester, NY. She attended The State University of New York at New Paltz and has an MA in English from Columbia University. She is the author of six works of fiction and lives in Central Florida.

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Copyright © 2019 by Jill Stephenson.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2019914049

ISBN:           Hardcover                 978-1-7960-5943-4

                     Softcover                   978-1-7960-5942-7

                     eBook                         978-1-7960-5941-0

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 09/26/2019

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CONTENTS

Brother, My Cup is Empty

Painting By Numbers

Fragments

Somewhere Unforgiven

Old Lace

Juliet and Ophelia

Dark With Nouns

Shifting Sands

Community Room

Back Roads and Detours

In Mid-fall

Ephemera

Broken

Being and Nothingness

The Lost Armies of the Night

But for Fortune

Eyes of the Poet

The Street Called Straight

Confessions

Hymn of the Homeless

…

for the creator there is no poverty and no poor or unimportant place.

Rilke

BROTHER, MY CUP IS EMPTY

Half past midnight, Jimmy Flannagan was putting up chairs preparing to close the bar for the night. He told Tyler for the third time to finish up, he wanted to go home.

Tyler was contemplating the walk ahead. He was not as anxious as Jimmy to leave though he knew from past experience Jimmy would not let him hang much longer. He was supposed to be at the office in the morning so staying out any later was risky. Except he was already too many hours gone and every time he thought about the office, he pushed it from his mind. He preferred to stay in the moment, as slippery as it was, the alcohol absorbing anything remotely suggestive of responsibility.

Dropping the last chair on a tabletop so the maintenance crew could mop the floors, Jimmy came back around the bar, putting his hands down on either side of Tyler’s pitcher and said, Seriously, its time to go.

Reluctantly, Tyler turned to climb down from the stool. His legs were slack and wobbly. As he sought balance, his vision doubled, a fun house flip of unsteady angles and bizarre reflections. Tyler was wasted. The condition familiar, he accepted it as one might an inoperable tumor — always present, always threatening demise. In his more sober moments, Tyler thought about this inevitability. That his drinking was slowly taking him to depths from which he would not return. That one day, one second, one drink to another, he would cross a line, a point of no return. He would wind up dead on a sidewalk or ingloriously slumped on a curb with city rainwater sloshing against his pitiful flesh. Passersby would stare, puzzled to see a young, well-dressed man lying in the gutter.

Tyler swung his arm seeking his wallet.

Jimmy watched, concerned but used to the sight. Once Tyler had been only an occasional patron; lately a regular fixture. With the changes taking place in the city, the construction boon, the rapid renovation of neighborhoods that had stood for decades, Flannagan’s was a last holdout for the older residents, those who had struggled and forged a community out of nothing. A new breed of young people were taking over. It was odd to Jimmy that Tyler was taking the downside when he probably had all the means to make it along with the rest of the techies. He had the right profile. From what Jimmy had overheard, he knew Tyler had gone to college. To Jimmy, Tyler seemed to have everything going for him. If not for the alcohol. It was the Flannagan family business to sell drink and provide a neighborhood clientele with pub food and recreation. Guys like Tyler could ruin any good night. So far nothing bad had happened; Tyler was still behaving himself. But as a barman, Jimmy had seen a lot of drinkers start out quiet only to disintegrate into aggressive bores who either depressed everyone with their alcoholic revelations or who took to defending their views with their fists.

You alright there? Jimmy asked.

Tyler swayed. Trying to get his credit card out of his wallet to pay the tab, he kept pulling out his company identification while his brain was directing him to the card behind it.

Jimmy waited patiently. All the closing tasks accomplished, Tyler was the last order of business. Once Jimmy ran the card he could close out the register.

Finally, in surrender, Tyler tossed the wallet to Jimmy. It’s in there.

Jimmy opened it. The wallet was full of plastic. Which one?

Tyler closed his eyes to think. Which was a big mistake. His head went one way, his body buckled trying to right itself. Tyler fell into a stool. Grasping the seat, he forced himself to stop moving. Whatever, Tyler said. I think the Capital One, his words were thick, adhering to his tongue. Can’t talk.

Jimmy pursed his lips. He was tired of the routine. Listen, man, I don’t want to go through…

It’s the Capital One.

