in the middle of somewhere

Two unrelated characters get pulled into the story of Madfish. Also, the protagonist, Bradley Fisher, is introduced along with his intern (and co-protagonist) Gin Rumi. A bunch of stuff happens.

MADFISH

Part 1
in the middle of somewhere

    The wily glow cut rivulets of orange against the brick, tracing the glass of the dark windows high over the cement floor. She briefly patted the breast of her jacket for ammunition and lead with her pistol through the entryway, letting the door slip from her shoulder to her assisting constable.
    Through the smoke and flickering shadows, Deputy Anselm scanned the room's peripherals before motioning for her partner to remain outside. So he slipped silently out the door as she approached the cause of the heat: an overburdened boiler. Discharging flames outreached the firebox to lick the steel cylinder's belly to a red heat. Sparkling smoke poured into the ceiling, threatening to overtake the room.
    This wasn't the result of an old ember or misplaced cigar butt. A coal fueled fire required wood tinder and periodic tending to get going. Someone deliberately stoked the flame. And it wasn't the proprietary engineer.
    With what sparse knowledge she possessed over this technology, Anselm reckoned the gushing fumes was a matter of exhaust. She attempted to approach the machine, but was repelled two paces for her one step forth. The heat coming off of the metal proved impenetrable. She couldn't get within an arm's reach to try operating a flue and the rapid decrease of visibility was soon to perish the possibility.
    Breathing through her sleeve, Anselm withdrew to where the tools hung and searched for something to carry water. The cement floor would restrain the fire to the firebox for as long as the air didn't ignite the walls and the levy was just a five minute ride outside of town. If she could get there and back with a couple of buckets...
    If only it wasn't so difficult to just see...
    She began to search herself for matches, coughed, and returned her arm to her mouth. She stuffed her pistol away, knelt near the floor, and continued to pat clothing with the freed hand. The mild exertion caused her to break a sweat.
    Anselm had separated herself a good ten running paces from the boiler and yet it felt as near as ever. The temperature of the room was building. A fiery snap turned her attention to an opaque mass of smoke expanding towards her.
    It wasn't safe to be in here.
    A stressful creak of metal sounded from within the glittering abyss. She abandoned the search to make for the exit. She tugged the handle. The door shook stiffly. She pulled--yanked--throttled it with both hands. She felt hastily for a bolt on the inside that could have been switched accidentally. None.
    She hit the door with her hand and shouted for her partner.
    She knocked and yelled and rattled the knob.
    The only visible shapes through the screen of pitch grey ash were six arching windows situated two bodies' length overhead. Stooping low, she ran her hand along the inside of the walls until she bumped a long, wooden object leaning in the corner. A perfectly sized pole with a rounded brass hook at the end, evidently used to access the window it was placed beneath. Rather than a ladder.
    She felt her way back to the door and began ramming it with the bottom of her foot. A sudden, deafening blast of sound withdrew her. A gasp surged her lungs with fuming ash and scolded her chest, rejected from her insides through a fit of heaves. She struck the door with her hand, then her body. She couldn't inhale. Her throat wouldn't open.
    The reflexive coughs that forced their way from the depths of her sternum were immediately exhausting. Excruciating. The weight of the atmosphere clutched and pulled at her. Lying her cheek to cement floor, she struggled to sip the sheet of oxygen beneath the carbon cloud. Chunks of burning coal radiated before her eyes, strewn by the exploded boiler. She watched them dim in the magnificence of fire climbing the wall.
    Was she going to die?
    Did she have a choice?
    The questions intermingled among the flashbulb memories of her waning mind. She held them fast to seek an answer and noticed the steel of her pistol against her breast. How many circumstances it had obligated her to decide...
    Anselm rolled onto her back, pulled her revolver, and blasted two 9 millimeter holes into the door. The third punched the lock cylinder straight through the wood. With a jab of her foot, the door swung, the clank of a keyhole escutcheon clattering to the ground. Sweeping her hat, she rolled off the ground and out the exit, letting blind feet carry her into a wall. Heat expelled into the cool night air; the atmosphere lifted its weight. She rested against the sturdy surface and tried to open her throat. She inhaled deeply and coughed. She coughed herself to her hands and knees, but with every inhale came fresh oxygen.
    When her lungs ventilated enough debris, she dropped onto her back to breathe restfully. The ground was unexpectedly hard, liken to the surface of the workshop's floor. She wiped the water from her eyes and observed her surroundings. She lie between two very tall walls, one of brick and one of some sort of stone. Or cement. Neither resembled the outside of the wooden shop.
    Below her was more cement. To her right, the alley opened into a perpendicular path of smooth, broad blocks. Beyond that, a broader path of what looked like dried tar. A road? A large road. A sizable building stood  at the opposite side of the road with windows that radiated a steady white light. The sharp incandescence shared an unmistakable resemblance to the daguerreotypes she'd seen of English arc lamps. And how could that be?
    Fixing on her hat, Anselm trotted gingerly beyond the alley to find a world where giant structures were dwarfed by superstructures the height of titans. Towers too tall to behold in the frame of her sight, that craned her neck and bored the heavens, illuminated the early evening with that same magnificent white light that poured from every pristine glass sheet.
    She stumbled. An strike of vertigo nearly dropped her. Her eyes escaped to the ground.
    This was an amazing hallucination. She must be dying inside of the workshop after all. But with such clairvoyance?
    She touched the street with a foot. The density of the tarlike surface was surprising. She noticed a pair of parallel yellow lines somehow painted down the entire center with impeccable precision and straightness.
    Something big, powerful and fast met Anselm's trailing vision. She pivoted, just barely avoiding a horseless metal carriage, it's glassy panels grazing the lapels of her duster as it shot by with a sharp blare. Hair and coattail blown by the gust dragged in its wake, she spun away and out of the road. By the time she could give the speeding automation a second glance, it had traveled far off, its mechanical growl fading as quickly as it came.
    The sound almost resembled that of a combustion engine, though she was sure she'd never heard of any that could propel such a massive object in such a compact form at the speed of a train. A self-propelled buggy with that brand of swiftness seemed as impossible as the tallness of the buildings that lined the sidewalk and the abundance of motionless light that touched every nook of the open street.
    She ran experimental hands over herself. She touched the metal of a nearby street lamp. Knocked on it. Another horseless carriage zoomed by. And another, oppositely. And another. The clouds they left smelt like fuel. Not coal. Perhaps naphtha. Or perhaps something else.
    It felt all too present to be a fantasy. She was dead or alive, not in between.
    Once more, she ventured out of the alley and carefully crossed the road to the glowing building on the opposite side. The sign above the door read Portman's, embellished with a pair of crossing bottles. The brand was engraved with impeccable accuracy into the wood of the door. She ran her finger on the inside of the letters.
    A weak cough of a near individual riled her attention.
    She stepped aside apologetically, taking the door as the man entered. The inside was a busy tavern, illuminated with lamps that hung from the ceilings and sat on tables. Unlike those lining the street, the electric light showing the bar and booths was as dim as the flame of a tired candle, saturated and yellow. The crowd was thick with men, yet not a wisp of tobacco smoke. Frenetic music played quietly throughout the room from an invisible omnipresent band.
    Above the bar, a rectangular mechanism flashed brightly colored images on its face. They appeared graphic and crisp and moved with the fluidity of real life without any visible projection, as though there was another world inhabiting it from the inside. The surface showed men in padding and helmets playing what she reckoned to be rugby within a glorious looking stadium. The images memorized Anselm so that she'd hardly noticed herself gravitate to the bar until a seated patron slurred at her:
    "That's some getup." A homely man suffixed this with a shot of alcohol. He smacked the glass down and checked her with a blutered gaze.
    She returned to the flashing images.
    "You a cowgirl? How 'bout I rustle you up a drink, eh? Heh."
    She began to circle the bar. The man latched onto her wrist. "Hey, I asked you-- I asked if you'd have a drink." She tugged away and found a gap in the otherwise occupied stools nearest the bartender and raised a finger. He was quick to come to her service.
    "Your poison, Miss?"
    "I was wondering if you could tell me where I am. I'm new to this place. Foreign."
    "I can tell! Your on Port Au Avenue in between Third and Fourth. Port Au runs east and west. Keep east, you'll hit the water in a few blocks," he chopped the air frontward, then pointed a thumb behind himself. "Go west, you'll eventually get to the Santa Vidora's square. Lovely brogue you have, by the way."
    "Santa Vidora is this town's name?"
    "Uh. Yeah. Capital of Uesica. Biggest city in the country..."
    "The country of Uesica?"
    He gave an incredulous chuckle. "Maybe I should have offered you a coffee."
    Anselm sunk into a stool and rubbed her face. "I'll have a tea, if possible. Milk. Sugar. Please."
    The bartender left. She slid her hands from her eyes to behold the images on the electric screen again. The possibility that she'd merely been transported to a different location wasn't conceivable when the very nature of the place was so physically abstract. It was as though she'd crossed into another world.
    "Watching the big Folders game, huh?" The man sitting in the neighboring stool raised his sights from a hand-held motion picture device not unlike the larger one hanging over the bar. He was gangly in build and sported short black hair styled up in a crest atop his head, like a bird. His grey eyes took Anselm in with the forwardness of an extrovert. He waggled his hand-held device at the big one. "Apparently they haven't won a consecutive pair of games in two years. Impressive. But I wouldn't know. Ya could say I'm about as familiar with the football here as you." A shrewd grin crossed his face before he lifted a frothy mug to it.
    The suggestion jolted her. Before she could find her voice, she was spun by the shoulder to the homely drunk man from earlier. He wobbled on his feet as he tried to point a finger and speak at the same time.
    "Hey, I asked a question. I asked if you wanted a drink."
    "No thank you." As soon as she turned back to the gangly man, the other yanked her around again.
    "Hey! Hey. Don't be a b***h about it. Especially after you just...ignored me."
