Faceless

Michael Strom, a young executive in the financial department of the corporation that runs a local mall, gets too close to the truth of financial vision.

 

Faceless

By Joshua T. Calkins-Treworgy

 

 

 

 

            He huddled in the closet of his apartment’s back bedroom, terrified on the same level as a seven-year-old might be if hiding in the same location after watching a monster movie late at night. They were out there. He could not face them. They were too much, just too much for his fragile mind to accept.

            As he sat on the hardwood floor of the closet, half hidden by his dress trousers and khakis, sports coats and a bathrobe, he tried to think back to how this had all started. He looked at the reflection of himself in the mirror hanging from the inside of the closet door. What he saw looked to him as alien as once the surface of Mars must have appeared to the first astronomers who managed to point a telescope at the red planet.

            The pale, sweaty man in the K-Mart pajamas and plain white hooded sweatshirt, a knock-off of a name brand that was an obvious duplication, could not be him. Could it? Why was the man in the mirror holding a hunting knife in his hands in such despair? They couldn’t come into his home after him. They didn’t have to. 

            He’d have to leave his apartment at some point, he knew that. They would wait. Even then, they wouldn’t hunt him, because there would be no need. He would simply become one of them over time. Thinking on this inevitability, the man in the closet remembered where the whole strangeness got its start. It started the day after he called Valerie, to tell her that she had to close up her shop at the mall.

            That was when his problems began.

 

            Michael Strom sat sipping his French Vanilla cappuccino, the view of the busy street outside of the Tim Horton’s coffee shop keeping in shift as traffic moved steadily past, both vehicular and pedestrian. In the early evenings, the flash of the headlights and taillights added an exotic patina to the whole spectacle as well, one that Michael much enjoyed. Just up the street, another coffee shop had shut down three months ago when it could no longer compete with the Horton’s. 

            Michael used to frequent the now-closed establishment, until the Tim Horton’s opened up nearly a year ago now. The hell of it was, he thought, the little place up the street had served far superior coffee. But Michael knew the game. He helped it flow, in fact, for a living. Tim Horton’s was a well-known, well-liked chain of stores. ‘Rory’s Bean Me!’ was not. The customer base made their choice, going with the better-known franchise, and whomever Rory was found himself out of business.

            Move up or move on, Michael thought, that’s how the world operates.

            Dressed that early evening in the dark blue version of the same monkey suit he adorned almost daily for the office, Michael kept an eye on the door of the coffee shop until in strode a grinning fellow who wore a similar suit in charcoal gray. The newcomer’s face was something else altogether, though. With the exception of his stiffened, iron gray buzzcut, the newcomer had the facial features of a man whose face has been broken apart by a professional fighter, only to be put back together by a six-year-old with a glue stick and Tourette’s Syndrome.

            Michael waved to the new suit, who offered a smug grin and approached. He seated himself across from Michael and cleared his throat, adjusted his tie. “Well, Michael.  Good to see you. You have the reports?” Michael nodded, reaching down into his folio bag and withdrawing a single brown file folder. He handed it over to the nameless suit, though a tad reluctantly. 

            “Everything’s there, sir,” said Michael. “Sales reports, payroll, lease payments, and contractual spillover profit payments,” he said. The last of the items mentioned was a new policy at the mall owned by the group he worked for, in the Finances Department. Each store in the group’s mall gave a percentage of their profits on top of their lease payment to the group at the end of each month, an arrangement that skirted legality with a contract signed by the owner/franchisee of each store. 

            The nameless suit grumbled aloud as he scanned the numbers in the file folder. Michael could smell a hint of smoke, and noted the way the man’s jacket pocket seemed to bulge. I could use a cigarette, Michael thought. He probably could too, he added. The nameless suit was suddenly pointing one finger into the report, shaking his head and ‘tut-tutting’ with his tongue. “Michael, this boutique here, this ‘Valerie’s Odds and Ends’? How many times have they come under the three hundred dollar mark in the spillover category?”

            Michael paused, thinking back on the previous two months’ reports. Valerie Dorenz, the owner and proprietor of the independent knick-knack shop, was a tall, leggy woman, pretty in a ‘no-age’ kind of way. Michael had actually gone to high school with her seven years ago, and he always liked her free spirit and the way she used her strawberry blonde hair as a wall against talking to people she didn’t care for. She had been possessed of a gentleness he’d found rare in the girls his age back then. 

            When he had gone off to college, Valerie took off on a ‘spiritual journey’ to the west coast. In his junior year of college, Michael received a letter from Valerie, telling him that she knew her true purpose now, and that maybe someday soon enough he would see her at it. The letter had been addressed from someplace in Montana, so Michael breathed a sigh of relief to find that she hadn’t wound up in ‘The Valley’ in California doing bad pornography for little or no money.

            In the long run, he had indeed come to see what she wanted to do with herself for a living. He was surprised to see her name on a lease agreement for a space in the mall owned by the group he worked for, but he was pleased as well when he read her business model plan and previewed her wares before she opened shop. They had been quite happy to see one another when he called her to arrange for a viewing of the space her store would occupy. Her ‘purpose’, as it were, was to try and spread the new-age counterculture, bring out the hippie in the modern adolescent and young adult. 

            The mall, he often mused, seemed a contradictory place to try something like that.

            Michael came back to the moment and his superior’s question, which now seemed to weigh on his temple like the barrel of a loaded gun. “This will make four times, sir,” Michael said in reply to the nameless suit’s inquiry. 