Jimmy found and ran the card. It was declined. When he told Tyler, Tyler stumbled, no longer able to hold the seat.

Putting a hand to his head, Tyler cursed. His face was numb. The hand felt disconnected, someone else’s hand. He could not remember, suddenly, if he owed money, how much, when. I don’t know.

Jimmy was getting angry. He wanted Tyler out. He did not need the headache. As soon as he paid, Jimmy decided, he would make it clear Tyler was not to return to Flannagan’s. Let him go to one of the techie holes with their themed atmospheres and elevated price tags. You better make a decision, Jimmy said. because I’m about to throw you out of here. You can’t pay the tab, I’ll make sure the cops get it out of you.

Oh, man. Come on, Jimmy, you know me. His voice careened from agitated to remorseful. Tyler felt his eyes watering.

Don’t get dramatic, Jimmy said. Just tell me which card.

I thought it was Capital One.

Well it’s not. How about this American Express?

Tyler shrugged. American Express called every day demanding their money. They and a host of others. You can try.

Come on, Tyler. Help me out here.

Too blurred to remember the balances, the lack of balances, his credit lines blown, Tyler concentrated on staying erect and keeping track of the conversation. But he was lost.

Sorry, he mumbled.

Jimmy, angry, tore card by card through the wallet. Every one of them declined. His instinct was to turn around and beat the crap out of Tyler. But he knew it would yield nothing. Just go, he said, tossing the wallet back. Get the hell out.

I get paid, Tyler started. He could not get a fix on what day it was, how long before his direct deposit from work would hit his account. He stumbled as he bent to retrieve the wallet from the floor. His head hit the corner of the bar and bounced like a rubber mallet. He didn’t feel a thing.

Don’t come back, Jimmy said. I see you in here again, I’ll throw you out myself.

Tyler could not recall the rest. He was not even certain what had transpired between him and Jimmy.

Wake up.

Pressure to his shoulder, someone was pushing him. He was pressed against a hard surface. His mind was cotton, dense with thoughts tumbling through darkness. He felt himself suspended for the briefest moment. Drifting. Until he heard the voice again. Someone calling him out. His limbs were thick as he tried to shift his weight. Leave me alone.

The pressure again. Hey, wake up.

Lids heavy, Tyler reluctantly opened his eyes. It was hazy. His vision cloudy. He felt the stiff in his legs. His arm, crooked beneath his head on the cement bench, was numb. It was hard to move.

Time to wake up.

Tyler looked up to see a man. As if wrapped in an aura, he was fuzzy, the outline blurry. Tyler tried to focus, to get a good look at this man. The surroundings strange, Tyler’s mottled mind could not grasp the moment. Where he was. How he got there.

The man was persistent. You don’t belong here, brother. It’s time to go.

Do I know you? He was sure he had never seen the man before. But, then, he was disoriented. No recollection of how he had arrived at this place, a hard bench in the middle of somewhere.

Slowly pulling himself up, Tyler’s head banged like a wrecking ball. His pulse was so rapid, he thought he might die. Wrapping his hands around his sorry head, Tyler moaned.

A minute passed, maybe a few. Tyler was afraid to move an inch. The pounding in his temples kept him inert. He feared the pain. Everything was garbled. His sense of time, location, the before, the way to get to the after. Scenes from the previous evening were a raucous kaleidoscope of bourbon shots and guys yelling over a pitcher’s bad throws, a baseball game Tyler could only recall as a prop above the bar.

It’s okay, the man said.

Tyler lifted his eyes. He had almost forgotten the man.

He blinked, rubbing his eyes to get a better look. But the man was hazy, as if fallen from a rain cloud. A mist seemed to cling to his form. What the hell…

You’ll be okay. You’re here too soon.

Tyler wrapped his hand back around his head. The pain was so severe, he wished he could black out again. Make it all go away.

Maybe this guy knows, Tyler thought, how I got here. Knows what’s happening.

Yet when he opened his eyes again, the man was gone.

Tyler was in a park. Some park. He recognized the obvious signs of a location: metal framed garbage bins, grass, trees, benches. He was sprawled on a bench. His clothes clung as if he’d been doused. The bottoms of his pant legs were wet. To his left a broken sprinkler head spurted shots of water in an uneven flow. This was not the park near his place. This was foreign. Might have been farther downtown. Might have been Istanbul. Tyler had no idea where he was. His gut shuddered, his nerves awakening to the situation.