    "Sorry." Politesse was not a natural self defense mechanism for the deputy, particularly in the presence of someone willing to lay their hands upon her. Traditionally, she would have asserted such an individual back to their seat--manually, if need be--though her mind was in such disorder that the proper response was unavailable. It was difficult to justify any sense of certainty when the very concept of the man's interaction with her seemed delusive.
    Providentially, the wiry, crest-haired fellow neighboring her had the present wits to interject, slipping between Anselm and the drunk to grab him by the shoulder, spin him around, and kick him into and onto one of the billiard tables. Balls jumped off the felt. The players threw their hands up.
    A hefty black skinned man was quick to come from the far end of the bar to strike a palm into the crest-haired stranger's chest. "You mess with my buddy, punk? I will beat y--!" The threat was discontinued by a speedy jab to the nose. He staggered away, only to be yanked back into place as the another punch was reeled.
    "Los sentimos, pero no hablo smalltalk, m**********r!" The crest-haired stranger throttled a sideward blow to the man's jaw, knocking him cold to the ground.
    The stranger proceeded to chug beer as a couple men from the wrecked billiards table rushed over. He finished with a burp just as one came swinging a pool stick. He dodged, shattered his emptied mug against the assailant's skull, yanked the stick from his hand, cracked it over the second man's head, then used the remaining half to beat the previous individual to the floor.
    The action set off a domino effect at the bar as every resulting physical contact, accidental or otherwise, was returned with brute force until half the tavern was thrown into a violent discord. Anselm watched the crest-haired stranger fending himself from a growing mob of aggressors, one of which bumped her backwards into another body. She was effectively thrown between two others who grabbed her by the arms and slammed her to the bartop. They looked surprised to find a female face beneath the wide brim of her slouch hat. With a spry hoist of her lower half, she rolled onto the bar, slipped her arms out from theirs, grabbed the backs of both their heads with fistfuls of hair, and slammed them into the counter.
    Someone tried to snatch her ankles. She got up to boot him in the face, then trotted to the end of the bar to descend off a vacant stool. Another person snatched at her clothes. With teeth grit, she wheeled a fist into the side of their face
    "Ow! S**t!"
    Oh. It was that crest-haired guy.
    A few barflies perused them out the door, but nobody was motivated to give chase beyond the exit. They shook their fists and returned to the tavern as the two escaped down the sidewalk. At the end of the block, they slowed their jog.
    "You must be Mona," the stranger deduced through huffs.
    "Anselm is just fine. Deputy Anselm."
    They came to a halt.
    "F****n' whatever..."
    Anselm put her hands behind her head as she caught her breath. The two individuals eyed one another up. "How do you know me?"
    "I was told your name and what you look like. That's it. Oh, and that you had a badass Irish accent. Welcome to Uesica, by the way. It's a mock-up of the United States. That's why everyone speaks English... But there's no such thing as England, technically, so how the hell does that work? Or maybe there is. I suck at explaining stuff. Hold on..." Leaning into his knees, he huffed a few more times, then extended his posture with one more heavy exhale. "Yeah. I needed that. Been feeling like punching someone since I got here."
    "What is here? Where am I and who are you?"
    "I'm Bismuth. And I told you where you are. 'Where' isn't really the question to ask, it's more of a what that needs to be answered.  Like, 'what just happened?' Wish I could give you a good answer, but I can't. I can give you a s****y answer. You want a s****y answer?"
    "I want a real explanation."
    "Funny you use the word 'real,' because you're actually a fictitious character created by some author who decided he would relocate you from your original story, temporarily into this one in order to help the protagonist with...some bullshit. That's where things get vague, but you should probably chew on the 'fictional character' thing before we get into the rest." He pointed at her blank expression. "Ah, see? Told you the answer was f*****g dumb."
    "I don't... What?"
    "Call it magic if that helps you get a grip."
    "I don't believe in magic."
    He began to cross the street. "Sure you do. Irish people call it divine intervention." Anselm stayed on the sidewalk at the sight of a speeding locomotive carriage. The vehicle screeched to a halt just as she braced for its impact with the careless Bismuth. "Yo, slow down, a*****e!" He beckoned her to come along.
    Able to get a still view of the carriage, Anselm noticed it was differently shaped than the others she'd glimpsed, with a sleek, flat body colored a hot red. Accompanied by the low, burning strum that rumbled from its core, it reminded her of the overheating boiler. The tophalf was plated by windows. Through them, she could see a man seated inside with one hand on a turnwheel and another flipping them a middle finger.
    "I don't dismiss phenomena with religion, either," she continued the conversation on the other sidewalk.
    "This'll be a hard pill to swallow." Bismuth pulled that peculiar rectangular device he'd been messing with earlier from one of his pockets and pressed a button on its edge. The surface lit up with a cyan hue that refracted upon his face as they stepped beneath the shade of the alleyway she'd arrived from. She found the wooden door she came through and touched the intact doorknob. She opened it. Nothing but a dark corridor on the other side.
    "Don't go in there. I think that's a crackhouse."
    "What does that phase mean?"
    "Like a drug house.
    She shut it. "Opium den."
    "Yeah."
    "This was the workshop I was trying to break out of just minutes ago. It was on fire. This was the door I escaped through."
    "Well, now it's a crackhouse."
    "Where are we going?"
    "Here. I just wanted to get out of the open street in case you have a mental breakdown over the tome of eldritch lore I'm about to show you."
    "Is it in there?" She leaned over the mystical little device he was fingering at.
    "Nah, I'm just trying to finish this level. Sorry... One sec."
    Anselm teetered back as Bismuth prodded the screen with his thumbs, tongue between teeth. A blocky tune whispered from the blinking device, filling the seconds of silence before the man redirected his attention to produced a small book from his back pocket. He handed it to her and returned to the bleeping device. "Might wanna take a seat before you open that. It could be a real mindfuck for you."
    She found a backdoor stoop and sat with the book, turning it in her hand. Aside from the cryptic title, MadFish, printed on the cover, it appeared featureless. Opening the face, she found no content section inside. The very first page of the book simply began...
    --with her.
*
    Bradley's way through the kitchen tinkled with the crunch of charred wood fragments and plastic underfoot. A halfway scorched cabinet door fell off a hinge as he opened it. A dog barked somewhere outside the soot-opaque window. The stove still worked, so he brushed the pieces of microwave plexiglass off the burners to make eggs. He ate them while checking his email, packed his laptop, and roamed into the morning with distractions locked behind the door.
    As per usual this month, Bradley greeted Ben Trovato where he loitered at the corner of his apartment complex. The slight, sleepy-looking man sat atop someone's discarded CRT television with his back to the alley wall and his hands occupied by a spiral-bind legal pad. Bradley was sure he was around his own age, somewhere near the beginnings of his twenties, give or take. Having a like-aged hobo outside his door made him feel uncomfortable, like a ghost of yet to come if he were to lose his job and start shooting dope. Or vise versa.
    The squatter replied with a salute of his pencil. Veiling his features were a pair of fiery rectangular shades. Of the weeks Mr. Trovato had been loitering on the side of the building, Bradley never saw the eyes behind those glasses. He must do a lot of that dope.
    "When you you going to finish that thing you been writing?"
    Ben chewed the eraser of his pencil. Bradley wondered if he chewed the opposite side to keep the graphite sharp. "Never, probably," he spoke around it. "You going to work?"
    "Yep."
    "You work Sundays now? No weekend?"
    "I don't do anything on the weekend anyway."
    "No girl? I thought you had a girlfriend."
    He wished hobos wouldn't ask about his personal life. Particularly, he wished Ben wouldn't acknowledge that he's acknowledged his girlfriend coming to and from the apartment. Bradley ignored the subject. "You want a bacon egg and cheese?"
    "Tell them not to put pepper and ketchup on it, yeah?"
    "I have been."
    "I see... Then..." Ben flipped the finger at the bagel shop next door. "F**k you, Best Baguette."
    Bradley went into the bagel shop and returned with a breakfast sandwich and stayed to witness the unavailing. Ben opened the bagel to show a lack of ketchup, however a stern expression passed his face before he could tear away his first bite.
    "Pepper?"
    He nodded.
    Bradley tried to look as sympathetic as he could about the free meal.
    "They need to Baguette a better line cook." Chewing on his peppery sandwich, Ben bid a farewell with a waggle of his writing utensil. "Arrivederci."
    Bradley left for the bus stop and was passing through at the gleaming front of the Machivel Media corporate building by eight-thirty.
    The office he worked in was rigged with the chintzy trinket becoming of Chinese food restaurant to detract the manager from whatever computerized social media network she was occupying her time with to notice the comings and goings of the office. Bradley got to work a half an hour early every day to avoid social interaction with coworkers, though Edith sat unavoidably at the end of the foyer. A practiced passive aggressor, she was unavoidable. With smug composure, the patient beast forced an over-the-shoulder greeting out of him on his way to his cubical.
    He unfolded his laptop on his desk and began to toil. Ten blogs were due in three hours. Three and a half thousand words, maybe. He automatically engaging other employees with a mechanical good morning as they began to arrived. He'd skip lunch again to grind the work out, blogging beneath the cybernetic guise of five different users: "Johnny_Fatstax," "Winkywaffles," "TheRiskyBiscuit35," "CallMeLazy," and the quasi-famous internet personality, "MadFish."
    Of all the bloggers he'd invented for Machivel Media, MadFish may have been the closest resemblance. A parody of himself, in a way, whose opinions were a product of Bradley's cynicism, but not of his own opinion. They were inceptually that of Machivel Media. Or, more accurately, the sponsors of Machivel Media. Known for over-the-top similes and highly subjective rants, MadFish's objective changed as his viral success began to yield the majority of Bradley's revenue. What was once a comedy prop became a tool to bedevil Machivel's competitors.
    "Now in a can!" was one of MadFish's memes and a big contributor to the beginning of his undeserved fame, created by the critique of a beverage company for their obnoxious use of buzzwords while featuring a cylindrical aluminum container as the new selling point of their product. It was now clever to suffix promotional brags with "Now in a can!".
    Memeasaur.com had a catalog of prime examples:

    "Joe Slim's Trim Gym workout tape will tone that tummy fat. Now in a can!"
    And,
    "Bow, troglodytes, my new Crappel thaiPhone has got one-jillion giggabutts of storage."
    "But does it...comeinacan?"
    
    Clever girl, internet.
    That was an innocent time. A time when Bradley could make fun of soda cans as some kind of underhand political agenda, before the pseudonym had superseded the man, swaying minds and saturating pop-culture with t-shirts. If Bradley could sell paraphernalia with himself printed on the front, he wouldn't need a nine-to-fiver anymore.
    Being beaten by an alter ego wouldn't be so debasing if MadFish could ever bother to influence opinions that didn't involve topics like whether or not so-and-so peanut butter had a racist brand mascot, but years of compliments on his high performance built his maker's confidence to a standard too high to seriously consider his own subservience to Machivel and its fictitious minions. And the boom of the business was too loud for Bradley to think over.
    So loud, as it were, his intern had to break through to him with the impact of her tablet computer on his desk. Not his desk, actually, but rather their desk. His and Gin's desk. Since Spring, Gin Rumi was Bradley's underling.
    The process of their office coexistence was a cubical equivalent of a shotgun wedding. Helped along with nepotism as the family friend of the beastly office manager, she was hired at this wing of Machivel Media to draw a series of editorial cartoons for a local news group and was referred to him for assistance. He was as proficient in the subject of cartoon strips as anyone in the office (which is to say, not at all), but his expertise lie in his versatility. With Gin's illustration skills and his lead on the project's topics and direction, the result was two dozen popular daily strips within two months. So they were married at the desk by the corporate executives for their beautiful contraception of newspaper style funnies. Gin even designed his MadFish logo, featuring a can with a grumpy looking cartoon fish on the label.
    The two were close in age, which may have been a part of the reason they'd been paired, even if the niceties of this trait were relative. She was fresh out of high school while he had graduated to drinking age, dividing them to opposite sides of the line between teenager and young adult that Bradley felt to be emphasized by their diametric personalities. Bradley liked to consider himself a stringent realist while he saw Gin as meticulous yet lazy anorak. A regular sitcom situation.
    She seemed uncharacteristically effervescent for so early in the day, the usually dozy girl grinning behind her digital tablet. Bradley continued to type, acknowledging her with but a glance. "Spare me the suspense," it said.
    Trammeled, she turned the monitor away. So easily shut down. It was a little weird. A spry and snub-nosed brunette, the girl had a sparse Siberian quality to her looks. She could be considered endearing from an outside perspective. Maybe her jaw was a little too square and her skin was too pale and her clothes were kind of shabby and her body wasn't quite full or tall or built, but she was fetching enough to have one wonder why she seemed so generally out of touch. It was hard to pinpoint, but the nuances of her behavior suggested a disconnect, her presence often leaving peers sequestered or overwhelmed. She was a juxtaposition that Bradley could never quite understand. Most of the time, he didn't mind to.
    "Uh. I finished the intro to our project."
    This news found his attention. He had been watching her work on the essay project throughout yesterday. It'd been the first time in a long time since he had seen her so diligent. A glow of dignity lit her face as she awaited a reaction, large, spruce green eyes glimmering like those of an animal poised patiently in its burrow from beneath the visor of an orange softcap.
    He felt a twinge of pride in his intern and insisted she read. Gin cleared her throat for dramatic poise...
    "'We begin inside a quaint office comprising one of the many department' (oops, that should be plural. 'Departments') 'of the efficacious freelance internet content creation firm, Machivel Media, where a single neon display of creation shined brightest amongst cubicle number B4. Unlike the other branches that existed for individualized services, the pretentious team of cubicle B4 took no single specialty, but handled any and all content that overflowed Santa Vidora's Machivel Media building's second-story office. From graphic art to newsletters, B4 took all the odds and ends, ever zealous and thorough in their work; ever committed; a peerless duo of efficiency, which brings us to our protagonists:
    Eight in the morning, enter the adorable Gin Rumi, prolific in her work, charismatic in her character. She bids hello to Edith at the front desk and passes through the office to her cubicle. Bradley Fisher, munificent work ethic and generously early to work, is already chipping away at their next assignment. His hair of flamey orange hides a downcast face as he steadily--'"
    "Wait. Stop."
    "What?"
    "'A single neon display of creation'?"
    "Yep. Shining brightly amongst the cubicle number B4."
    "Why'd you call us pretentious?"
    "I meant like we're respectable."
    "You mean... You mean 'prestigious?' That word?"
    "Oops. Yes."
    "And what does 'munificent' mean?"
    "Munificent was a compliment to your character!"
    "And what's it mean?"
    "I don't remember, but I'm pretty sure it fits."
    "Don't abuse the thesaurus, Gin."
    What Gin had been reading off was an account of how she and Bradley had come to be under the firm of Machivel Media. Secretly, it was intended to be an oblique exaltation of the company, a two-faced tactic to persuade people into humanizing and sympathizing with a large media firm as a modest almsgiver for good folks like Bradley and Gin who have been through deep, inspirational situations.
    Even if those situations never happened.
    The employees were encouraged to stretch the truth in order to make for an inspirational tale. If that didn't constitute entirely ignoring the truth altogether, they sure weren't admonished for doing so and nobody bothered to ask.
    Most tasks that weighed down on Bradley and Gin, once finished and turned in to be replaced with the next, felt personally insignificant, with no consolation in the fact that most of the publicized work was written under pseudonyms to give the impression of fresh personalities. There was little time to think about what was being done, which was usually bound by strict discretion, but this particular assignment was an exception. How could anyone have authority over another's autocraticy? The two were working toward something that felt like an expression of their own. It was a rarity.
    And it made both of them edgy.
    Despite the fact that he was sour as a lemon about it already, some desperate part of Bradley that assumed himself to be a reasonable fellow gave his attitude the benefit of the doubt, so to be sure of his opinion of the work, he read Gin's introduction over with his own two eyes. He confirmed the opinion.
    "Gin, I know where this is going already. First few paragraphs, and you're already exaggerating. You're going to dramatize the whole ordeal."
    "You want a boring story?"
    "I want the truth."
    "The truth? Okay." She hunched over the desk and began typing her fingers against it, "Gin Rumi walked into Machivel Corp and handed them a resume. A week later, she got a call for an interview, was hired, and was put into a cubical with the grouchiest guy in the office Bradley Fisher..."
    "You're oversimplifying!"
    "Now I'm oversimplifying!"
    "Yes! There's more to the story than the bare minimum. What about our individual motivations for applying? And how about what came after? How we helped carry this floor's office up the ladder?"
    "I've only been here for six months. I didn't carry anything up any ladders. What else is there to tell?"
    "Plenty!"
    "Plenty of nothin'! We needed money, we got hired, met, worked our butts off, and here we are! Roll credits!"
    It's irritating to hear the truth.
    The two argued until Edith came waddling over to calm the situation. With the administrator's help, Gin's will succumbed to Bradley's. It was begrudgingly agreed that he would be the writer. This relaxed him. He could finish, do it right, and he wouldn't have to babysit someone through it.

    It wasn't atypical for Bradley to commandeer the workload for what he believed to be the best interest of a project. And Gin would typically roll over and let him. They rarely argued. In retrospect, he'd realized that having to raise his voice over her's suggested a refreshing glint of passion for their work. But this notion fizzled with the response that came a week later. Same time, same place, same Bradley grinding away at the desk while the email sat unattended at the top of his laptop's screen. Having received a forwarded version on her own account, Gin pointed it out.
    "Tell me about it."
    "It's from the firm admins, about the thing we wrote."
    Stifling an impulse to correct that pronoun, he minimized his work window and checked the in-box:

 From: [email protected]
 To: [email protected]
    
    Dear Valued Employee,

    Your most recent project has been rejected due to unsuitable content. An edited portable document of the file has been attached to this email to highlight our suggested corrections. Please  redact all liberal innuendos and profane language from the essay and resubmit by 5:00 tomorrow afternoon.
    Thank you.
        Machivel Media Corporation Staff

    The message revolted Bradley more with every re-read he bothered to humor it. To his left, Gin chewed on a pencil with an apprehensive fixation on his face. She shot out of her own chair as he rose from his. He addressed her with forced repose, showing his cell phone. "I'm just making a call."
    "To who?"
    "A call."
    "Tuh-- what? I said 'to who?!'"
    "The headquarters. I want to get whoever responded to my essay on the phone."
    "Our essay."
    "'Our.'"
    "Do it after lunch."
    "Why?"
    "You're gonna be too aggressive."
    "That's the point." He began dialing. She grabbed his wrist. He tore it from her.
    "See?! Touchy!"
    "Don't touch me, and I won't be so touchy."
    She pushed herself between him and the cubical to snatch the phone. He held it further back. "Gin. Stop." Stiff-arming her against the wall, he made for the exit to take the call outside.
    "Give it an hour, willya?!" She called across the office, turning heads. When he didn't pay attention, she perused. "Cmon, Brad." She tried for the phone again. He held it over her head. She hopped around him as he tried to move around her. They danced in a tango of clumsy steps until Bradley tripped, taking them both into a neighboring cubical. In an effort to break the fall, he tore down a shelf, pouring files onto the floor while the two crash landed halfway over a crowded desktop. Something under Gin--adventitiously pinned beneath the combined weight--cracked.
    "Was that plastic or bone?"
    "Ow, ow, ow. Get off."
    "I'm trying." He blindly slapped the walls for leverage over his awkward position. Thankfully (or not), Edith had rushed over to help Bradley remove himself.
    "What are the two of you doing?!"
    "We tripped," he said. He gave Gin a hand up, a keyboard sliding off the desktop from beneath her. Keys clattered across the floor. She gasped and stooped to gather them.
    "Look at this mess! Looks like you owe Dillon a keyboard!" Edith's words contradicted the evident personal offense she was taking over the incident, an offense far greater than Dillon would care to take.
    "It was accidental," Bradley defended. "Take it out of our paycheck. As a matter of fact, don't take it out of our pay, because I'll go buy the replacement for him right after work."
    "You will replace it. And don't think Dillon won't know."
    "Tell him! He's getting a new keyboard out of this!"
    "Oh!" Edith jerked her head around to share her incredulity with an unseen audience. "Okay, so horse-playing at work and breaking other people's things is okay as long as we can replace them. Okay... You know you're going to have to find a way to screw this shelf back in?"
    "Yeah.  I'll have to figure out what tool I can use to drive a screw into a wall."
    "A...screwdriver?" Gin asked. A genuine guess until the evidence of tardy self-awareness indicated itself with a proud smirk.
    Edith clearly waited for her mind to catch up. The best retort could offer was to turn her back to them. "Clean this up. Now."
    The manager returned to the front and Gin held a fist in which to pound in mutual appreciation for frustrating the boss. She instead received a look of disapproval. He transferred this to the messy intermission before them, certain that he would lose his nerve by the time he got around to calling HQ. Gin had got what she wanted. She began to clean the mess, but he promptly advising her to finish what she had been working on instead.
    The remaining day was particularly difficult, and Bradley slogged out of the office at mid afternoon with the bittersweet relief of escape. Ben noticed his disposition as he passed that same alleyway at the corner of the apartment complex. Considering the the irony of complaining about work to a hobo, Bradley ensured him the day had went fine.
*
    Revelations dawned throughout the course of the week to challenge and fortify Bradley's repressed ideologies until his constitution against Machivel absorbed him with such despise that he didn't bother to notice his coworker's own growing paranoia. Gin, too, was afraid for another, although related, reason. She knew of Bradley's industrious ambition and understood nothing would get done without it. She had only just enough motivation to do what she was told, and with no one to cardiograph tasks, she would care little about figuring them out for herself. And she was frightfully self-aware of this.
    The two sat next to one another, exchanging only the necessities in verbal communication. Most of their articulation was through body language, each shift plucking the taut strings of tension with the small, sharp noise of grievances.
    A particular event ensued the following month that broke the cord with a tug. Bradley, not a minute later than timely, traipsed into the office, prepared for work. Transient curiosity passed his mind at the empty front desk. He found the manager standing at his desk instead, waited with a speech prepared. He could see it in her distorted mug. He didn't need to ask anything aloud. He just gumshoed to the edge of his workspace with a question on his face, diverted her planetoid mass, and sat down.
    "You're not seriously doing this."
    "You're going to have to be more specific, Edith."
    "Did you expect no repercussion to that email you sent to the executives?"
    Ducking beneath his desk, he plugged his laptop in and opened it up. He stared at the booting screen, clicking and jiggling his mouse.
    "Are you going to tell me what you were thinking?"
    "I revised the essay just like they asked and resent it. If they got an issue with the new version, then I can't be responsible for the project anymore, because I'm not doing it all over."
    Edith swelled. "It's not about the essay..."
    She handed over a printout of an email thread between his business email and Machivel's. The first was from the corporate executives concerning the original, apparently unfit, first draft of his essay. The second email was his revised essay. Inexplicably, beneath that was a third email. It was sent from his email addressed and directed to Machivel Corp.