            “Hmm. And I see she has one month left on her current lease.” The suit with no name snapped the folder shut and put it into his own briefcase by his feet. “Contact her tonight or tomorrow, let her know she needs to start clearing out,” said the suit.

            “Sir?”

            “We already have an offer on her space, Michael, and I believe it’s probably because she already missed the spillover mark in the first place. The new client is international and is a guaranteed profit builder,” said the suit, buttoning up his blazer. “The business model is efficient. What’s more,” he said, standing up and grabbing his briefcase. “Our boys in marketing have already gotten started on advertisement spots for the local radio and television stations. Her final lease payment has already been paid, I saw on your report, so just swing by her little boutique tomorrow and take care of delivering the news.”

            And so the suit with no name left Michael Strom sitting there in Tim Horton’s, speechless and feeling utterly alone.

 

            Michael paced back and forth in his modest apartment kitchen, the heels of his De George dress shoes clacking rhythmically along the white tiles. He had always been frugal when possible. Hence, despite his low=end six-figure salary, his two-bedroom apartment was small, sparse, and economically priced. He wasn’t a wasteful man at any point in his life, and he often bought knock-offs and store brands when shopping for food, clothing, and other sundry items for the home. He did his grocery shopping at an Aldi’s. 

            The sole food-stamp child of a single mother, he’d learned early on how to budget.

            The home phone hung on his kitchen wall, silent, patient, expectant. Could a phone mock you, he wondered. It was a slim receiver, the numbered buttons on its underside, eggshell white exterior absorbing the overhead light in the ceiling. He could smell his own nervous sweat, could feel the clamminess creeping into his fingers. “Oh God, I don’t want to do this.”

            But he knew he had to. It was just another ugly part of his job. He’d done it before, at least six times in the three years he’d been working for the group of men who owned the mall. His first had been easy, a Burger King. He’d wound up giving references to other fast food joints around town for all of the employees, even the salaried management. Everybody had walked away from that store closing happy.

            The second one had been easy, too. A small sporting goods store, and it had turned out that the owner had already started packing to run his store out of a small, independent strip mall lot. Good for him.

            But the third time he’d had to deliver the bad news had been by far the worst. Karl Hosten, the owner of an import store, dealing largely in Japanese cultural goods. Japanese sodas, candies, anime and manga, figurines, the works. He even had some import video games and offered mod chip installments on the systems the games had been made for, so they would run on U.S. systems. Michael had given him the news in person, and he recalled that Karl had responded well, with great understanding and patience. 

            But two days later, Michael heard over the radio that the man had burned his small ranch-style house to the ground. His body was found in the remains of the living room, amid the wreckage of antique Japanese weaponry. After dousing the entire house in gasoline, police discovered, Hosten had committed seppuku, a samurai ritual suicide. Before he bled out, Hosten lit his Zippo lighter and tossed it at a nearby puddle of fuel, and the rest, as they say, is history.

            Michael knew Valerie well enough to know she wouldn’t react quite that badly. But therein lay, he finally realized, the true crux of his dilemma. He knew Valerie, period. He hadn’t known any of the other people he’d had to tell to remove themselves and their stores, thus their livelihoods, from the mall. He knew Valerie, just as he now knew from his e-mail that her replacement was to be a Sprint store. He shook his head, his stomach turning sour on him. The call ahead still loomed large, and he’d have to tell her that yet another large, multi-national service provider was going to be taking up space in the mall for maximum profit for his bosses. 

            Steeling himself against the inevitable disappointment he was bound to hear in her voice, Michael picked up the phone and dialed her home phone number, located in her store’s files on his kitchen table. One ring, no answer, okay. Two rings, no answer, that’s to be expected. On the fifth ring he heard the click as the other end of the line connected. “Hello?” Her voice, soft and vaguely slurred-sounding, sent a tremor down his spine. “Hello?” Annoyance crept into her voice. 

            “Um, Valerie, it’s Mr. Strom. Michael, ah, Strom. From Finance,” he said, making this last sound like a question with the lift of his voice. 

            “Oh, right, Mike!” He could hear faint music now in the background. “Hold on a minute, I was meditating,” she said. Michael identified the song as it was paused or turned off, and thought it strangely appropriate for this conversation. It was ‘Bridge Over Troubled Waters’, by Simon and Garfunkle. 

            “Valerie?”

            “Yeah, still here. Just wanted to turn the volume down. What’s up, Mike?” The familiarity in her voice, the implied smile, dug into his heart like a jagged knife. 

            “Well, it’s the store,” said Michael, sitting down slowly at his tiny kitchen table. “I had to give the monthly reports to my boss tonight.”

            “You don’t sound very happy about it. But I made the lease payment, at least. Should I be expecting new neighbors? Or does the game store want to expand into my space?”

            “Um, neither.” He armed cold sweat from his forehead, cleared his throat, and pressed on. “Valerie, you came under three-hundred in the windfall profit percentage again. They want me to tell you to clear out by month’s end.” There came from the receiver a pregnant silence then, the only indication of a connection the fact that Michael heard no dial tone. “Valerie?”

            “I’m, uh, I’m still here. I’ll, um, maybe see you tomorrow at the mall. Mike?”

            “Yes?”

            “Who’s replacing me,” she asked. Ah, he thought, the dreaded question asked.