Head heavy. A few pale globes in the distance, seemingly a piece of the park’s perimeter. He heard infrequent traffic: a car with a bad exhaust, a delivery truck’s air brakes stuttering to a stop. Tyler grabbed at his pockets, his suit jacket was soiled with some gummy, white substance below the breast pocket as if he had fallen on someone’s fast food trash. In sync with the finding, Tyler smelled rancid food, the stench coming off him like steam off asphalt. Closing his hands over his face, Tyler was spent. Out of energy, so tired, so confused. If he got up to walk, he reasoned, he could wind up dead. A victim of a junkie or some similar desperado. Again, he tapped at his pockets. The wallet was there. No money where none had been. The useless cards still present. In his pant pocket, his cell phone. Pressing the button, he saw four texts from Cloe. She was looking for him. Yelling in caps that she was sick of his standing her up. While Tyler groped to remember, again, the day, the location, the day before, what he was supposed to be doing. As he slipped into the panic of his job, the hour, the need to pull it together before everything was blown, Tyler forgot about the man and the odd encounter. He had to get home. However he could get there. His cell read the time as more than two hours past his usual wake-up. He had to make it to the office. He could not ruin that one last hold. Once he lost that job, he would be finished. His days were already numbered. He had to hang on. Had to follow it through with whatever strength he could rally.

PAINTING BY NUMBERS

Who can say where anything begins? I watched circles disintegrate and cannot remember when it all began to unravel. The bulldozers came, the developers clapped hands like mighty genies and we scattered. Losing my job was certainly a catalyst. Leaving no doubt about my uncertain future. My friends and their friends were forced out as well. Funny how life can change, seemingly overnight, and you can get so caught up in the maelstrom, you forget what’s most essential.

I start this story from the weeks leading to my losing my job.

I remember thinking about the television shows I’ve watched. How immersed I could become by staring idly at the glamorous people whose troubles were always solved in an hour. We all admire the workaholic. The cop shows, detectives, doctors of the dramas who work doggedly. Their around-the-clock dedication, their personal lives touched upon between victories without the pesky details of bill-paying, anxieties over retirement funds, 401k plans, having to use sick time to wait on a repair guy when the cable goes out. They never have laundry to do. Their lives are crammed with the earnest pursuit of the higher good.

I wanted to be like that - married to my profession. Working with a team of cool people who would have my back, no matter what. Drinks after another tough episode resolved. Vacation plans perpetually thwarted by duty with no question which was the more important quest. Except I had a stupid job. I really didn’t have a profession. Maybe that was what I was missing all along. I did not go to med school, law school, become the noble public defender, take courses in criminal forensics. And it was too late by then. I was too far down the road to embark on a journey involving credits, pop quizzes and exams.

My working years were rapidly coming to a close: I was past the point of no return. I could not mask my aging. My hair gray. My veins becoming prominent on my hands and the slightest bump resulting in ugly bruising, thinning skin.

Over the years memories became a house of repetitive corridors I haunted like ghosts seeking vindication for slights the current inhabitants of my small world had little chance of satisfactorily concluding for me. In this time of my great recession, the city was rapidly becoming a haunted place. Ghosts were wandering its streets until there was no trace left of the way things once were. Younger people, armed with the higher metrics of computer lingo, were taking over. Their rubics-cube variations altering the tools of production until it all seems a secret code to my friends and I. We all have cell phones and laptops, but these new people, this breed, is technology to the fourth power. A base ten mathematics subverting the old multiplication tables. It’s a club, a selective society. The handshakes are not for the uninitiated. The language is hieroglyphic, requiring particular pathways and a syntax I am loathe to learn. Like some modern-day Rip Van Winkle, I feel I have suddenly come to in the future. Where is my beautiful house? Where is my sleek, turbo-engine car? Where is my all-consuming career that I can no more think of ignoring than choosing to chop off a limb?

I was so pushed to the edge, I cannot even decipher the point at which it all began. All I know, for sure, is that life took a fateful turn the week I lost my job.