 From: [email protected]
 To: [email protected]
    
    Dear Machivel Zwangsarbeiters,

    Your most recent review of my autobiographical essay has been morally rejected due to numerous examples of stupidity. Nonetheless, I've submitted to muzzle my self-expression and modify it the way you suggested. Please redact all following criticism to a nearby mirror and remember to pay me on Friday.
    Thank you.
        Valued Employee, Bradley Fisher


     He read it twice. "This isn't my message."
    "What do you mean it isn't yours?"
    "I mean, I don't even know what a 'zwangsarbeiter' is."
    "It was sent by your email address."
    "This one is my email, the blank one with the attachment. This one isn't." He held it to her.
    "It has your address at the top."
    "I see that, but I did not write this."
    "Who did, Mr. Fisher?"
    "I don't know. I've never seen this. When was it sent?"
    "The day you re-submitted your essay, according to the date."
    "How is that possible?"
    "You're going to have to show me your email history."
    "Like hell I am."
    "Like hell you are if you want to stay employed here."
    Bradley looked to her.
    "You've been slacking off lately..." she pointed out.
    "And yet, I still put out more than the majority of the people working here."
    "You've been slacking off and causing discord in the office. Every other day, I hear you arguing with the intern, distracting the other workers. You've been poorly tempered for weeks. I've had enough of it."
    "Are you considering firing me for a poor temper?"
    "I'm considering firing you for not owning up to this completely inappropriate email. If you have a problem with your superiors, I suggest you confront them on a mature level."
    "I didn't write that email!"
    She passed over his interruption. "You talk to them or a manager about the situation rather than deciding to fly off the handle one day, sending hotheaded insults."
    This lit a fuse that had been shortening daily. Bradley slapped his laptop shut and stood to her face. "Two years I've been working here. I've turned out more material than anyone on my level. I don't gossip and I don't gripe. I think I've shown enough dedication to be given the benefit of the doubt on this one."
    "I like how you give Gin no credit toward your prosperous time here."
    "She's been here for months, I've been here for years. She's got nothing to do with it. Or this essay, for that matter." He shook the email printout.
    "She must have plenty to do with your defense; she must make up fifty percent of the recent achievements at work you're boasting about, since she is fifty percent of this cubicle."
    "This cubicle is a one-man team. She is a useless slacker you assigned to weigh me down."
    "You're going to insult your partner while you throw accusations at me now?"
    "There's no excuse for her to be working here except as some pawn in your convoluted ploy to keep me from breaking through this place's glass ceiling."
    "If you think I've ever been afraid of you taking my job..."
    "In case you are, I'll put your mind at ease and assure you that I never intended to sit on my a*s and complain for a living."
    "Then I hope you intend to be unemployed, because you no longer work here."
    "I'll delete my blog profiles then," he said without a hitch. "I'll start with MadFish."
    She snorted like a pig. "Oh, no. They'll be staying. They're our property, not yours. Especially MadFish. Harm a hair on his fictitious head, and you'll pay for it."
    Bradley bit his tongue to keep it from insulting her gelid face. Instead, he crumpled the email printout and dropped it at her feet. On his way out, he nearly collided with his ex-working-partner. With a twist, he gusted past Gin without responding to her hesitant hello.
*
    Bradley's circadian rhythm was none the wiser to being unemployed. It woke him up at seven O'clock and tossed him around for a couple of hours before he got up to get dressed. The first shirt he grabbed from his drawer was, of course, a MadFish shirt. "Now in a can!" He made a mental note to desecrate it with fire later on.
    On the topic of burning things, he wondered on his way to the kitchen how long he'd now have to procrastinate on renovating the burned-down parts of the room. He looked at his shattered microwave oven, deducting it from his bank account.
    Despite common misconception, utensils aren't inherently dangerous to microwave. Rounded utensils do nothing and pronged utensils (almost) harmlessly spark at the corners, but there's always Murphy's Law acting upon the decision to bombard a sparking conductor with electromagnetic radiation, and, although Bradley hadn't consciously decided to leave a fork on his plate of leftover lasagna, taking on twice the workload lately, he'd been forced to bring some of the work home, which interfered with his sleep, which caused him to leave a fork in the microwave while he dozed off at his desk. So...!
    Something in that meat sauce must have been flammable enough to catch fire and render two cabinets crispified. Amazingly, the probably loud process of a microwave blowing up and his kitchen setting afire had not disturbed his nap until the smoke alarm went off.
    The silver lining was that he was forced to avoid microwaved garbage for these past few weeks and try his hand at using a stove. He'd been eating a lot of eggs. He ate some this morning while he prowled the internet for work. The prowling was out of impulse more so than desperation. He had somewhat of a nest egg in the bank, though had little incentive on dwindling that cash away. The inability to spend irreplaceable money would make him a hermit until he found a source of income, socializing only to the extent of contacting his girlfriend, not that that was far from his usual lifestyle. He'd spent the previous two years single and with little use for the world. During the rare points in time in that period of his life when he wasn't being productive, he was sleeping. His first lover was a fling in middle school, he carried some short-lived relationships throughout high school, then remained thoroughly antisocial until he found Annika, who was willing to put up with his quirks provided he tend to her mandate of boyfriend obligations.
    She was a no-nonsense girl and was probably going to be irate when he explained the loss of his job. Even he was irate with himself, and it wasn't even his fault.
    A knock at the door made him cough on his orange juice. The prospect of being found home during work hours contradicted itself. Annika wouldn't visit while he wasn't home, but therein lie the difference between reasonable fear and paranoia: the reason. The knock was anomalously gentle, however. The modest tap of a stranger. He couldn't imagine anyone else who'd be dropping by unannounced, though, and he mostly wished they'd just leave.
    When the visitor knocked again, he relented to open the door. Of all people to be visiting, a fleeting sense of surprise passed through him at the sight of Gin. Fleeting, and quickly overwhelmed by a profound sense of annoyance at her buoyant greeting:
    "Mornin'."
    "What are you doing here, Gin?"
    "Er... I heard you were fired."
    "I quit, actually."
    "Oh."
    "How did you get my address?"
     She was stricken promptly by the deadpan attitude. Gin faltered, deflating on the spot as the conversation nosedived. "I've, uh, seen your address a bunch of times. It's on your portfolio. Did you know we live a couple blocks apart?"
    "My phone number was written on my portfolio, too."
    "I know that. Eight four five, two six""
    "Sooo, you decided to just show up here instead of calling?"
    "I live right on the other block. I just wanted to talk about somethin'."
    "Yeah? Personally deliver your condolences?"
    "No."
    "Okay, look, I don't need pity, Gin, especially from you, who, honestly, was one of the reasons I flew off the handle in the first place and got myself fi"err quit."
    That last statement derailed whatever reply the girl had bottled up. Prepared lips snapped shut before she refreshed a response. "Me? What the heck did I do?!"
    Bradley ensued with a punctual sigh. "Imagine all the stresses of working at a company like Machivel and combine it with a co-worker you have to carry on your shoulders for eight hours, six days a week."
    "Wooow. Maybe I shouldn't have come by after all..."
    "No, you shouldn't have." He allowed an awkward silence to really emphasize how genuinely he meant that.
    She puffed up as the finality of the statement sunk in. "So you're going to blame me 'cuz you got 'firequit'." She finger-quoted the word in cross-eyed mockery. "Whatever, Bradley. If you're gonna be a jerk, I'll leave you alone now."
    "Goodbye, Gin."
    "Bye, jerk."
    She hesitated, then cut a way for the stairs. He leaned out to watch her go before shutting the door. Justified, he returned to his breakfast.
*
    Gin slumped on docks of the harbor. She watched an old lady on a nearby bench feed the hobnobbing pigeons. Like Gin, the old lady was a routine visitor of the harbor. Lonely and bored, probably, she spent her time feeding the birds. The woman caught her eyes and Gin offered a half smile. She didn't return the gesture. She never did. Gin wondered if the lady had ever noticed her at all each and every day.
    Gin extracted the stylus from her digital tablet and began to draw the brittle woman in her hunkered posture. She felt a little sorry for the woman. The notion reminded her of how she felt about what she had done, visiting Bradley at his home. She still didn't really understand what the big deal was. She'd mistaken him for someone who could appreciate an unexpected visit. She'd forgotten he had someone to be and talk with whenever he wanted. He had a girlfriend, so why would he want visitors? Stupid of her.
    The old woman got up and left.
    Removing her hat, Gin laid on the dock. The sky was bright and blue and cold. She liked the cold weather, usually finding solice in the slowness of the fall season, but the loss of her employment made everything harder to appreciate. Now what was she going to do?
    Some pigeons were disturbed into flight, crossing between her and the sky. She picked herself up to a tall, broad man crossing the pier. Without ado, he turned onto her dock and sat right down next to her, crossed his legs over the water and leaning his weight back on his hands. He was large and proportionate, like an Adonis, garbed in a silk waistcoat and suit pants. He had trimmed facial hair and clear blue eyes that mimmicked the sky she'd been gazing at. Sticking out from between his flat teeth was a thin cylindrical engine expelling steam in wisps from a glowing blue tip. When he plucked it out to smile, she liked him right away.
    "Drawing, huh? Am I interrupting?"
    "Oh. Yes. And, no. Not really. Um." She patted her hands against her thighs. "Are...are you here by yourself?"
    The man nodded and over his shoulder, westward. "Just taking a breather from work, Genièvre."
    "You know me? Aaand you can pronounce my name."
    "You've probably heard of me, too. 'Leaven,' CEO of Machivel Media?"
    Her posture erected.
    "Don't get all nervous." He unlaced a hand for a shake. The gesture was lent with a soft, undemanding embrace of fingers. "You worked on the second story office, right?
    "Ye'sir, but""
    "Mr. Leaven. Don't call me 'sir'."
    "I got fired yesterday."
    "I heard about it. Not totally convinced of the circumstances. You'll come into the office and talk about it, won't you? You're not busy here."
    "Uh, no. I mean yes, I can. Okay."
    "I can give you a lift to the office if you'd like to come along now. No pressure to take the ride, though, I'll be there all day."
    He patted her knee and got up. Caught up in the suspense of not knowing what to do, Gin sprung to her feet and caught up at a brisk pace. His car was idling quietly in the nearby lot: shiny, sleek and black. With a paper-white smile, he opened the passenger side for her. The beige leather interior was warm.
    A familiar tune played from the stereo.
    "Oh," she said. "I like this song."
    "Huh. Good taste."
    They pulled out of the parking lot. The car revved softly as they cruised back into the city.
*
    Bradley wondered what that ridiculous girl was doing at his place on a workday. The nerve of her, dropping by to satiate her morbid curiosity, using his information to locate him. He hadn't written it on his portfolio as an invitation for people to drop by for breakfast.
    He shut the sink off and began drying his plate.