            “Sprint.” And that was when he finally heard the click, followed by the dial tone. He pulled the phone away from his ear, staring at it as though someone had just called him with terminal news. As the night wore on, Michael Strom had trouble getting to sleep, but he did, ultimately, pass out on his living room couch. 

 

            Michael’s building was a five-story cube across the road from the mall itself, and Michael himself was just making his way to his private office past the cubicle slaves. Gina, he thought, passing her secretarial station. Standing all of five-foot-two, she had a nice little oak desk set up with none of the cloistering, suffocating snap-together walls that all of the other worker bees were forced to endure. Her station, just to the left of the door into Michael’s office, was fitted with all of the tools she needed to help keep him running his job. He knew she was responsible for getting a lot of the reports together that he in turn used to create his own monthly numbers and reviews. He was glad for that, because without her input, he would presume that the woman was a permanent in-house prostitute for the building.

            It wasn’t that she slept around (no more so, at least, than any other woman in the department), no. It was that she dressed like an 80’s hair band groupie, breasts practically on display, short skirts, lots of makeup, every day. She rolled her chair back into the path he walked upon, cutting him off from his office. A flirtatious glint shone in her eyes, but she just smiled up at him and said, “Mr. Crayes is on line 3 for you, sir.” Michael muttered a thank-you and headed into his office. He made his way around the polished desk, seated himself, and picked up the phone, hitting the flashing button for line 3. 

            “Michael Strom here,” he said into the phone.

            “Ah, Mr. Strom, so good to hear you’re still with Unicorp,” said a soft and familiar voice. “Listen, you know my café there in the west end of the mall, Mr. Strom?”

            “Sweet Dreams Café? Yes, you’ve been doing excellent business there,” he said, now remembering Crayes. He didn’t often think of the owner, but he did rather enjoy the products the older gentleman made available at his location. 

            “Good business, yes, but I’m getting a little old to keep the place up and running,” said Crayes. “I received an offer on the store, Mr. Strom, and I wanted you and the others up top to know. I’ll be selling the store and all of my recipes to Comfort Zone Incorporated,” said Crayez with a tone full of delight. Michael sat stock still, smelling the coffee Gina brought in and silently set in front of him. It bore the ‘Sweet Dreams’ logo on the cup in faded brown print. 

            “I see. And the transfer paperwork, Mr. Crayez?”

            “You’ll have it by Monday, Mr. Strom. I just wanted your people to have some extra notice before the weekend.” Michael wrote down a notice for Mr. Drexl, the head of the Finances Department, and closed up his notebook. “Take care,” said Mr. Crayez, and then the line was dead. Gone, Michael thought, just like that. He smiled to think of the wonderful financial deal that Crayez likely got out of the sale, but also felt a touch of sadness in the wake of this news. The Sweet Dreams Café had always performed well, financially speaking. The place had that homey sort of touch of class that he found enjoyable at small, family-owned Italian restaurants. 

            And now it would be gone, replaced by the cold comfort of a cash cow corporate franchise. It put him in mind of every hostile takeover he read about in Newsweek when some enormous conglomerate swallowed up smaller, privately owned businesses wholesale, promising to continue providing a quality service or product, but never really living up to said promise. Sure, Comfort Zone could afford to lower prices on the drinks, but what would happen to the atmosphere and the regular customers who came in almost daily? Would they remain?

            The franchise café would probably do plenty good business, and Michael’s bosses would be pleased with the additional income. In his secret heart of hearts, Michael Strom knew the atmosphere would be gone, and hoped the regular customers would be too.

 

            Taking a respite from his paperwork, Michael crossed the street at the light, heading into the mall. The west entrance door whooshed open to admit him, and the scent of floor cleaner and cheap perfume worn by a nearby gossiping customer struck him. It was a familiar sensation to him.   Young women like the cell phone-chatting girl by the automatic doors constituted approximately 64% of the mall’s revenue, after all. 

            Michael started moving toward the large open floored area that dominated the west end of the mall. A set of yellow floor tiles, when stood upon in the center of this space, could be turned upon 360 degrees to allow the shopper a view of no less than eight sotres, all of them huge chain stores. 

            To his three o’clock stood the store on the westernmost end of the structure, JCPenny. To his 4 o’clock, Radioshack. On and on this went, and Michael let his eyes rove to the customers coming and going from each. When his eyes fell upon the Lenscrafters store to his nine o’clock, it finally happened.

            A woman dressed in an American Eagle pink hoodie and jeans that looked like a name brand carried by the GAP (at the east end of the mall) came striding out of the Lenscrafters. She had shoulder-length brown hair, styled in a fashion that had become quite popular earlier in the year. 

            She had no face.

            Michael’s eyes bulged in their sockets as he stared at the moving apparition before him. Pinned to the woman’s sweater was a crisp twenty-dollar bill. Where her facial features should have been, all Michael saw was a soft, shapeless expanse of eggshell white, like a ceramic mask with no paint on it. 

            Before he could scream, he blinked. When his eyes came open again, the young woman was a normal human being again, though she was giving him a curious glare through her new spectacles. No money stood pinned to her clothes. A daydream? He couldn’t say, but as the woman passed him by, he caught a whiff of her perfume. He recognized it at once as a new line being touted and endorsed by yet another of the latest pop-star teeny-bop divas ‘gone wild’. It was very trendy this year. Michael headed to the food court. He needed food and a few minutes to compose his thoughts.