I was working at Dodds, Hesperin. A temp agency for office workers which has evolved since its inception in the mega-merger 80s to a somber, last-ditch reservoir of people otherwise unemployable, hired by companies failing themselves but still hanging in there. Even as the old-college-try mentality was waning in the city, there were many still going through the motions. Either as zombies or as incorrigible optimists who refused to see the writing on the wall. We would all go down together, however, whether we held to the ideal of the American dream or were simply too tired to change our minds. I had given up on New York City (or it gave up on me) soon after I arrived in this place. For a long time I felt shipwrecked, my talents suspect and my will to endure questionable. I moved to a city that seemed manageable. More malleable for my purposes. The plan being that one day I would crack the golden egg of fame, the world would hear of my astounding abilities and I would go to NYC a hero.

Yet none of that ever came to pass. Decades later, I was struggling all over again. Though much more panicked, given the years already lost. While the city was changing, Transformer-style, into a mecca for young people whose savvy was a candle-scent blend of over-indulgent parents and plain old naivete. They knew technology and still lumbered around like the blank-brained teenagers of the Eisenhower era sit-coms. Lives buried in phones and all manner of other screens. Mesmerized by lights and whistles like tribes newly exposed to civilization.

Not that I’m a Mennonite. My bitter is admittedly a fox and grapes thing as my reach grows less and less able to grasp even the low-lying fruit.

Vi, are you listening to me?

A co-worker leaned over the edge of my cubicle to let me know Millicent, my boss, was trying to reach me.

Why doesn’t she just use the phone? I asked Patty, my best friend at work.

Because she’s a ‘B.’

We laughed.

I picked up a pad and a pen and sauntered into Millicent’s office.

Although I had worked there for fifteen years, I always felt like I was being called into the principal’s office whenever the boss beckoned. Millicent Andover was an old-school neurotic. She bit her nails. Her chubby little fingers reminded me of the creepy little boys in grammar school. Her hair was thinning and her scalp was the pink of a discount store’s baby doll. Her choice of cover make-up was an orange tint, making her pink-tipped ears a Halloween pumpkin tone. Hideous to look at and worse to listen to, Millicent had been running the office since the days when shorthand and dictation were all the rage.

Her nubby nails were only one visible sign of Millicent’s worry. She was a worrier who carried the corporate line like a gospel commandment from above. Even as the place was sinking, Millicent charged ahead with the cliches and phrasing of an ad campaign, never showing any signs of believing the business or anything else in her life was ever going to end. She may have worried all the time, but she was damn sure she would make everyone working below her think the company was invincible. Even in the crazy days of the 80s or when the firm teetered on the edge of collapse as we entered the decades of the 2000s, Millicent forged her own peculiar brand of feigned bravery and repetitious catch phrases. Hang in there, baby! It was hard to be around her. She was a downer. We’d lost a lot of employees over the years because they couldn’t stand the dour atmosphere. Most of the help were aspiring to be other than office workers anyway and having to face Millicent every day was too much. They came to the city prepared to pay their dues, but there was a limit to what one should have to suffer. No one needed the bad vibes. Life was hard enough as it was.

As I entered the inferno, Millicent’s worry was neon.

Yes?

She barely glanced at me. We lost the Fulton account, she said.

How do you know? I mean, they were always sporadic…

I stood awkwardly. I hated the olive green walls with the phony Euro landscapes. Why the alpines in spring? Why the Black Forest? Why the rural Moors and the Italian pastures? The colors were dreary, purchased, no doubt, at some seedy, off-avenue Goodwill. The odor of mothballs meeting dust-infested carpets lingered in the corners of their cheap frames. On her shelves, photos of aunts and uncles scowling perpetually at their woe-begotten niece. Their unmarried, childless, niece. She had no parents that I knew of, never mentioned siblings. For all I knew she grew up in an attic where she was fed gruel. That would explain a lot. In the thin vocabulary of her past, there was just the extended family she dutifully visited once a year at Easter.

Do you realize, she hissed, how long it’s been since we’ve sent them a temp?

My mind was blank. Time was a problem for me. I think I had worked so long at so dull and routine a job, I very well could have been reliving each workday a la Groundhog Day minus the Bill Murray dialogue. Maybe the place would have seemed sunnier with a few well-timed punchlines. As it was, nobody laughed a whole lot at Dodds, Hesperin.