    The vaguely creepy action had him wonder what other personal information she bothered to commit to memory. Had she looked through his portfolio? Through his cell phone? He had told her his PC login password once, which was the same password he used for most things. Including his email. He wouldn't be surprised if she committed that to memory just to snoop through his...email.
    He stopped drying.
    Gin knew his email password.
    Almost breaking it, Bradley dropped the dish into the sink and trampled down the apartment stairs. Outside, there was no sign of her up the road. He ran to the corner of the complex to ask Ben which way she'd gone, but he was missing. The one time in his life he needed a homeless man's help, and he was busy. What could he possibly be doing? Stealing more pencils?
    Gin had gestured eastward when she mentioned living a block away. He grabbed his bicycle and headed for the harbor.
*
    Veraciously, Gin smoothed the front of her tee as she stood beside the CEO of her previous place of employment inside a private elevator hidden behind the lobby from the regular use of employees and visitors. Despite the public elevator sustaining crowds, it was much smaller than the spacious, polished marble cubical she and Leaven rode, complete with ambient soft jazz.
    Leaven gave her fidgety movements an up-and-down as he pressed a button high on the elevator panel. "You look nervous."
    "I just feel under-dressed."
    "Don't worry, there's nobody you need to impress here. Only me."
    She forced a chuckle.
    Up to the 45th level and down a corridor, Leaven brought her to his office and gestured to the chair on the nearest side of his desk. On top of the desk was a chromium Newton's cradle and a golden name plaque with "Leaven" as the sole word engraved into it, leaving Gin to wonder whether it was his given or surname. She sat down and glimpsed warily at the CEO hanging his coat and decided to discreetly pull one of the metal spheres of the Newton's cradle whilst his back was turned.
    He returned to sit in the larger, more leathery chair across from her. With snub amusement, he pulled the cradle away and seized the clacking spheres without a break in eye contact.
    "You from this area?"
    "I live pretty close."
    "I meant are you from Santa Vi."
    "Oh. Yes. I mean, no. I'm not from this city, no."
    "Where you from originally?"
    "Little Callow on Kallipyge Island."
    He spun his seat away, occupying himself with a filing cabinet. "A child of Sister Archipelago. That explains some things."
    "It does?"
    "Your attitude, specifically."
    Leaven looked over his shoulder as she mentally searched herself for transparencies.
    "It's a compliment," he added.
    "Have you been to the islands?"
    "Not to all them, but I have a timeshare right on the island your from, on the mountain near Dullard. And I've gone down to your town of Little Callow plenty. The people are very easy going. Like you."
    "Oh."
    "It's a rare trait here." He kicked the drawer shut and turned to his desk again, opening a folder on top of it. "How old are you?"
    "Eighteen."
    "You live with mom 'n' pop?"
    "No, I'm on my own."
    "And in the big city. My, my. Self-sufficient damsel, aren't we?"
    Gin hesitated at the damsel moniker. "I had help. A friend hired me into Machivel."
    "Edith?"
    Gin nodded, a little unsteadied by his knowledge.
    "And she also fired you, so what's that all about?"
    "Um..."
    "No worries, Genièvre, I'm already on your side. I'm just curious of the story."
    "Can you call me Gin? I don't really like my full name."
    "What's wrong with it?"
    "I just don't think it fits me."
    "Okay. Gin-- tell me what happened with Edith."
    "I'm not really sure."
    "As best you can, then."
    "I was hired to work with Bradley Fisher..."
    "Your mentor."
    "I guess."
    "Well, you worked beneath him, didn't you?"
    "Uh-huh."
    "Go on."
    "I worked with him for a few months as an intern, and he's kind of a stern guy, but also a really good employee. Um, and Edith said he sent an email to the superiors here about one of the projects we were assigned. The email was really sarcastic and mean, so I guess the executives told Edith, and she fired him? And I argued with her about it, so she fired me too."
    "Why'd you argue?"
    "I don't think Bradley wrote the email. I don't think he'd do that."
    She left the factor of being too scared to work alone as a motivation to herself.
    "You stuck up for him then? I really do need to look at the standards of my middle management. That takes tenacity. Leadership quality. Not many people have that kind of respect for their coworkers."
    Gin fidgeted.
    ""Especially Fisher. Whether he wrote the email or not I can't judge, but I am sure he would not have done the same for you."
    "He wouldn't?"
    "He's been with us for a few years. Kid's a strong worker, but I wouldn't call him a co-operative individual. Is he nice to you?" Gin found it strange a man probably in his thirties would refer to any other adult as "kid."
    "Sometimes he's okay."
    "That's not really an answer."
    "It depends." She touched her fingertips together in a habitual way. "When he's in a good mood, he's really cool. He treats me like a partner, and it's nice. But sometimes...I can be lazy. I really can be. And sometimes he can be touchy. So, sometimes, we don't get along, but when we do, I think we make a very good team."
    "Does he like you?"
    "I...I don't think it matters?"
    "Why wouldn't it matter?"
    "'Cause he takes care of the stuff he's responsible for. If I was fired for something he thought was wrong, he'd say something about it. So...so I think that he would do that for me."
    Leaven leaned until his forearms rested on his desk. His fingers entwined. "But why?"
    "We work together."
    He unlaced his hands, spreading them in emphasis of her empty logic.
    "And, uh...we help each other. He didn't even have to keep me as an intern. He would have requested for me to be transferred to a different cubicle if he thought I was useless. I think he has the leadership qualities, not me."
    The CEO kicked back in his chair and rested a leg upon his knee. "Bradley is not a leader. Bradley is what I call a martyr. He does not delegate, he diverts. What you call 'help,' I am sure was him taking your work from you and doing it himself. Am I right?"
    "Some...sometimes."
    "You are the cross he bares, Gin. Mr. Fisher is not an over achiever or a leader, he is a scapegoat glorifying his own tribulations. And he does so in order to get the upper hand on people. Understanding this is understanding the difference between a genuine individual and a charlatan."
    Gin looked at the upturned hands Leaven held to his left and right, like a pan scale weighing personalities.
    "You say he helps you, but does he appreciate your help?"
    "Um. I don't know."
    Leaven nodded.
    "Maybe I shouldn’t have felt so bad for him," she thought aloud, instigated by lingering blue eyes.
    The CEO granted some empathy with a lift of his brows. He flipped the folder on his desk shut. The tab on the front read Bradley Fisher. "Don't regret your feelings, Ms. Rumi, it'd be more of a concern hadn't you cared." He plucked a red pen from a mug, scraped an X into the folder, and slid the stack into a trash bin at the foot of his desk.
*
    She fiddled with the ammunition clips in the depths of her pockets as she mulled over the possibility of needing them. An explanation for their presence here was tenuous. This individual she was staking, as far as she knew, was twenty-one and fired just yesterday from his job at a content creation firm called Machivel Media Corporation. What "content creation" meant, she wasn't entirely sure but it didn't sound criminal. She'd seen the Machivel headquarters centered monumentally in the center of the city and tried to see the purpose of its placement. Pretentious, ominous, but not quite devious. Wickedness had an energy that this city did not give, and she hoped the target matched the grain of its habitat. If she had learned one thing from a decade of of law enforcement, it was that the unfamiliar were to be assumed dangerous.
    "So, what exactly are we doing?"
    Anselm's unwilling, otherwise unrelated associate in this operation, asked this without bothering to lift his face from the game he was playing. Like a child, inattentive even to himself. She felt like taking it away from him.
    "Too busy on that contraption to listen to yourself, were you?"
    This once, he removed his eyes from the screen. "It's a cell phone. You should bring one back when we're all done here."
    "I don't think that'll be very handy to me."
    "Oh yeah. I forgot there's no satellites in the stone age. That sucks. But, hey, you could still play games on it. Comes with solitaire. You'd like solitaire."
    "I don't play games."
    "Only mind games, right? Being a cop and all."
    She rested her temple to her fingers.
    "Don't give me that exhausted look. You been pissed at me ever since I dropped the truth bomb, but do you think I wanna be here either?" Something yowled down the alley. Bismuth looked to it, then across the street toward the apartment they'd been staking out. "He left his blinds open..." Again, only partially at attention for an answer as one hand now played catch with his cellular phone, he asked, "So, what're we doing? What's the plan?"
    "Talk to him."
    "He won't give a single s**t about what we've got to say."
    She tapped the chrome badge on the front of her slouch hat knowingly.
    "Sorry to have to be the one to break it to you, lady, but you're not the law in this city."
    "All the more reason to use the uniform for whatever authority it's worth."
    "You don't even look like a cop, you look like a weirdo with a Victorian era fashion fetish. There's no sumptuary laws against dressing up in a trench coat and vest. If you'd of let me carry a real weapon 'for authority,' maybe we'd have some real f*****g leverage."
    "I'm not concerned with your choice to carry a weapon, I'm concerned with your choice to carry a large and unconcealed weapon that resembled something crafted by a basement-dwelling maniac."
    "I did make it in my basement..."
    And here she was worrying over whether or not the target was dangerous. The irony.
    "We should tell him to call that girl or we'll cut his dumbass head off."
    "'Dumb-a*s head.' Do you listen to yourself speak? Actually, I already know the answer to that. And, no, we're not going to threaten him."
    "Why else would he listen to us?"
    "I don't know. But I'm not saying that."
    "I'll say it."
    "No threats. We're messengers, right? Not enforcers."
    "Damn." Bismuth kicked a rock out of the alleyway. The rock skipped across the street, almost ricocheted off a passing car, and landed on the far sidewalk. "I'm bored as hell. I don't like waiting, especially not for some prick kid."
    "How would you know what he's like?"
    "His name is Bradley. His parents had to be pricks to name their son that. Like a soap-opera name."
    "Very rational point."
    "No, that's not it. He writes for that big firm on the internet. I thought you were paying attention."
    "I didn't know what that meant. You keep forgetting I have no experience with this 'internet' technology."
    "He writes online journals and s**t."
    "So what makes you say he's prick-ish?"
    "I read a couple of his blogs. He has this one profile he uses just to bash other people. He's a hired troll."
    "A hired 'troll'?"
    "Like a professional prick."
    She still failed to see the correlation being made and she didn't reckon asking what a "blog" was would have elucidated much. The topic ended when a messily-orange-haired young man came strolling by to punt the rock further along the sidewalk. He was tallish, wiry, wore a short black jacket and blue jeans.
    She looked at Bismuth, who looked at her, who nodded.
    They crossed the street.
*
    Whatever. Even if it had been Gin's fault he was fired, it was too late to do anything about it now. She was out of his life along with Edith and the rest of Machivel, good riddance. He even considered finding a new apartment just to get further from the office, but an idle glance in the direction of town square reminded him of the HQ's dominance over the skyline. There was no avoiding Machivel Media as long as he lived in Santa Vidora, but at least he'd never have to step inside another one of their offices.    