 

            It was perhaps a full hour later when, fed and quickly dismissing his earlier vision as a stress-related delusion, Michael Strom approached the store still bearing the title ‘Valerie’s Odds and Ends’. Only the day before the nameless suit at the Tim Horton’s had informed him of Sprint’s bid. Yet already the boys in Advertising had put upa standing placard near Valerie’s shop declaring that the Sprint Store would be ‘Coming Soon’. They likely hadn’t even waited for the ink to dry on the agreement before putting together the sign, which stood there like a silent herald of the current store’s doom.

            Michael shook his head, took a steadying breath, and headed for the open doors of Valerie’s shop. Upon entering the boutique, the aroma of mothballs assailed his nostrils, a scent that put him in mind of things lost and half-forgotten. Perhaps not even forgotten on purpose, but forgotten nonetheless. The display tables and shelves were laden with tie-dyed shirts, hemp skirts, baja sweaters. On one set of racks stood a collection of ceramic one-inch teddy bears in various civilian and service costumes. They were cute and marked two dollars apiece. Michael was pretty sure Valerie could get more for them.

            Ms. Valerie Dorenz herself was at the moment occupied with a customer at the back of her store. Michael scanned a few more trinkets on sale, then started looking through a rack of shirts marked down to ten dollars. The first few were Grateful Dead tees, followed by Jimmy Hendricks, The Who, and some other music groups of the sixties and seventies era.

            Halfway through the rack, Michael stopped flipping, his eyes riveted to a stark black shirt with bold white lettering on it. In block print it read, ‘WE ARE ALL STATISTICS’. Thinking it another phantasm like the woman with no face, Michael looked away and then looked back. However, the shirt and its macabre message remained sitting right before him. A goose walked over his grave.

            “Michael?” He looked up from the shirt at Valerie, who offered him a weak smile. “Let me just cash this customer out, and we can talk.” 

            “Of course,” he said robotically. “Take your time.” Looking back around, the shirt now was solid black with a white cartoon heart on it. Once again he felt clammy and cold, on the brink of screaming. A cold sweat started on his forehead, his armpits damp as he thought of the message he’d already seen. He could not quite get over the feeling that there was something going on around him, something significant. Either that, or he was the target of one of the most tasteless practical jokes he’d ever heard of. 

            Yet he did not believe that explanation. Without knowing exactly why, Michael Strom felt certain that he was being given a glimpse of the truly strange and abstract. But just because something is abstract or out of the norm does not make the message any less true.

            Valerie came back over to Michael after her customer was gone, trying to smile at him. “Well, what’s up, Mike? Come to make sure I’m not going to start a riot or a protest?”

            “Valerie,” he sighed, rolling his eyes. “It’s not like that at all. We just, well, these things happen. I had no say in the decision. I’m just in charge of putting together the reports and handing them off to the boss. Usually after I explain the charts,” he added. That at least got a grin and a soft giggle from her.

            “Well, maybe you can explain it all to me, then,” Valerie said. “Coffee over at Sweet Dreams sound good?” Michael accepted the offer graciously, always more than willing to get a quick caffeine fix. He stepped out of the store while Valerie closed the shutter gate and locked it into the floor slot. He took a quick look around, and saw another image that set his teeth on edge.

            Where the arched sign stood over Barnes and Noble’s door there stood and arrangement of letters he knew could not be real. Instead of the famous chain store’s title, there stood the words, ‘WE OWN YOU’. Not wasting a moment, he turned to Valerie, to see if she was as surprised as he. But she was just cocking her head to one side at him. “Are you okay,” she asked. “You look kind of pale.” Michael looked back, and saw that the sign had returned to its usual lettering, ‘Barnes and Noble Booksellers’. 

            “I’m fine,” he muttered. “Let’s get that coffee. I’m daydreaming, so I must be really tired.”

 

            Michael and Valerie sat at one of the corner two-seater tables, cups to one side as they enjoyed the quiet atmosphere for a moment or two. That’ll be gone, too, Michael thought. Why is Crayez selling it all, he wondered. He makes good money, even with the spillover percentage we take out. So why? He didn’t know, and for now, resolved not to think too hard about it.

            Valerie asked him then to explain how the financial situation worked and why she was being replaced with, of all things, a cellular phone store. Using one of his pens, a pair of napkins, and some on-the-fly illustrations, he showed her how the standards of the overall Operations and Finances departments worked. When he was finished, she leaned back in her seat and frowned. 

            “So because the boys up top don’t get enough extra out of my profits to their liking, they’re just going to refuse me another lease extension? How could I have saved the store?”

            “By signing over a higher percentage of your net profits,” Michael said, deflating as he spoke. “That’s actually what’s supposed to be suggested at the second time a store falls under the $300.00 overage mark.”

            “You know what I would have told you,” she replied. She wore a stern expression, her arms crossed over her chest.

            “That’s sort of why I didn’t suggest it. We’ve never had anyone accept the percentage hike, even when they could afford it. I’m really sorry about all of this, Val.”

            “Hey,” she said, her face softening by small degrees. “It’s not your fault. Besides, even if you tried to do something like fudge the numbers, you’d get yourself in trouble.” She reached out and patted his free hand. When he looked up into her eyes, Michael could sense the warmth and true beauty of this counter-culture woman he hadn’t gotten close enough to. “I’ll get by, Mike. So don’t be too hard on yourself.” Michael gave her one of his own tiny grins, made some idle chit-chat, and then got up to excuse himself back to work. He only had a couple of hours left in his office, and for much of that time, he tried to think of any reason she made him feel so secure, despite the bad news he’d delivered her.

