Subtraction

  “Waste, not life.”

  Adapted from Benjamin Franklin

On my one and only trip through “the system,” I didn’t get any jail time. I was a first-time offender, and someone—white, middle class—the judges didn’t see as a criminal. They gave me community service. Eighty hours total. Two weeks of full-time work. I didn’t work full-time, though. They let me set my own hours, and I worked five hours, nine to two, four days a week. I had a real job that started at three, with an hour’s commute time. Also, I took Fridays off, just because I could. It was all plotted out, how I’d count off the time in weekly twenty-hour increments.

At this rate, I’d be done in a month.

When the case workers heard I’d been a student at the University—expelled now, but still—they’d assigned me to a program called “Probation Promise.” It was housed at a small city college on the far Southwest Side, a hard-to-reach part of the city where, if you lived there, you weren’t supposed to leave, and if you didn’t live there, why would you go? In the mornings, while my roommates went to classes, I boarded the Number Six Jeffery, a bus they only ever took north. I rode to the end of the Jeffery line, to a corner on 103^rd Street, to the spot where the city gave out. On one side of the road was the college, with its little three-building campus, and on the other side—nothing, just a shallow, swampy ditch filled with some tall, tasseled grasses and beyond that some struggling woods. Every morning, when I stepped off the bus there, I had the same thought: From here, you could walk out of the city. You just had to wade through the ditch, then climb up through the trees, and emerge in the large, distant world.

It wasn’t really true, though.

There was nothing out that way but Gary, Indiana.

And anyway, you weren’t ever going to get out.

I “worked,” with two other community servants, in a hall filled with long fold-out tables. We had our own smaller desks to one side. They called us “tutors,” but we didn’t teach anything. We administered Scantrons to people entering the GED program, either, like us, by way of the Cook County court system, or else just released from the big state pen in Joliet. Then—not actually having a Scantron machine—we corrected the test forms by hand.

I sat at the middle desk. In front of me, closest the door, sat a woman my age named Cecie, and behind me a fellow, slightly older than I was, named Lance. Lance had the longest sentence—about three hundred hours. Cecie had a little bit less.

“I’m here because of my brother,” Lance explained when we met the first day. These were the first things we spoke of. How much time we were doing for what. “He’d just come from prison, and my parents didn’t want him, so I said he could camp out at my place. It seemed to be going okay. He had a job even, bagging groceries at Dominick’s. Then one night, I’m sleeping, and the next thing I know I’ve got cops at my door. They bust in, and they search the whole place, and they find coke in the room where my brother is staying. Not a little bit of coke, either. Like a whole giant bag.” Lance held up stiff, precise hands, made some subtle adjustments, settled, finally, on the bag’s exact size, and then shook his neatly trimmed head. “Next thing you know, they’ve got me down, not just for possession, but for possession with intent to sell. And that wasn’t even my stuff.”

Next, it was Cecie’s turn. She spoke with good humor, with not even a quake of resentment, in a sassy loud musical voice. “I used to work, you know” she said, “back before I met Quentin. But after we started going together, he always wanted me to sit around his place and, as he put it, ‘keep an eye on things at home.’ Well, I didn’t know what it was I was keeping an eye on, till one day the cops came. And when they came, I did what Quentin told me to do. ‘You can’t come in here,’ I said, ‘’cause you don’t have a warrant.’ ‘Oh, we got a warrant, ma’am,’ they told me. ‘And if I were you, I’d get away from that door.’ So I stepped away, but I didn’t open it, because what would I tell Quentin if I’d opened it? They smashed their way in, and then they went straight to the basement, and that’s when I knew we was fucked. Because Quentin kept his guns in the basement. That much I knew. But you wouldn’t believe what all they found down there. All sorts of assault rifles, machine guns, even a thing like a rocket launcher, or at least that’s what they called it in court. I asked Quentin, the last time I saw him, just before sentencing, what the hell he was thinking. And you know what he told me? He said ‘Baby, you know what we’re fighting here? Don’t you know it’s a real civil war?’”