Millicent expected an answer and I had none. The job was too monotonous. Of late it had turned from a getting-through to a when-will-it-end. Which is a subtle distinction. Getting through was when I began checking my watch every half hour and feeling like an eternity would pass before I could get out of there, see friends, drink, whatever. When will it end became a sharp-edged instrument of destruction since it was very obvious Dodds, Hesperin was charging the cliff. I was counting time very differently. It would exist no more. Whatever bright future Dodds or Hesperin had for this agency as empire, the aspiration to be as big as Merry Maids or the once colossal Kelley, was crashing to a halt. Did it seem abrupt to the founders? We all had our theories about where Dodds had escaped to, where and just exactly when Hesperin disappeared. We talked about Millicent and wondered if she heard from them or was only fed directions via an accountant or an attorney. I tried to remember the last time I’d seen Dodds with his woolly head of black hair, the thick specs, the wobbly way he nodded his head in conversation as if the spring were about to pop. Or Hesperin with his halitosis so palpable it filled every crevice of one’s skin, nostrils, soft tissue like the noxious essences it mimicked. How anyone could stand to be around him…it was always a race to get the conference chairs at the far end of the room whenever he was going to deliver a plan of action. He was big on Plans of Action. As if we were about to vanquish the city’s worst nightmare instead of merely sending out some half-ass presentable chicks to sub as secretaries for far more capable career girls.

You need to call, Millicent said, every one of our clients. Get results. We can no longer allow our competitors to eat up our profits. Taking food from our mouths. You, she paused heavily, are responsible for letting this slip. From our grasp!

So used was I to Millicent’s hyperbole, my pulse no longer quickened when she sallied forth with the big guns. We were losers. It was clear. Only we were her losers. There were not many in this universe, the age of Dr. Phil and the judgments of Judge Judy, who would put up with her daily slew of invective. Responsible, I said flatly.

Her eyes glazed. Millicent was not great at reading irony or sarcasm, a very literal lady was she. She would deliver these lectures without looking one in the eye. Often, Millicent sat with her arms folded across her fat breasts and her eyes, tiny black spots enfolded in puffy flesh, would dart sideways, a lizard or a blind snake sensing danger.

Millicent turned to the side in her chair. Facing her filing cabinets as if the final damning evidence of our soon-to-be-complete demise would pop out like King’s It clown, she spoke through clenched teeth. We’ve no time to waste, Vi. No time!

Yes, of course.

For a second she drifted off. No time at all.

The day slogged on. I would get tired from the boredom. I made calls. The clients listened, some even politely, to the pitch we’d always given them. Promising excellence, skill, professionalism. Whatever businesses were left to hear the pitch, that is. We were obsolete. The clients were obsolete. Either the businesses had software which had vastly cut the number of staff they required or the businesses had died because of the advances in the technology. The city was being raided by small firms of young people with a language few on the outside could understand. It was like the invasion of the body snatchers. Only the bodies themselves were no longer needed. The coup could be accomplished without the flesh and blood of human beings. The ramparts were invisible, existing in a cloud.

Luckily there were still a few warm bodies I could relate to. Shari was one of my oldest friends. We had a standing date to meet for drinks on Mondays. The first day of the week required a boost or two. Fortitude compulsory.

What’s up, girl?

The usual, I said. We talked on the phone for a quick minute to confirm a plan that needed no confirmation. I would pick her up around 6:30. Sometimes we’d be joined by others. It was an open invitation. Our circle of over-50s was a small cluster. The warriors, the veterans, we built this city, our generation’s contribution to a centuries-old metropolis. In the decade we arrived, we were young, we were idealistic, we were going to conquer the place the way so many artists had before us. A vanguard, mavericks, a new beginning for the world of high culture. We were something. Something special. Now we were aging and overly aware of it. No longer able to hide the waning years from anyone who took only a millisecond to stare down our chicken-wrinkle necks. We had conquered nothing but our own frail illusions that we would ever be considered exceptional. Considered at all. I continued to write, sporadically. Shari continued to show for cattle calls, sporadically. Our friend Marcus played gigs, small venues, while his partner, Chance worked (bless his heart) diligently on his canvases. Chance was not so failed as the rest of the crew. He sold his work once in a while. I used to say, out of range of Shari’s hearing, of course, that I was glad I hadn’t been born with the obsession to act. At least, as a writer, I’d have a drawer (or a trunk) full of work to show for a life when my final time arrived.