    Ben still wasn't hanging around when he returned to the complex. Odd. He couldn't think of one day this month the man hadn't been present in the alleyway. Well, he must have to move sometime to be a real transient.
    There was a couple crossing the street as he turned the corner of his apartment to access the entrance on the side. The man was sporting a denim jacket and black bondage pants, topped off with a fauxhawk hairdo. The lady wore a long, kahki duster coat and a big slouch hat with its side brims bent to the sky. The outfit made her look like a militant of the late 1800s. There was only one door at the end of the stairwell and it belonged to him. He turned to ask what they were doing as they perused him to it, but the fauxhawked man cut him to the chase:
    "You Bradley Fisher?"
    "Yeah."
    "Former employer of Machivel Corporation?" asked the female. Thoroughly Irish, her dialect was melodic and Gaelic, and her hair was burgundy, and her eyes were blue.
    "Yeeaah...?"
    She smacked fauxhawk's chest in a private moment of triumph before producing a badge from within her jacket: a disk of steel with circling a five-point star.  "Deputy Anselm, Pilcrow Borough constable," she greeted with a tug of her hat. "May we step inside?"
    "'Pilcrow'? Pilcrow where? You aren't really a cop, are you?"
    "Let me rephrase that." She put the badge away to replace it with a copper colored revolver pistol. "May we step inside?"
    He invited them in.
    Fauxhawk-guy arbitrarily lifted a file folder loitering on an end table near the door, which the female yanked out of his hand and shoved into Bradley's. He looked from one to the other. "So, can I help you?"
    "As a matter of fact, we're here to help you. Try not to look so nervous." She gave Bradley a banausic glance as he held the folder affront like a shield. The other intruder was meandering around, imposing on the apartment like the welcomed guest he was not. Both seemed at least a portion disinterested in him--which he didn't know whether to take with relief or concern.
    "Why would I be nervous of a duo of armed strangers holding me up at gunpoint and barging into my apartment?"
    The woman prodded a hand to shake. "Excuse us. As I said, Deputy Anselm." Her other thumbed toward the guy. "His name's Bismuth. And, sorry about the gun. We're not from around here." As if that excused it.
    "And we're not a duo. Not a duo, not a team," the man named Bismuth sounded grateful to say. He wandered into the next room. "Not even friendly aquenten"...What the f**k happened to your kitchen?" The refrigerator door opened, shut, and he returned with a bottle of beer.
    "So we got a little problem," he continued without ado. He banged the cap of his stolen beer off against the coffee table. "Usually I don't deal with other people's problems, but..."
    "But what?"
    Deputy Anselm snapped her fingers in revelation. "Wait. He doesn't know."
    "He doesn-- ...Oh, yeah. Ohhh. Damn it."
    "What?" Bradley looked between them. "Are you two on drugs? Why are you here?"
    Bismuth lifted his bottle to speak, but the deputy yielded him with a finger. "We apologize for the intrusion--"
    "I don't."
    "--but there's a complicated situation going on that I can't necessarily explain to you."
    "Explain what?!"
    "I actually can't explain, but I can tell you what you need to know right now and you can take it however you want. Listen to what I have to say, and we'll leave and you'll never see us again... You're friends with a girl named Gin Rumi, aren't you?"
    "No."
    "You know her. Right?"
     "Sure." Bradley was tactfully curt.
    "Good. Speak with her."
    "Tell her you want to be her business partner," Bismuth intervened. Anselm chopped the air at him.
    "No, just speak with her. Don't suggest anything. Get to know her. That's all."
    "I told you I know her!"
    "Apparently, you don't know enough!" Bismuth insisted.
    "What do you mean 'apparently'? She said I could take what you said however I wanted."
    "Just do it!" Bismuth caused an abrupt tension in the room as he sprung to his feet. A Mexican standoff lingered between the two before Bradley pulled his cell phone and began dialing.
    "You better be calling that chica..."
    "I'm calling the cops." He glanced at the so-called deputy. "The actual cops."
    Bismuth breached the distance between them, snatched the phone, and whipped it against the wall. "No f*****g cops!" With a flick of his wrist, he pulled a switchblade between himself and Bradley. "You're going to find that girl, or I'll come back here and run Mr. Robert De Knifo up your a*s."
    He looked at the three different locations his phone now lay. Having given off the impression of being the duo's "straight man," Bradley halfway anticipated the female cohort to deny the other's claim. She didn't. She grabbed his hand and placed something inside. It was a slip of paper with a nearby address written on it.
    "I recommend you pay this Gin Rumi a visit today."
    At the risk of being sodomized with a knife, he agreed.
    Satisfied, she left. Less satisfied, Bismuth gave one more threatening waggle of his blade and followed, leaving behind an empty beer and a lot of unexplained questions. Bradley threw the beer out. For the questions, he opened fresh one.
*
    He'd arrived at the written address around two in the afternoon: a dilapidated brownstone a few blocks from his home that he recognized as the borough's local homeless shelter. He double checked the address, walked up the stoop, and triple-checked the address.
    Sure this had to be some inexplicable con, he stepped inside. The vestibule was a smelly little cove with a peninsula counter stretched along the back wall. There was nobody behind it. Eery, creaky footsteps and unintelligible slurring radiated from a narrow stairwell behind the counter as an example of the building’s consistent activity. His shoes made ripping noises against the linoleum floor as he approached the counter. He slapped the service bell.
    A baby started wailing through the dilapidated ceiling slats. It looked as though they'd sprinkle dust on his head if someone were to step hard enough on the second story.
    He dinged the bell again. He kept dinging it until the stairwell thudded and creaked and a sagged as a being lumbered down. He was old, hunched, had a protruding jaw and a receding hair. He sniffed, entered a brief coughing fit, then dropped his hands on the counter. They were gigantic hands. "Can I help you with something?" The question sounded rhetorical, like the last thing he anticipated at the end of his struggle downstairs was having to help someone with something.
    "Maybe. Is there a Gin Rumi living here?"
    "Mm. Gene-ver Rumi. Hm. Reckon we got one." He sounded like a motor.
    "Seriously?"
    He looked at Bradley tiredly. His head bobbed.
    "Short, snub-nosed girl, brown hair...?"
    "Wears a hat lots."
    "Okay. Wow. Thaaat's her." Not expecting to have arrived in the right place, he had to think of the next obvious question. "Where is she?"
    The man pointed up. "Hm. It's the third story, make a right, and it's at the end of the hall. End of the hall." He waved a hefty hand. "The end-end. You turn left, there's the bathroom at that end, you turn right, there's her door. Reckon the knob is different. All the other knobs are round and yeller, but I reckon hers is different."
    "Ah."
    "One'a these." He put his hand flat and hinged it up and down just in case a visual reference was needed.
    "Got it, thanks."
    Bradley ascended the claustrophobic alley of stairs, which opened onto the second story and circled to another flight of steps to the third. He dodged a swinging door on his way around: a woman sprung from her room, screaming at a man, who was screaming back. Their baby was inside, screaming at nothing. There was something screaming on the TV, too, or maybe a radio screaming, or something, somewhere. On the third story, some Hispanic guy in a black bandanna was scrubbing the floor in front of the bathroom. The entire corridor was soaked in soapy water. Catching himself on the rail, Bradley just avoided slipping down the stairs and continued more gingerly to the end of the right hall. There was a door there, and, while all the other doors had round, yellow knobs, he reckoned this one was different.
    He tapped on the door.
    This can't be right.
    And yet, it couldn't be not right. That old landlord had identified her spot on.
    Frustrated at the gross surroundings, he argued privately over the possibility of Gin being behind the door as he tapped upon its face less gently.
    There was a rattle of a chain lock and the door cracked to reveal an evergreen eye. It scanned him through the sliver and then the door opened. There she was, Gin, in utter discord of her visitor.
    "Uh. Um. Hi." She spoke without looking at him but vigilantly past his shoulder. After a pensive moment, she receded. "Come in." She urged this in a way that suggested it was in his best interest to do so.
    There wasn't much of the room to step into. It was a hundred-fifty square feet, rounding up. She had a large desk taking up a considerable chunk of the right wall and a twin-sized bed running perpendicular with a clothes basket sitting at the foot. There was a desk lamp and a quaint paper lamp in the opposite corner next to a clothes rack. She had a tiny dresser next to that with some utensils and hygiene products placed atop.
    Though spartan, the room was well taken care of, a stark contrast to the poorhouse. The floor was swept, the little square windows were transparent, and it smelt clean, with the faint scent of her. Her desk was near-covered in stacked papers, but even those were perfectly straight and rowed.
    What caught his attention more entirely was the wall behind the desk, which had drawings pinned to almost every inch of its upper half; layers of loose leaf strewn with both cartoonish caricatures and realistic profiles of graphite, drawn with professional diligence. He gravitated toward the wall and noticed more drawings on the desktop. Piles of portraits of what appeared to be real people. Stacks of them, piles of stacks...
    So taken by the art, he almost forgot to engage Gin, who been standing in place after latching the door, wooden with discomfort. His unexplained presence looked to be putting her through contained, growing discomfort, as though she'd swallowed a chili pepper.
    "Nice, uh..." He made a forthcoming step, gesturing his hands vacantly.
    Tight lipped, Gin teetered on her feet. "Government-funded home?"
    "But it's nice. I mean"you're room, not the rest of the place. But I was referring to these pictures..."
    She sat on her bed. With limited places to rest, he imagined she sat there often. He imagined her looking at the wall opposite to that spot in an attempt to envision what that might be like. At the desk, he began to rummage through one of the stacks. "Mind if I look?"
    "You can."
    Amongst the pile, he found a fat-faced man. His many exaggerated chins stacked up a scrunched face. His smile was goofy and banal. Somehow, the funny face was familiar "This is hilarious. Whose this fat dude?"
    "Oh. That's supposed to be Dillon."
    "Ha! Wow. It is him, isn't it?"
    "Heh. Yeah. I like to draw people. He was a fun one... You know...with the chins..." Her snicker granted some alleviation to the room's tension.
    Her tablet computer was set on the corner of the desk. On it was an unfinished digital illustration of a stocky individual hunched on a bench with teardrop-shaped things at their feet. Birds? He lifted the computer to take a closer look. Surrealistically, he found a portrait of himself upon the stack of papers beneath the tablet. A full-bodied side profile of him at his cubicle. Unmistakable: the reckless hair, the lanky form, the flatterlessly protruding nose and a posture that he knew to be his own in the deep midst of his work. She even included the tiny scar on his right ear from a parakeet bite. It was perfect, full of detail that had to be impossible to emulate without a reference.
    He lifted it. It wasn't pure chance he'd come across a solitary portrait. There were more. Beneath the first was a second, and beneath that, a third. A fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eight, ninth, and tenth.
    He lifted a picture of himself where Gin could see, then a second. It was amazing how instantaneous and vivid her shape and tone changed: scarlet and swollen, taught with insecurity, she morphed like a spooked deep-sea octopus.
    "This is me. This is me." He followed one with the other. "This. This. This."