Cecie chuckled, and Lance chuckled, and I shyly joined in. All three of us chuckled at Quentin, a guy who’d thought he could take on the government, just because he had a basement full of guns.

Suddenly, though, Cecie went serious. “He still has a lot of the Panthers in him, Quentin does,” she announced to us proudly. We stopped laughing and both gave her nods.

Then came a moment of silence. Maybe partly for Quentin, who was now doing twenty in federal. Maybe, though, they were waiting for me, because now it was my turn. I said nothing, though. What could I say? I had done something bad. So bad, there was blood on the floor. The injustice, in my case, was the lightness of my sentence, the fact that I wasn’t where Quentin was, or, preferably, someplace far worse.

“Aw, come on,” Cecie said finally. “You got nothing to tell us?”

Lance, I think, noticed my shudder.

“Leave Eric alone,” he told Cecie. “He probably didn’t do anything, either.” He looked skeptical, sad, though, even while he stuck up for me. For a guy like me to get even eighty hours, Lance knew he must have done something. If I’d really done nothing, then why wouldn’t I tell?

Cecie was pretty—slim but large-breasted, hair hanging in long braided loops, with a cute little face that didn’t know how to frown. It was clear right away that, if you were a guy like Quentin, who got to choose, you’d choose her. How she’d been placed as a “tutor,” though, was a bit of a mystery. I had my two years of college, and Lance was a semester away from a degree in Accounting. Cecie, though, told me right away that she’d never finished school.

“You know what school was for me?” she asked when she heard I had moved to the city for college. “School was taking our lunch money, me and Lisa and Kelly, and buying some Wild Irish Rose, and drinking it under the L. That’s what I did, back before I dropped out. And I had fun, man, but I was wasting my time. And now it’s too late to go back.”

She said this as we were sitting there in a place that gave out GEDs, and where she seemed a lot brighter than a lot of the people there taking these tests. I guess, though, that that was the problem. She was sharp, so much sharper than they would have been able to make her in high school. It seemed funny—to me, and probably also to her—to think of her sitting around, after all that she’d been through, like some little kid in a class.

Luckily for me, Cecie and I, in that group, were the only two smokers. Lance didn’t smoke. He, as Cecie liked to tease him each time we went out on a smoke break, was “too good.” (The way Cecie said the word good made it sound like the very worst thing in the world). No one seemed to care how many smoke breaks we took. We went out and sat on a picnic table. Not on the benches, but up on the rough concrete top. I smoked my Dunhills, and Cecie her Winstons. Usually, especially in the first days, Cecie started off with some ribbing. The topic, in these first days, was always my sentence, the awkward secret of why I was there.

“I can understand if you don’t want to tell Lance,” Cecie would whisper conspiratorially while we puffed away in the sparse, dappled shade from the couple of trees that they had in that yard. “Lance is so good, and you don’t want to shock him. But do you think you could actually shock me?”

She pursued this line of questioning until it was clear it led nowhere. Then, she would shift from the coax to the taunt.

“Maybe you think that you can shock me. If you think so, then come on, let’s see what you got. You think you got stories? Well I’ll tell you stories. So come on, just tell me. Then I’ll tell you how real shit goes down.”

After the first couple days, these interrogations became more of a ritual, perfunctory. She seemed to accept that I wouldn’t ever tell. And once—after the first half or so of our cigarettes—she was done with her chiding, we moved on to other stuff.

For starters, she asked where I lived. She whistled when I told her Hyde Park.

“I had an aunt who lived in Hyde Park,” she told me, almost like she was bragging, which maybe was what she was doing every other time she had told this to anyone. “Hyde Park is nice. That’s probably the nicest spot in the city.”

“It’s cool,” I said noncommittally. I didn’t tell her about the North Side neighborhoods where they considered Hyde Park the “ghetto.” I didn’t tell her about the maps that they sold to tourists downtown on which Hyde Park—and the whole rest of the South Side—didn’t exist.