Off at five every day, I generally sat numbly for the last couple of hours as the time for release neared. At one time the after 3 p.m. hours were as busy as our 8 a.m. slot. Firms calling for temps to get briefs completed, contracts typed before morning. The early part of the day, naturally, spent filling absences of girls who called out sick. So little of that now, the after-lunch period was a tomb in which the click clack of the clock could prove a Chinese water torture if one did not know how to override the insufferable with some seriously consistent daydreaming.

With so much time to fill, I went over the random vestiges of my past. Years spent dawdling over plot lines and sentence structures. Planning and planning and planning. And suddenly the decades were behind me and I’d been more of an office worker than a working writer nagged by the thought that I had chosen comfort and certainty over a destiny I fooled myself into believing took first place in my priorities. Sitting idle was a slow death for me. My life flashing by as if I had stepped backwards off the rock ledge while someone I honestly, if I were deep-down honest with myself, could easily live without was coaxing me into the perfect picture. It’s okay. Just step back a little more. A little more… Which leads, naturally, to the question of whether the persons I’d committed myself to in my sad series of melodramatic episodes were looking to get that memorable photo or actually hoping I’d step off the cliff. There was a certain angle of sado-masochism to my relationships that I was loathe to admit. They inflicted the pain, I played the martyr.

So I daydreamed release. Repentance and redemption. The sequence varying, the snapshots of occasions life might have served differently mixing with those of moments when I knew better and proceeded anyway. Dash it all. Better than a Mary Richards spunk. Worse than a Betty Ford rehab.

Shari said I needed better role models. Late one Saturday night several weeks before the end of Dodd’s Hesperin was obvious but for the fat lady singing, we stayed behind at Flanagan’s for one more round and then a couple more. The boys, Chance and Marcus, were already gone. My boorish brother, Kevin, who regaled us, again, with his brilliant market strategies and office politic acumen, announced he would be on top of the world till the lights went out. Kevin’s adolescent braggadocio often brought the night to an end. Once he left, Shari and I swung between alcoholic idealism and boozy despair.

Anna Akhmatova stayed, even when she could have gone to Paris, I said.

Shari said, She probably didn’t have the rents we do.

They cut off her rations, I said. People had to bring her food. Scraps from their meager portions.

That’s very Dickensian.

I was gulping my Jack by then. Shari was hooked on Whipped Cream flavored Pinnacle, a deceptively pure alcohol that drank like dessert. The Jack still had some burn, but went down smooth as a sore throat tonic.

Yeah, I know. Romanticizing.

You have a bad habit, Shari said, of doing that.

I just want to teach the world to sing.

Shari laughed.

I went on. But how great is it that when Akhmatova could not chance writing her poems down, her friends memorized them. Then when she was blessed with acceptance once more by Khrushchev I think. I don’t remember which leader…When the cold war thawed, as they would say, her friends recited those poems so they could be written down. Akhmatova lived on tea.

You think you could do that?

My alcohol addled brain said, yes, I could sacrifice all. I could starve myself, freeze in an attic ghetto, endure ramshackle tenements and harassing bill collectors to create my art.

Shari did not need an answer from me. We would have done all that if we’d been serious, she said.

The shadows fell upon the table like the dark vestiges of our unproductive pasts. Drama was in the air. We were make-pretend heroines of our own pedestrian scripts.

I feel serious, I said weakly. My voice came out tiny like a pathetic little girl’s.

We laughed.

You know what I mean,

Shari nodded. She took another cowboy swig of the Pinnacle. Wow. I love this stuff.

Makes your tongue thick.

I’ll probably puke.

Wait till we get outside.

No sweat.

So…

So here we are, Shari said.

Approaching the twilight of our years.

You have a 401K, she said.

I huffed. Yeah. You know how long that’ll last? I already dipped into it to pay my medical bills. From when I had the biopsy.

Which proved there is nothing wrong with you.

I did what the doctor recommended.

I know. But geez, using your savings.

Never mind, I said. Things go awry.

Tell me about it.