    "It's... I... I just... Huh..." She put her hand on her chest, and for a moment Bradley thought she might need medical attention. Then she smiled a very unhappy smile. "You aren't the only person I've drawn."
    "But ten? Ten perfectly detailed pictures? How could you draw something like this without me modeling for it?" His eyes wandered over the desk. "Where are the pictures?"
    "Pictures?"
    "I mean the photos. The photos you took of me as a reference. You can't just take pictures of me to draw and not ask, Gin, that's creepy. Where are they?" He shuffled papers and pulled drawers.
    "Quit ransacking my desk!"
    "Should I not be a little weirded out?"
    "I-- I draw a bunch of portraits, so is it that weird that maybe two a month are of you? I see you daily, more than anyone else... Stop messing up my stuff!"
    He shut the cubby he'd been digging into.
    "I see you almost every day, so is it really that weird? I mean...I mean you interest me. The way you talk. And-- and walk-- eh. Um... Oh. Gosh, I-I mean... Now I am starting to sound weird..."
    Gin's hat was next to her on the bed. She donned it, veiling her eyes beneath the brim as she dipped her view to her hands which she rubbed cyclically, left over right, right over left, engulfing themselves.
    Now it was Bradley's turn to feel awkward. Maybe she was telling the truth and drew them off memory. If so, he couldn't grasp how it was possible to recreate with such detail. Even so, why so many? It had to be an unhealthy fascination or something. Some kind of Freudian flaw. He cleared his throat, shimmied one of the portraits of himself and said, "They're...well drawn," and placed it down.
    The room pressurized. Tempestuously, he rapped his knuckles against the desktop; the desk, which he had physically disengaged; twisted his front away in repulse from.
    Meanwhile, the embarrassed girl was left to burn in a conflagration of unrelinquished appreciation. She nodded at him without making eye contact. "...Thanks."
    "Okay... So, I'm here to talk about this morning. I guess I was hasty. I never listened to why you came over..."
    Gin continued to stare at her lap, clenched in place by the atmosphere.
    "...And that was probably the wrong way to handle that... Sooo..."
    Her hands slid up her arms and gripped them defensively. Bradley had left his statement open-ended for a reason, and he waited expectantly for the answer as she receded into herself. Ten seconds, twenty seconds. He waited until he couldn't bear it. He thought about asking the question more literally, maybe giving her a touch on the arm to try and surmount the wall expanding between them, but he reached for the door instead.
    "Sorry about that... Aaand, that is...that... I guess I'll be on my way."
    "Okay."
    "Seeya..."
    The door creaked open. She didn't so much as raise an eye. So he left.
    He collected his thoughts outside the room. As he reassessed the note he had left on, the floor squeaked beyond the door. He thought she was going to open it up, to catch him by the arm and relieve him of any possible guilt. The sound of a chain latch punctuated the moment.
    The bandanna-ed Spanish guy was idling in the bathroom doorway when Bradley came down the still slippery hall. He watched without expression, and watched until Bradley left down the stairs.
*
    Still obsessing over how his email address had been broken into, Bradley decided to revisit the office. Gin had a flash drive of his, he lied to Edith, and asked where she might be. But the manager had picked up the telephone as he explained, raising a finger at him. She walked to the back of the office to close herself alone inside the transparent walls of the conference room until hanging up and beckoning him inside.
    "If you're looking for Gin, she was let go as well." She took a seat in one of the chairs. He did not. Her tone was spiked with the anticipation of gossip, he could tell. She'd already lured him into the privy of this glass box and he had little intent to humor the news she was so giddy to express any more by settling down.
    "For what?"
    "I'm afraid it's none of your business."
    Suspenseful bullshitery.
    "I was just wondering if it's as good a reason you used to fire me."
    "The reason I supported the idea of making Gin your intern in the first place was so that I could get rid of her. So, yes, I would say it was." A pause for effect that Bradley had to progress with a raise of his brows. "This past spring, Gin asked me for a job. I couldn't turn her down." She spoke this as if it gave her some sort of authority on fate. So I set her up with someone I knew she couldn't keep up with. I expected to fire her much earlier, but no matter how much work I gave, you managed to get it done..." Jowl-framed lips bent, and the realization of his role as her unbeknownst tool made Bradley want to take a shower. "I wonder why you bothered. You notice something off about her?"
    He didn't have to think very hard to understand the question. "I noticed she has a really good memory for some things, a really bad memory for most things, and the attention deficiency of a fish."
    "Strange, isn't she?" Contempt laced her question.
    "She's quirky."
    " 'Quirky.' "
    The weight of her echo suggested a point, but he could care less about playing Edith's game of Guess-What-I'm-Thinking. "I just want to know if you figured out she was the one who sent that email through my address. Is that the reason you used to fire her?"
    "No. We didn't come across any proof she had. But nice try." Question answered, Bradley began to leave. Edith creaked in her seat. "You want to know why she was fired?"
    He was already halfway out of the conference room door. "I thought it was none of my business."
    "She argued with me about that email. She tried standing up for you, Mr. Fisher, so maybe it's a little bit of your business." He could feel her simpering at the chance to objurgate him.
     "You didn't have the right to fire her for that, especially when she was defending the truth"which she was. She has never lied to you. She's never talked back to you. But you think this is fair?"
    "I am here to keep this office productive. Fairness need not apply."
    "What kind of comic book villain prioritizing is that? You put your humdrum middle management job over a family friend. That's the bottom line."
    "'Family friend.'" There was that contemptuous echo again. She huffed, wobbling in her seat like a cocktail glass of Jell-o . "She's not family."
    Finally, Bradley's attention was piqued enough to seat himself opposite of Edith. "But you did know her before this job, so what is she to you?"
     The woman pulled a breath into herself in a sordid way. "An honest mistake."
    "Fine."
    "I was a friend of her mother's," she recovered when Bradley made a rising movement. "A long time ago."
    "She dead?"
    "Not sure. Wouldn't surprise me if she was."
    "So, you are a family friend."
    "I don't want any association with that woman."
    "Does Gin have any relatives left?"
    "She has an older sister. As far as I know, she still lives in Little Callow. When Gin came to the big city"don't ask me why"her sister was the one to contact with me, asking me to check up on her. I did. But I didn't offer this job. That was something Gin just imposed. What was I supposed to do? I hired her."
    "And fired her."
    "What's that? It was for the best. She's better off disassociating with me. Lord knows I'm not qualified to look after a handicap, and she's not qualified work this job."
    "Handicap?"
    "You didn't notice?"
    "Handicapped how?"
    "She is mentally handicapped." Edith's eyelids drooped, deadpan. "Slow. Dumb."
    "Who claimed that?"
    "Experts. No wonder, with all the drinking her mother did."
    "Experts. Right."
    "Right. Are you surprised?"
    "Yeah, surprised at how incompetent you are to have known someone for years and have no idea who they are."
    "Mm. She's the 'useless slacker,' right?"
    Bradley exhaled, rubbing his face.
    "I didn't go through the trouble of getting rid her just to hire her back, so it isn't going to happen if that's what you're fishing for, Fisher."
    He laid his hands and shook his head. "What you did is so messed up."
    Edith placed the tips of her fingers to the table leaned. "I. Don't. Want. Her."
    "You stabbed her in the back."
    She rose from her chair. "I did not move to the city to be stalked down and guilted into giving away a job to an unqualified individual! She was a child when I left! The only reason she remembers I exist is because of her sister! ...Why me? Why? I'm not her family! I'm not even her friend!"
    Edith whined as Bradley tried to fathom what drove Gin out of her hometown, away from her sibling and into this world.
    "Why me?"
    Gin didn't deserve this.
    "She'll live. She lived all this time. She doesn't need this job, and I don't need the guilt. It isn't my responsibility."
    Ignorance grants no grace in the real world, but everyone deserved some kind of decency. She didn't deserved to be tricked by the first person she turned to.
    "And you. You! Who do you think you are, judging what I've done?! You're not my problem anymore either, so get a box, get your s**t, all of it, and get out of this office. And don't come back! And grab Gin's s**t, too, because I don't want that little retard coming back to f**k with my life!"
    A rush moved through Bradley that settled into a cold stone of despondency at the pit of his stomach. He rose. Turning, he noted the entirety of the office from beyond the glass wall. The usually sealed door of the conference room had been left wide open from when he'd nearly exited. Twenty-three eavesdroppers gawked over and around their cubical walls. And, slowly, Edith sunk into her chair.
*
    Killing time for the bus, Bradley meandered the bustling boardwalk bordering the east end of the city. It was late afternoon now and things weren't quite as rambunctious as in the morning, but there was always a surplus of distraction at the city's shore. Only venders with the right connections acquired license to merchandise here, and there were just less than enough crammed into the outskirts of the city to impede the flow of foot traffic. Just about anything anyone on the go would want could be bought at some dingy mobile stand, from hotdogs to pocket-sized cans of shaving cream. One particularly popular vender he knew of was run near the harbor by a round, enthusiastic man with a robust accent and a mustache of equivocal thickness who would advertise his food at a constantly high pitch. Hunks of salted, battered fish skewered on sticks. Gin, having sometime been personally familiarized with the venderman, had invited Bradley to the stand for lunch one afternoon.
    "I call them Feeshtix! I catch thee feesh myself!" he told Bradley without any encouragement. "Sometimes I catch them big! Boh!" He flung his hands to scale the immensity. "BEEG'A FEESH!" He handed them a picture of the "beeggest feesh" his fishing net ever caught. Bradley figured he must not have any close relatives if he kept pictures of dead animals in his wallet.
    Besides its considerable size, there was nothing special about the photographed fish. It was just a grey shad with beady, shallow eyes that gave no indication of life or death, but Gin thought it was "cute" and found it more endearing after the venderman explained what dimwitted creatures they were.
    "Nevar learn, these feesh! I just float by, SCOOP! BOH! Lossafeesh!"
    The effervescent fisherman had her practically rolling. Of all things to find funny: a fish.
    That was during the golden months of their partnership at Machivel. Even then, he was quick to contradict Gin's humor, not trying to find sense in it or her. Until now, as he sat isolated on the bus stop bench mulling over the battered sea creature he'd bought. It was their mediocrity she found so endearing. Their sheer normality and blissful obliviousness. He got it.
    The bus came before he was done with his food. He ate the rest on the way home, chewing on the bamboo skewer when some police officers greeted him at the front of the apartment. He let them upstairs, unsurprised by their presence. He anticipated somebody eventually calling about the two loudly dressed, armed vagrants roaming the city. He prepared for questioning, but the officers weren't interested in his encounter with Bismuth or Anselm. Instead, they jammed an electroshock baton against his kidney, shot something into his arm, handcuffed him, and dragged him downstairs and into the back of a vehicle. No questions asked.