Instead, I asked her where she lived.

“I was born on the West Side, but now I live on the South Side,” she explained. She squinted a moment in thought. “You know the difference between the South Side and the West Side?”

I shook my head. I knew the two areas’ approximate boundaries, but I also knew this was not what she meant.

Cecie nodded, like a patient parent who was going to have to explain some hard truths. “On the South Side, people only care about money, so they’ll kill you for money. But on the West Side, people don’t care about anything, so they’ll kill you for no reason.” She paused then and thought some more. “I like the South Side,” she concluded. “I like people who care about money.”

I didn’t tell her that, in spite of my South Side address, I was really a West Sider. Someone who killed for no reason. Or who had at least tried to kill.

My first couple days at the program, I tried to brown bag my lunch. I stored it in the fridge in a break room down the hall. Taped to the fridge door, presumably for the benefit of the staff, was a chart called “Street Gangs of Chicago.” There was a column for “Name,” and for “Affiliation,” and “Symbols.” Sometimes, when we weren’t busy testing, I wandered down there and studied this chart. This was how I learned that Chicago was divided not only into black and white—its basic, its defining division—but also into two warring “nations.” The Latin Kings, the Vice Lords, and the Blackstone Rangers were “People;” the Gangster Disciples, the Cobras, and the Simon City Royals were “Folks.”

After just a couple days, though, I gave up on this lunch plan. I didn’t always feel safe going into the break room, which was usually crowded with men, my once and future testees, wearing electronic monitors strapped to their ankles, many of them sporting some of the very same symbols I’d learned to spot from the chart on the fridge.

Instead of eating at Probation Promise, I rode the Jeffery back north as far as Seventy-Fifth Street and stopped at “the store” on my way into work. My co-workers and I simply called it “the store,” there was no other store in the area, and really no other place to buy food. It didn’t have a name, just the words “Groceries and Sundries” in fading red paint on an exterior wall. I bought my main meal of the day there: A half dozen Wonder buns, a screw-top of Jif, and a small jar of Smuckers. I don’t know if these were better classified as “groceries” or “sundries,” but they were the things the store sold.

I worked at a building down the block. It was still called a “medical center,” but no one was practicing medicine there. The only evidence that anyone ever had consisted of some old metal hospital beds you could see, from outside, through the grime on the windows. Inside, the lobby was dark, the only light rising up from the stairs that led down to the basement. That’s where our “offices” were—little windowless rooms where the dense humid air seemed to be made up of ninety parts mildew. Any rain at all, and these rooms simply flooded, so that the floors made a squeeging wet sound when you walked.

My boss was named Abraham Bunting. He had a doctorate in something from Harvard, I think maybe Child Psychology. With this degree, he’d returned to Chicago and started Harvard Square Tutoring, where he charged the cash-strapped parents of his old South Side neighborhood forty-five dollars an hour to teach their children what they should have been learning in the city’s defunct public schools. He paid his tutors ten an hour, which left a nice rate of profit. Rightly or wrongly, I viewed the whole thing as a scam, and I could hardly believe he found takers. Hope was so high in demand there, I guess, that some people paid what they had to.

My title was “Assistant Tutor”—“assistant,” because I didn’t have my degree—but I didn’t do much more tutoring here than at Probation Promise. My only job was, when the students rang, to go up and open the door. Or rather, since we could simply have buzzed the door open, my job was really to close it. To make sure that our students made it safely inside, and that nothing else did.

These were my days then, my two shifts in limbo, two stretches of “work” without work. At Probation Promise, at least, nobody cared what we did. Lance was always working his way through a textbook on something like “Finance” or “Tax” or some similarly incomprehensible topic. He dressed every day like he was going to the office, with dress shirt and tie and an oversized watch. While he was preparing for his future, I usually sat reading Proust. I had decided that, if I was ever going to make it through all of In Search of Lost Time, this was my chance.