 

            Four hours later, sitting in his apartment living room, Michael almost felt like weeping. At Sweet Dreams, he and Valerie had made some small talk before he left for his home. She’d gone off to reopen the store for the rest of the afternoon, and he watched from a distance for a minute, somehow sure that he caught a glimpse of her deeper sadness at losing the store in the way she carried herself. He in turn had returned to his office to review the Sprint Store’s initial estimates and reports.

            He crunched numbers and read focus group studies after reviewing Sprint. Teenage boys were apparently spending less on computer gear this quarter and more on video games. Parents of children under 12 were in too much of a rush to get their kids’ requested toys online, what with order receiving, system glitches, shipping and handling charges, et cetera. So they were still shopping at the stores, which was good for the mall. 

            Facts, figures, projected sales spikes, all of it brought to him with the key underlying message, ‘enhance and protect the bottom line’. Bring in and support stores and franchises who outsource like crazy to boost profits and revenue, thus providing us more revenue. Not made in America? Who cares? We don’t want their sadness, their pride, their lost glory. We just want their money!

            And after that line of thinking, Michael decided he’d had enough for the day. He told his immediate (only) superior in Finances he was heading home, and was bade a good night. “And get some rest,” his boss said. “You look ill.” On his way to his blue Ford Focus out in the parking lot, Michael saw two young men walking up to the crosswalk that would take them over to the mall. When they looked at one another to exchange words, Michael saw that they, like the woman that morning, had no faces. Pinned to their sleeves were stripes of green that he couldn’t read, but he knew what they were.

            Money. Cold, lifeless cash.

 

            At 6:30 the next morning, Michael Strom did something he hadn’t done since he worked the 7-11 register down the road from his college campus. He called into the office and left a message for his supervisor saying that he wouldn’t be in that day. He still showered and shaved as usual, but dressed himself in blue jeans and a Philadelphia Eagles sweater from the year of their NFC Championship and subsequent Super Bowl loss to the Patriots.

            After getting dressed, he turned on his coffee maker in the kitchen and cooked himself a ham and cheddar omelet. The smell of his own cooking always gave him a smile, because it told him he could survive without the need for diners and restaurants. A quiet morning passed as he relaxed in the living room, coffee in hand. Michael listened to the works of Mozart on his lavish sound system, one of the few signs he had of his monetary worth outside of his working wardrobe. It was a soothing practice he usually only enjoyed on his days off, but he felt it might help his nerves. 

            His cell phone vibrated near the end of an overture, and he muted the speakers with his remote. Michael checked the caller ID display and grinned. He opened the phone, thumbed the accept button, and put the phone to his ear. “Donny,” he said. “What’s up?”

            “Not much, man, ain’t seen you in a minute,” replied Donald Burgess on the other end of the connection. Donald had been one of Michael’s dorm mates in college, a wild child who mellowed himself via ‘self-prescribed herbal remedies’ every opportunity he got. Michael still kept in touch, despite Donny never finishing college with him. He was one of the only real friends that Michael had. “So, what time are you getting out of work today, man?”

            “Actually, um, I’m not working today,” Michael said, leaning back in his recliner. “I called in this morning, took a personal day. I figured I was due. I haven’t taken one since I started working for my employers.” He got up out of the chair and headed into the kitchen, grabbing his keys off of the small table against the wall.

            “Really? That’s not like you, man. Hey, if you’re free then, you wanna come hang out, dude?

            “Already out the front door,” said Michael, unlocking and climbing into the front seat of his car a minute later. He hit the ‘end’ button, turned the ignition over, and drove over to Donny’s place as fast as he could without breaking any traffic laws. 

 

            “Whoa, dude,” said Donny through the cloud of smoke obscuring his whole head. “That’s, like, heavy s**t,” he said. He launched into a series of fitful coughs then while Michael, who did not partake, paced back and forth at the other end of the living room. He’d told Donny about the strange day he’d had the day before, hoping Donald would have an explanation. Donald’s major at college, despite not having finished his courses, was psychology, and Michael knew from his continued friendship that, although he was not studying at an approved university, Donald Burgess still kept up his studies in other ways, largely through the internet and used textbooks he bought at college bookstores. 

            “Tell me about it,” Michael said. He sat listlessly down on one of Donny’s recliners, elbows on his knees. “So, what do you think?”

            “Wha,” said Donny. His jaw hung slackly, his eyes puffed and bloodshot. 

            “These things I’m seeing, these, whatever they are,” said Michael, huffing. “Delusions, hallucinations, visions, whatever the hell you want to call them. What do you think they mean?”

            “Oh,” said Donny, bobbing his head up and down languidly. “You need a psychiatrist, not a half-assed psychology student who dropped out, dude.”

            “What’s the difference between psychology and psychiatry,” asked Michael. 

            “Oh, a big one, man. Psychologists study human behavior, see? Why people behave the way they do. Some deal with phobias, family and marital counseling, that good stuff.” Donny sank further down into the sofa with a small whoosh of air from the cushions. “But hallucinations, hearing voices, and that fun stuff? Signs of schizo thinking man, and only a psychiatrist can diagnose and treat that stuff. But, like, my honest opinion, man?” Michael nodded. “Just too much stress at work,” he said. “Smoke some of this s**t and you’ll be clear.”