We held up our tumblers and toasted.

Millicent, I said, is grinding her teeth. I know the end is near.

Shari’s silence was graveyard heavy.

Sorry, I said.

"They were casting for Barefoot in the Park," Shari said.

I could tell she had passed on the audition.

Who are we fooling?

Shari smirked. We can’t go down that road.

And yet we did.

Millicent hung an announcement for an office meeting. It was to be all-hands-on-deck. I felt the wave of finality blow through the corridors, a cold, damp wind signaling Nor’easter. The pounding imminent. For a moment I panicked — had I made enough calls to clients? Had I been aggressive enough? Too aggressive? Why had I used a feeble joke on Lance Klepman, knowing he was a sour pickle who once told me his underlings were lucky he allowed them the funds to eat? Regrets and replays, I left the office that day feeling the lone survivor of a plane crash. Filled with an odd survivor’s guilt as if everyone’s demise had a whole lot to do with my blunders. Even as I kept seeking the phrase to convince myself I had no control over anything. Powerless to move people just as I was powerless to pull myself together to face the uncertain future. By the time I made it back to the office the next day, the day of the meeting, I was bleary for lack of sleep, my brain racing in overdrive with the fact I was mere hours from the end of my working life.

Unless MacDonald’s was hiring. Wasn’t there a new Target at the mall? Didn’t Kevin say Walmart hires people with no experience whatsoever? Kevin with his perfectly rational explanations for all that went wrong in our lives — ours, not his. He was convinced he would beat out the techies, those hot on his heels to ruin his company’s portfolio. He was ahead of us all. Always had been, according to him, and we, having been treated to his line so often we swallowed it, even as we talked behind his back about what a jerk he was. Kevin made us all feel smaller in his presence. For that reason it seemed entirely feasible he would be the one to come out of this period of the city’s history a winner. We hated him for engraving the belief in our very souls. A wonder we continued to talk to him at all. Though in retrospect, I guess we kept him around to remind us of what we never wanted to become. And, being my brother, I couldn’t really ignore him.

Except, as fate would have it, things took a spin that flabbergasted us all. Kevin got fired.

An outsourced personnel firm came into the office where Kevin had worked for over ten years and told him he was done. Empty the desk, escorted out. Kevin.

As I said, my brother was the guy everyone talked about with his smug postures, his claims of greatness, bragging about the acquisitions he solely had the good taste to purchase for his clients. A lot of stuff. Kevin was the first of us to throw in the towel on his artistic ambitions and the loudest about how ridiculous it was to cling to lofty, clearly unreachable, ideals. He was my brother so I had to tolerate him. Although it would be difficult to admit, I suppose I loved him. We were so very different from one another. Yet, we clung together, especially once our parents were gone. Kevin stayed in the old home town until I came to this city. I once had fantasies of his being with me in New York. Walking the great white way, sharing exotic foods at expensive, chic restaurants, both of us gliding easily to the pinnacles of renown. Why we both thought we could write was a mystery he refused to address. He gave up so early despite his getting his short story, Retribution, published in Granta before I had even graduated from college. My little brother had a lot of talent, it hurts to say. And he threw it over for money. Kevin was not the type to suffer. It really pissed me off, the cavalier way in which he gave up so easily. It was several years after I graduated before I even got a sliver of encouragement from an obscure journal that is no longer in print. They said, keep writing.

When he called, I feigned indignation at how poorly he’d been treated while silently leaping for joy that he’d finally been brought down. Our adopted city was changing. We were all in line to be dismissed. Yet Kevin’s downfall felt sweet for a second. With plans to see Shari and the guys that night, I was bursting to be the first to relay the news.

It threw me back to thinking about the old days, when I left the small town of Goshen to make it big in the city. Shari was one of my first friends in the city. We had arrived about the same time, early 80s, planning on fame and fortune like the thousands before us. We met in the laundromat on Essex. I was cursing the dryer that had failed to dry my clothes. After dropping my last six quarters in the machine, the cycle indicated complete while my pitiful rags were still drenched. Shari, a few machines down, said that dryer never worked. People put signs on it and idiots, she said, tore them off. People are stupid, she said. Then she offered to let me share her machine. We went for coffee and the rest is history. It was the time when big hair bands owned the arenas and