Cecie, meanwhile, was like the gold-medal world champion of time-killing. She didn’t read, but she didn’t seem bored. At her desk, even during the hours we did nothing, she sat alert in a tense, ready crouch. She always seemed to think that, even trapped there inside our strange, wall-less prison, at any point something might happen.

And sometimes she was right. Something happened.

Usually, the something was bad.

One day, a guy came in who took longer than anyone else ever had on the test. The rest of his “entering class”—the parolees who’d arrived in the same busload that he had—were long gone, and he still sat shifting and muttering over his Scantron, wildly gridding in bubbles, then erasing, and gridding, and erasing again, until at points he had worn through the form. When he was finally finished—announcing this with a final, quick curse and a two-fisted pound on the table—he came over to my desk. He watched with a frown while I marked up his score—the very lowest I’d seen since I started.

“Figures,” he muttered. “That figures. This is the most racist city in the world.” He said this like he thought I didn’t know it, or like he thought I might know what to do about it. “I’ll tell you what, though. I’m clearing out. I’m going over to Africa. My buddy was over there, and he said they got no Checkers, no McDonald’s, no J&J Fish. So I’m gonna go over and open a franchise. Own the first McDonald’s in Africa. Own the first J&J Fish.”

He fixed me in the eyes while he said this, in a way that was mildly menacing, as if I stood between him and his franchise in Africa, me and my dumb Scantron test. In reality, I found his plan vaguely inspiring. For as long as he talked, I believed him, if only because I felt I’d be risking my life if I didn’t. (A decade plus later, I read an article in the Wall Street Journal about American fast food chains spreading profitably in Africa. I thought of this guy, and how he’d had the right vision. But it didn’t really matter. An idea’s not much without cash).

While this dude was talking, his test form remained, marked up in red, on the table in front of me. Suddenly, his hand snapped forward and crumpled it. I think I jumped back in my chair. He glowered at me, then looked at Cecie and Lance, asking with his eyes, I think, if they cared if he harmed me. Apparently, the look he got back said they did. He stared all three of us down for another long moment, then, as he backed out of the room, checked us all, in a challenging way, with his chin.

“You all right?” Lance asked me once he was gone. I nodded. I was numb, and still taking deep breaths.

“That guy is crazy,” Lance said, tisking with his head. “Blaming other people for the problems he made his own self.”

“That’s right,” Cecie said. “Crazy motherfucker. Blaming all his problems on white people.” 

I felt like Lance and Cecie were putting on a show for me—letting me know they didn’t lump me in with all of “racist Chicago.” I appreciated it, but didn’t really agree with them. I agreed more with the J&J Fish guy. This was the most racist city in the world. I had some very good reasons to know.

Sometimes, though, it was at my real job where the bad thing happened.

            At Harvard Square, most of our students were younger. Grade school, or middle school at most. By the time they got older, their parents had concluded we weren’t worth the money. Or by that time the kids had dropped out. We did have a few older kids, though, even high school juniors or seniors. One of these was a girl named Alisha. She was my, and was everyone’s favorite. Sometimes, when one of the regular tutors was absent, I, the assistant, got to tutor her. Together, we worked through her homework, and if we got done early, we just talked about junk. Who the greatest rapper of all time was—was it Tupac or Biggie? Who the best Bull was—I went with the obvious, Jordan, but she favored the maverick underdog, Rodman. There wasn’t much of an age gap between us. I was twenty. She was seventeen, the age of girls I had dated in high school. I had a bit, maybe more than a bit, of a crush on her. But I failed her, like all those I loved.

One night, a few weeks into my sentence, I was slow when Alisha rang for her eight o’clock appointment. Maybe I was tired after Probation Promise. Maybe it had blunted my already weak sense that anything mattered, that not everything I did was a joke. In any case, by the time I got up there, Alisha was crumpled on her knees on the sidewalk, with her face in her hands on her thighs. Next to her crouched the friend—Jolene—who always came with her to tutoring. Jolene, when I got there, was screaming, her voice going off in shrill, prolonged pulses, like one of the unheeded car alarms you often heard in the long South Side nights.