            “You know I won’t,” Michael said, waving away the offered joint. “But you’re probably right. I’ve just got to relax a little.” He spent much of the rest of the day catching up on life with Donny and playing some video games with him, then headed home. Michael went to bed that night feeling a little bit better about his sanity. 

 

One Month Later…

 

            Michael Strom sat in the Tim Horton’s closest to his apartment, tapping his foot impatiently. November was just around the corner, and the snows had already settled in. He hated winter driving, most of all at night. But he’d been waiting for his newest immediate superior, Leonard Roe, for half an hour past their scheduled time already. He was, to say the least, getting a little impatient. 

            Forty minutes late the man came in out of the blustering wind, a red-haired and red-nosed gentleman with an eternal whiskey face. His plain brown, tweed jacket hung over brown pants. His wingtips, despite the slushie weather and ground of the parking lot, were perfectly buffed and shining. By Michael’s estimation, the man was going to be a royal pain in the a*s.

            No sooner did the man sit down than he proved that assumption. “Your reports, Strom,” he said with heavy belligerence. Michael handed over the manila folder, but the brown suit just slapped it down on the table. He glared at Michael, who wondered why this relative stranger and total newcomer was seething at him so. “By the way, I’m Calvin O’Donnell.” He extended a hand to Michael and the two shook succinctly. “If I come off kind of testy, don’t mind, it ain’t you.” He looked down at the floor and grunted. “It’s the guys upstairs, at the top of the ladder.”

            “I’m afraid I don’t understand,” said Michael, blinking rapidly. “What’s the problem?”

            “Well, for folks like you and me, nothing,” said O’Donnell. “But for the private lease holders at the mall, a lot.” O’Donnell shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “The board has decided that they have to raise the prices on the leased space everybody’s using. Mind you, it doesn’t go into affect just yet,” he said, putting up a hand to stay Michael’s questions, if he should have any. “But all the non-franchise stores in there? The owners probably won’t be able or willing to pony up the higher lease price. They’ll be gone before the middle of next year.”

            Michael remained silent for a long moment, and finally asked the first question he felt he needed an answer to right away. “Why are they increasing the rent?”

            “Well, Michael, energy rates took another hike up. The boys on the board don’t want that to adversely affect their bottom line,” O’Donnell said with undisguised disgust. “In other words? They all still want to buy a bigger house and newer car next fiscal year, regardless of performance.” Without another word from his lips, O’Donnell handed the reports back to Michael, and headed out of the coffee shop. 

 

            Michael sat on his sofa, half-numb on Jack and Coke after his meeting with O’Donnell. All the small businesses, he thought, poof! Vanished as if they’d never been there. Yes, that was how it would be, just as the whiskey-faced new supervisor of Finances had put it. Of that, Michael felt almost certain.

            Depressed by the prospect, he channel surfed until arriving on a rerun of Seinfeld on Fox. Michael waited until the first commercial break to get a refill on his drink, but when he returned to his seat, another commercial was just starting. It showed a woman rubbing her temples as the voice-over asked in the patronizing tone of a doctor, “Chronic headaches?” The woman on screen nodded and the shot cut to a middle-aged man on a tennis court rubbing his elbow. “Sore joints,” asked the unseen doctor.

            “Of course,” Michael slurred. The screen then cut to a man portraying a doctor, but Michael knew right away that something was very wrong with the good doc. Something wrong enough that good Mr. Strom became almost instantly sober. The doctor wore the white lab coat and stethoscope he’d seen on so many hospital dramas over the years, blue button shirt and red tie on over it. But the man had no face, just a clean expanse of eggshell white where his features should be. His nametag said ‘Drug Company X’. The doctor then began to speak in a tone akin to demons from every movie Michael had ever seen, that queer doubling of voice that sounded as though two very different people were speaking the same words.

            “Then what you need, my sheep, is CureAll,” said the no-faced doctor, taking a blank white pill bottle from his lab coat pocket. “We’ll tell you it can help all sort of stuff, and maybe it can. I don’t know, and we don’t really care. We’ll run some figures by the FDA, and you people will buy this garbage like it’s bottled water from the Holy f*****g Grail.” The doctor-thing tossed the bottle off-screen nonchalantly and leaned back against the desk behind him in the shot of his office. “And the potential side-effects? Too many to count, but who reads that stuff anyhow? Just go buy it,” he said, pointing at the camera. “Or we’ll scare you into making your purchase some other way.”

            Michael had just enough time to pick up the remote and turn of the television before he fainted dead away to the floor. 

 

            When Michael finally came to, he checked his watch and saw that it was four in the morning. He vaguely recalled a very strange and disturbing dream. He couldn’t quite remember all of it, and he headed to the bathroom for a very early start to his day. In the shower, his thoughts remained hazy, blurry. He could feel the twinges of a headache coming on, but that was okay. It was a Sunday now, one of his days off. But he knew he couldn’t sleep in, not after the lingering dread conjured up by his dreams. Michael stepped out of the shower, toweled off, dressed and went out to the kitchen to make a fresh pot of coffee.