As soon as I saw this, I scooped up Alisha. I carried her in down the spiraling stairs.

Abraham Bunting was on a phone call when we got to his office, but when he saw Alisha in my arms he hung up. It was one of the few times I respected him utterly. Because of the steadiness with which he went to the pantry, fetched the First Aid kit down from the cupboard, filled the eyewash bottle at the sink in the pantry, and then came back to the office and flushed out her eyes.

While Bunting looked after Alisha, I went back to my desk near the door. A few minutes later, a cop rang, and I went up—this time quickly—and let him in. Then I returned to my seat and my Proust. Bunting, though, came up behind me.

“We need you, too,” he told me. “Like it or not, you’re involved.”

I followed him back to his office and stood in the door. He took his place at his desk. Alisha still sat in the chair where I’d set her. It was May now, and already muggy, but she was still wearing the tight faux-leather jacket, with a strip of fake fur on its collar, she’d been wearing since early that spring. Her eyes were red, as if she had merely been crying. The cop sat beside her in the other chair. He had the dumb, turned-off look of all cops on the South Side. I could tell how this thing would go down. He would take down her info and file his report. They’d store it where they stored such things—all the unread reports of the unsolved crime called Chicago. If they even stored them. If they weren’t merely lost. He was in some sort of bag, but I didn’t know in whose bag. Maybe simply his own bag. Maybe the bag of just cashing his check and doing the absolute least that he could.

By this time, Alisha understood what had happened. She told it with stoic acceptance, like of course this was what had to have happened, she’d just needed a moment to puzzle it out. She and Jolene had been waiting at the door, and two “shorties” had come up behind them. The girls had heard them, and had turned around, and then one the “shorties” had maced them. Jolene had seen what was coming, and had covered her eyes. In any case, the “shorty” had aimed at Alisha. It was her beautiful face he had wanted to harm.

“I live at the Manor,” Alisha explained, “and everyone at the Manor is Folks. And so they saw us, and they know we live at the Manor, and so they must have thought that we was Folks.”

This was the sort of reasoning, then, that had almost cost Alisha her vision. The cop shifted his eyes, but they didn’t quite roll. “What do you want me to do?” was the vibe that I got off him, or maybe it was “and you think this is a crime?” At his desk, meanwhile, Bunting didn’t even watch while she said it. Instead he was looking at me, with his mad, narrowed eyes, like didn’t I know to stop this was the whole of my function, to make sure things like this didn’t happen? In that look, I felt the weight of his ten other reasons to fire me. I couldn’t understand, when I left there a few hours later, how it could be that I still had a job.

A couple mornings later at Probation Promise, just after I’d sat down and opened my book, Mr. Hughes came and stood by my desk. Mr. Hughes ran Probation Promise on behalf of its founder, the Pastor. He had large moles on his mostly bald head. I liked Mr. Hughes. He had “seen it all,” had been “washed in all waters,” and didn’t make the mistakes people sometimes make on the outside, like thinking that criminals are not the same as normal people, and more the same in Chicago than anywhere else.

Mr. Hughes said to come see the Pastor. This was a bit of a shock. Till then, the Pastor was only a name in the newspaper clippings that hung on the bulletin board in the hallway. These clippings credited the Pastor with miracles. New beginnings, and lives turned around. I didn’t really believe it, though. Everywhere I went, there was a man like the Pastor, who sat in the back room collecting the money. And everywhere I went, this was the man I despised.

I followed Mr. Hughes to the door, across from the break room, that I knew was the Pastor’s. Mr. Hughes gave a sigh as he knocked. Then he placed a hand on my shoulder and more nudged than shoved me in.

In those days, whenever I met someone like the Pastor, who was supposed to be an authority, or whatever, I always asked myself first, could I take him in a physical fight? If I could, then I dismissed him immediately, because I knew his authority was really just borrowed, not real.

In this case, the Pastor was a tall but skinny man who seemed to weigh in well south of my weight class. He had big tinted glasses and a big prickly mustache that both seemed too wide for his face. I saw right away I could take him, and, as a result, I stood in front of him now in the same slack, sullen way I had stood in front of the Dean on the day he’d expelled me and, a month later, in front of the Judge on his bench.

“I hear you’ve been showing up late here,” the Pastor said, like I was some bug he’d just pinned to a spreading board. “Sometimes,”—he ah-hemmed—“as much as eight minutes late.”

The Pastor was right. The Jeffery, in those days, ran only every half hour, and I had only the options of arriving twenty or more minutes early or a little under ten minutes late. I’d picked the second option—because ten was less than twenty—but the Pastor didn’t approve of this choice. I had signed up to show up at nine, and he wanted not general, but specific compliance. And this was one of the things I never got. One reason I couldn’t make it in schools or jobs, or, it seemed now, community service.

I didn’t explain about the bus. I told the Pastor I’d be there at nine—the automatic, preemptive obedience that somehow always insulted the power to which it bent. The Pastor looked at me skeptically from over his mustache. He had my file, flipped open to my mug shots, on the desktop in front of him. He was the one person there who knew exactly how much I was already getting away with, and I think he wanted me to know that this was enough, that I wouldn’t be getting away with anything else.

When I arrived the next morning, thirty minutes earlier than usual, Cecie was already out in front of the building for what was probably her first break of the day. She stood in the yard with a smoke in her hand, and she was arguing, in a quiet, firm voice, with the angry-eyed guy who had ranted to me about opening his own J&J Fish. He stood between her and the building, and slurred threats through a mouth he seemed to think he was too cool to open. He wore a Sox cap cocked backwards and a pager clipped, in a show-offy way, to his belt. He looked a little like a gangster, but even more like a crackhead trying to look like a gangster. I guess I should have gone over to help her, but I was afraid of him, and actually, now, afraid of all violence. Anyway, she seemed to be telling him off.

On my way in, I passed Mr. Hughes in the hall. He gave me a sad, friendly smile, like he was sorry for having turned me over, the day before, to the Pastor. Something occurred to me, though. I stopped, and he stopped in response.

“Cecie might need some help,” I said.

“Again?” Mr. Hughes asked, without pausing for clarification. He waddled off fast, down the hall and straight out through the front door. A kindly, fat, elderly man, but also the man who would sign our release papers, and with the weight—such as it was—of the institution behind him.

I went inside to my desk. Cecie showed up a few minutes later, sat down at her spot, closed her eyes. 

“He been bothering you again?” Lance asked. It seemed that this happened every morning, and until now I hadn’t known.

Cecie nodded, then opened her eyes.

“Same old shit?” Lance continued, concerned, but also greedy for details.

“Naw,” Cecie said. “Today he had a new one. Today, he said the reason I wouldn’t get with him was because I was going with the white boy.”

My breath froze in my lungs. Goose bumps spread over my body. Because, you see, I was “the white boy.”

Lance gave a twinkly-eyed, mildly scandalized, very nearly lascivious grin. “And?” he asked. “So what did you tell him?”

Cecie turned towards me, gave me enough of a wink that it stopped what was left of my heart.

“I told him it was none of his business.”

So I asked Cecie out, right? 

Wrong.

That would have been far too brave for me back then.

It would have risked bringing me too close to happiness. 

Instead, the rest of that week and the next one, the last of my sentence, I spent simply counting off hours. I couldn’t think of anything else to do with my time but to just make it pass. In spite of which, in retrospect, that whole period, from May to June 96, seems like one of my strangest, hence best. I got to know Cecie. I got to know, for the first and last time, Chicago. What I didn’t know yet, though, was how to appreciate them. Life, I guess I believed, was subtraction. The point just to get through a day and a day and a day, and an hour and an hour and an hour. No memories, no gains, no remainders.