            While sitting at his tiny kitchen table over his mug and the previous day’s paper, Michael remembered a little thing his mother used to do when he got headaches. He perused through his pantry and located a container of honey and a shaker of garlic salt. He poured a pinch of each into his coffee, and by the time he finished with the sports pages (two cups), he could feel the squeezing in his temples begin to subside. 

            Michael felt a wave of great triumph, though he could not say why. Perhaps, he mused, it was his ability to rely on something other than a quick fix pill. Emboldened, he headed to the bathroom, intent on throwing away the Advil or Aspirin or Tylenol, whatever brand he was keeping on hand at the time.

            He opened the medicine cabinet over the sink, and the bottle before him, standing alone on the middle shelf, was a plain white cylinder with a single word stamped on it: ‘CureAll’. Screaming, he threw the bottle into the trash can and fled to his bedroom, where he shook and wept, remembering his vision of the evening before.

 

            “That just can’t be real, dude,” said Donny as Michael paced once more in his living room.

            “Besides, I watch Seinfeld every night, and I didn’t see anything like that,” added Valerie. Michael had called her when he regained his composure and together they had gone to Donny’s after meeting up at the mall. “I mean, not to be too harsh, but Mike, that just sounds completely crazy.”

            “I’m aware of that,” said Michael. 

            “Hey, at least it’s consistent,” said Donny, cigarette dangling up and down from the corner of his mouth. The other two gaped at him openly. “The people with no faces, like that day last month,” he said.

            “What’s he talking about, Mike,” asked Valerie in a hushed tone. Michael shook his head, but could not hold onto any rising anger at Donny for his lack of discretion. After all, hadn’t he himself called Valerie up that morning, convincing her that he had something vital that he wanted to share with her and Donald? He told Valerie then about his first visions of nearly a month before, and he was discouraged by the mounting horror he saw in her eyes as he related the details. She must think I need to be committed, he thought when he was finished.

            “I’ve got some vacation time due to me,” he said finally. He sat down next to Donny with a sigh. “Maybe I just need to take a bit of time off. It could be that I’m daydreaming this stuff as a way to force myself to relax.”

            “Also good, if you actually take the vacation,” said Donny. He pulled a colorful pipe from under a cushion on the couch. “Why not start by going to Mars?”

 

            The next morning, after informing O’Donnell that he would be taking seven of the fourteen vacation days he was due that year, Michael drove over to World’s Gym over on Delver Road. He had a membership that he had not taken advantage of in weeks, and he could always count on a workout to help clear his mind. He changed in the locker room, adjusting his mp3 player on his hip so that the cord wouldn’t snag on anything. Heading toward the leg press machine, he tapped the ‘play’ button his player. He adjusted the peg on the machine, starting his first repetitions as Fear Factory pounded in his ears. He did the leg press a total of thirty times at two-hundred pounds. Not bad, he thought, stepping away from the machine.

            En route to the arm curl machine, he spotted a young woman over by the inner and outer thigh machine. She herself was not the object of his attention, however; with her back turned momentarily to Michael, her shirt held him transfixed. The picture in the middle of the woman’s back showed four faceless men in suits and a fifth man, wearing a colorful Hawaiian shirt and slacks, hug dead from a noose to one side of the other four. In bold block lettering below the picture the shirt read, ‘Assimilate or Die!’

            Michael nearly knocked down three people in his mad dash back to the locker room.

 

            After his minor panic at the gym, Michael had been able to go back out and complete another forty minutes of a workout circuit before hitting the showers and leaving for the day. After the gym, he needed a good lunch, and he tried to think of where he could go and grab some decent food. Driving along in his PT Cruiser, he passed a McDonald’s, a Wendy’s, a Denny’s, and at least three other chain restaurants that, normally, he would have happily pulled into. 

            But today he didn’t feel safe about those options, and his own choice of words to himself stunned him momentarily. “That’s the thinking of a paranoid,” he whispered to himself. Yet the moment he spotted a small diner called Holly’s Hideout, he pulled in and ducked inside as if being targeted by a rifleman. 

            Michael found himself instantly taken aback and charmed by the motif of Holly’s. The entire interior was designed and decorated with a 50’s flair, from dime-a-song jukebox standing at the back of the diner to the waitress’s uniform behind the counter. She wore a gold nametag that read ‘Mary’, and she offered Michael a pearly-white smile. “Hey there, stranger,” she said. “Come on up and have a seat at the counter. No need to be shy.” Michael noted that there were three other customers, all in one window booth, nobody he recognized. However, they appeared to be done, so he was presently the only customer to wait on. He took one of the red leather padded stools for himself and sighed relief. “Coffee?”

            “Please,” he replied. 

            “May be a little strong,” said Mary as she poured him a cup. “It’s a small company we buy the coffee from, based over in Ohio.”

            “Hey, small companies can make great stuff,” said Michael, thinking about Valerie as he said so. Mary handed him a menu and leaned on the counter, showing the world at large every bit of her ample cleavage. The door of the diner opened once again, the little bell over the door jangling noisily. Michael looked to the new arrival, and upon seeing him, nearly broke into song. The newcomer sauntered over, sat next to him, and said, “Have any trouble finding the place?”

            “No, Donny,” said Michael. “None at all.”

 

            After lunch and a long talk with Donny, mostly about football, Michael headed home to relax. His Netflix were in the mailbox, and he set them on the television once he was settled into his apartment. He turned on CNN to catch up on his daily dose of world news. Hmm, he thought, not a long going on, eh?