And in a sense this worked.

Because my sentence—right on schedule—ended.

But Cecie had been at this weeks longer than I had.

And her sentence ended first.

Her last day—the Tuesday of the week I was going to finish—we took our first break around ten. Cecie, the last couple weeks, had lain off of her teasing. The more time we’d spent here, the less sense we had had of any existence before this, the less interest in questions like “Why?” Now she made up for the weeks she had spared me. Grilled me in a giddy and good-natured frenzy, like whatever weird, private horrors lay in back of my silence couldn’t matter on her date of release.

“I always knew you were waiting for the last day to tell me,” she goaded, with a smile sadistic and winning, proclaiming a fait accompli. “Might as well get it over,” she shrugged. “You won’t see me, probably, after this anyway. So you don’t really have an excuse.”

I’d never claimed to have any excuses. It was simply not something I told. Today, she was right, though, I was going to tell her. It was the one thing she had ever, unambiguously, asked me to do for her. The one gift that I knew I could give. Besides, if I didn’t tell her now, I didn’t know how long it would be before I had somebody else I could tell.           

She was also right, though, that I was going to wait till it didn’t really matter.

Just like with everything else in my life.

We took our next break around noon. It was hot, the air clogged with humidity. The concrete table, the last few days, had been too warm to sit on, so we stood on the grass in the shade. Cecie seemed restless, done with me, like the rest of her punishment. She still went through the motions, though, and joked with me feebly, squinting out through the ozoney haze.

“This is looking to be your last chance, Sport.” Moist, her lips popped on an inhale. “You ’bout ready to finally fess up?”

Really, she didn’t seem to care.

“Alright,” I said, stiffening, suddenly jerky and nervous. I took a quick, shallow puff and exhaled.

Her eyes shifted towards me, large, and surprised, and not pleasantly. And I took a large, choking breath, and I told. What had happened that night when Dennis Anderson had been flirting, at my apartment, with the woman I’d thought that I fancied, and I’d decided that this time, I really was finished, and had struck him first with a bottle, then with my fists.

Cecie—her lips parting—took it worse than I’d thought she was going to. For a second, I thought she was shocked.

That wasn’t it, though.

It was actually something much worse.

“Holy motherfuckin’ shit,” she said, when I’d finally stopped talking. “And they gave you eighty fuckin’ hours?” Her voice was the coldest, the hardest I’d heard it.

And then we just stood there and smoked.

“We should go in,” I told her after an awkward stretch of silence.

“Naw,” she said. “You go ahead, Boss. I’ll be along in a bit.”

I went inside. Picked up my book, but all of a sudden couldn’t read it. Gripped the page, but just wished I could cry.

Cecie came in a few minutes later and sat down without looking at anyone. All I could see was the back of her head. The four or five necklaces stacked at her neckline. Her hair pulled up into a towering bun. She stood up again when it was almost one-thirty. Gathered her skirt. Nodded past me to Lance. Then she took off—I assumed on a smoke break. My lungs twitched with a craving to follow her. Instead, I sat fixed to my chair.

As usual, at two, I packed my Proust in my satchel. I had made it to volume six, in the Moncrieff translation, whose title I’d always thought was mistranslated. Not the straightforward, literal Albertine Disappeared, but the fanciful Sweet Cheat Gone.

“Hey,” I asked Lance as I got up to leave. “What do you think happened to Cecie?” I was worried, thought maybe I shouldn’t have let her go out all alone on a smoke break.

Lance looked surprised, like I must be a dumbass. Then he smiled, well aware of the score.

“Cecie was done at one-thirty,” he said with an accountant’s firm certainty. “Probably, she’s already home.”

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 Eric Eschweiler is a writer living in New York City. He is currently working on a memoir about his experiences with the legal systems in Chicago and New York.