            The show took a commercial break, and things once again took a turn for the strange, but Michael felt more prepared for it this time. The commercial showed a random teenager sitting on his bed, staring at nothing. A faceless man in a police uniform stepped onto the screen and said, “This is your kid on drugs.” The screen shifted to a shot of a sedan crumpled against a tree, EMS workers dashing about an injured driver as beer cans poured out of his door. “This is your kid on booze. But he’s 21, so he can drink, because we can regulate that. Drugs are bad, and this Bud’s for you. Remember, if we can control it, you can have it.

            “Because we control you,” the faceless cop said, entering the shot. “Michael.” Michael’s heart skipped a beat, and the faceless officer pointed off screen. Michael followed his finger, seeing that it pointed toward his living room window. He got up from the couch, turned the television off, and approached the window slowly. He could still taste the burger from the diner in his mouth, accompanied by the taste of sour bile from a very suddenly upset stomach. 

            Ever so slowly he twitched aside the curtain, and when his brain processed what his eyes beheld, Michael let loose a shivering scream. Standing on the lawn fronting his building to the street were two dozen faceless men, women and children. Some had money pinned to their brand name outfits, others had spreadsheets and flow charts stapled to their bare chests like tribal tunics. One, near the left side of the crowd, held a poster of an American flag with not stars in a blue field, but a dollar bill in a green field. Washington’s face bore no features, just a round, eggshell white expanse with a powdered wig. Michael saw this last item, and bolted to his bedroom, locking the door and curling up into a ball on his bed, quickly falling into a troubled sleep.

 

            The very next day he made a trip to K-Mart, in order to buy himself some cheap knock-offs of about half of his wardrobe, as well as a serrated hunting knife. On his return to his apartment building, Michael saw them everywhere, driving on the roads, walking their dogs, all of them faceless things.

            He couldn’t go to Donny, because he’d have to leave the apartment again. This is about where we came in, friends and neighbors. Yet he didn’t know who else to turn to. That was when he pulled out his cell phone, realizing there was someone to turn to; Valerie. He dialed her number as he entered his closet and sat down, the knife in his free hand. “Hello,” she said when the phone rang twice. She sounded tired, but Michael needed her. 

            “Val, it’s Mike. I need you to come over to my place,” he said in a rushed whisper. 

            “Wait, Mike, I’m at work,” she said. “Can you wait a couple of hours, until I have my break?”

            “Sure,” he said. “Where are you working now?”

            “Wal-Mart,” she replied. “I needed a job, so here I am. You still on Oakwood?”

            “Yeah, number seven, first complex on the right,” he said, feeling reassured already. He hung up the phone and turned it off, exiting the closet and tossing the phone on his bed. Michael waited patiently for two hours, and then heard the knock on his apartment door. He jumped up from the couch, feeling thinly hopeful now that Valerie was there to ease his troubled mind. 

            Michael opened the door, and there she stood. Black jeans, blue Wal-Mart employee vest, radiant long hair. And when she looked up at him, Michael stumbled back like a cornered rodent, tripping on his own feet to the floor. She, too, had become one of the faceless. 

            “It doesn’t hurt, Mike,” her voice intoned from the eggshell where her pert little mouth should have been. “You’ll be just like everyone else, just another consumer.” She reached down for him, and he rolled over, getting to his feet and bolting for his bathroom, screaming bloody murder the whole while. When he got inside, he slammed the door and shot the bolt that locked the door against entry, and immediately he heard her beating on the door with both fists. She did not call out his name, but only continued to bang on the door. 

            Faced now with no escape, Michael Strom stepped back into the tub, crouching down and letting his legs stretch out before him. There would be no evading these faceless creatures anymore, it seemed. His fate had been sealed, and he had had a hand in it himself. Had he not himself prepared the reports for his corporate masters that would rob Valerie of her independent livelihood? “Well, you won’t get me,” he whispered, turning the knife on his own wrist and running it up from his palm to his elbow. “You won’t get me.” He was dead in mere minutes.

 

            Donald held Valerie close as the two of them watched the medical examiner follow Michael’s bagged corpse up into the back of the ambulance Valerie had called for. She stood shaking in Donny’s arms, unable to speak. She’d already told the tale to a police officer who’d responded to the 911 call. “He’s, he’s been acting really strange lately,” she told the officer as she sat curled up on Michael’s couch, before Donny showed up. “He was talking about these ghosts or something he kept seeing, people with no faces.”

            “Yeah, he’d been talking about it for a few weeks,” Donald confirmed, standing off to one side of the officer and Valerie. The officer took notes as they spoke. Now Donny spoke to one side of Michael’s neighbors as they stood gathered in the complex’s parking lot. Something wasn’t sitting well with Valerie as she let Donny keep one arm wrapped around her shoulders. It hadn’t just been the look of horror that Michael wore when she showed up at his door, or the scream he’d loosed when she tried to help him up off of the floor. Something just felt out-of-sorts to her.

            As the ambulance pulled away with Michael in the back, Donny and Valerie watched its slow progress to the access road back toward Oakwood, they both shuddered. When the ambulance turned onto that narrow pathway between the complexes and the street, the two of them got a good look at the driver, and both of them nearly shouted, gooseflesh breaking up and down their arms and backs.

            The driver had no face.

 

-End

Author's Note

First draft thrown together in a white heat one evening about two months back. A mouthpiece for how I believe some people in the financial sector view the common consumer.