    He recalled being in an SUV. It was hard to keep track of just how long the while was, since whatever drug they had shot into his veins put him out pretty hard. He recalled the smell of sea water inside of a tin room, but that could have been  dream. He didn't remember much from that point, but it felt like a while had passed.
    Shoosh. Shoosh. Shoosh.
    He did remember being sick at one point or another. His mouth tasted horrible, so he figured that part probably happened.
    He was sitting in a posh kitchen now. Was this part happening?
    Shoosh. Shoosh. Shoosh.
    His diplopic vision adjusted itself; he noticed  a mahogany and marble bar counter. On the other side of it was a man dressed in a leisurely unbuttoned suit vest. He was leaning forward, saying something. Flowing between his hands was a slinky. Shoosh, shoosh, shoosh.
    He wondered again how long it had been since he was at his apartment, but it was impossible to find a reference for time between being electrocuted into a coma and staring at a slinky. His vision sunk to the man's mouth, which was undulating around a smoldering object with a glowing blue tip.
    A shock of neurosis struck him, reeling his perspective over each shoulder in search of a threat from behind. He tried to yank his arms from what he remembered to be cuffs, throwing them unexpectedly, astonished by their freedom.
    Shoosh. Shoosh. Shoosh.
    The man poured the slinky onto the counter, reached over, and snapped his fingers. "Stay with me, Brado."
    "Huh? Wuh? What's going on?"
    "Guess you weren't listening to anything I just said." The man replaced the electric cigarette between his lips with a glass full of amber liquid. "I'd offer a drink, but you're just riddled with ketamine," he spoke into the glass, swigged, placed it down. "You were in and out for a long time. Looong time. Drugged by some kidnappers. For the record, I didn't tell them to drug you. That's just what they do. They're professionals. I don't question their methods, but if you ask me, they shouldn't standardize all their syringes with whatever it would take to bring a heavyweight pro wrestler down. That can't be healthy."
    "The...cops?"
    "Not the cops. Professional abductors dressed like cops." He swallowed the rest of the alcohol, made a face, and drew his tongue over his teeth from behind his lips. His eyes narrowed and his voice deepened. "You know, I was doubting it. I'm surprised you're really the head honcho."
    "H-head honcho...? I don't..."
    He tapped the counter with his glass and clicked his mouth. He spoke low, as if being listened in on. "I'm Leaven, by the way. I don't think you caught that, did you?" He answered as Bradley's mouth formed the question, "Yes, the Leaven of Machivel Media, but you can forget all about Machivel."
    Bradley didn't take the greeting hand offered to him. Gracefully, it lifted away to present the room.
    "And this is my temporary getaway. Familiar with Kallipyge?"
    Bradley rattled his head.
    "It's some puny island off the shore of Uesica. Part of the Sister Archipelago. I delivered all the s**t in your apartment here, so take your time leaving. That's all you have left now, isn't it? Your possessions?"
    Without ado, Bradley teetered off his stool to leave. He only got a step away before having to steady himself on the bar.
    "Going somewhere, Speedy?"
    "Anywhere. Anywhere but here. I'll hail a taxi..."
    "No taxis."
    "I'll walk."
    "What part about 'an island' don't you understand? You're a thousand miles away from the city and surrounded by water."
    "One of us is more inebriated than they think."
    Leaven took out a cell phone.
    It was hard to make sense of anything through the fog of his mind but he was sure this didn't make any. "There's no way I traveled a thousand miles."
    "You're right. I exaggerated. You're only nine-hundred and fifty seven and three-fourths miles away." He turned the phone, showing the navigator’s current location to be floating somewhere off the northeast coast of Uesica.
    And according to the date and time, it was already tomorrow.
    Adrenaline sobered Bradley's focus. He raced out of the bar and through the house, found the vestibule, and staggered out the door. The sharp daylight revealing no familiar concrete, but colossus green rolls of land. He stepped out onto the porch, onto a great, grassy knoll overlooking a lonely street. Far beyond that, a little white cathedral looked as natural sitting on top of the greens in the distance as the landscape itself. He heard its slow, deep ring from afar.
    Kuh-lang, kuh-lang, kuh-lang...
    Bradley made a run for it, bounding from the knoll to trample onto the road.  Not a foot from it, he realized the ground come to a very abrupt stop. His legs scraped clouds of dirt up in a skid that barely prevented him from dashing over a mountainside grotto into the sea.
    A pelican chortled at him where it poised at the cliff's edge.
    Leaven joined him on the opposite side of the road. He exhaled vaporand took a sip of his liquor. "That look. I know what you're thinking: 'Why is he drinking at eight O'clock in the morning?'"
    Not even close.
    "Because it's cold out here. That's the thing about Kallipyge, it's beautiful, but the weather is a*s. I could have made coffee, but I drink enough of that at work. Bet you could go for a cup of coffee right now. Maybe I'll" Hey. Where...? Okay."
    Bradley ran down the street. He went one way, then the other. There was nothing but this big house, that little church in the distance, and a great, waterlogged gap between them. He began back towards his kidnapper, fists balled.
    "Why? Why would you take me here?! Why would you kidnap me and put me on some mountain in the middle of nowhere?!"
    "You wouldn't be here if it was nowhere, Brad. It's definitely somewhere."
    "What's that supposed to even mean?! And why do you keep calling me that? 'Brad.' 'Bradley.' like we're friends or something!"
    "We're more acquainted than you think, Brado." Leaven walked across the street and up the knoll. He settled on the porch's stoop, placing his glass next to himself. "A lingering disillusion in the back of your mind will surface one day; a feeling of displacement; that you were never really in control. If you're lucky, and if you're smart, you'll leave that nagging little voice alone until it shuts up. In order to do that, you need to remain willingly unaware of the events taking place within Santa Vidora. You don't know what or why they are, but you don't want to be present for them. Unfortunately, the only validation I can offer you is a threat, so if you come back to the city, you'll be confronted by me, and it won't work out in your favor." Pocketing his cigarette, he stood to meet Bradley's approach up the knoll halfway. "There's nothing left for you in that place except a tragedy."
    "I have a life there. A home. A girlfriend..."
    "Don't kid yourself. And don't try to kid me. You're unemployed and you don't "have" a home, because you don't own jack. And it should be obvious by now that your girlfriend is not an invaluable asset to that identifiable piece of time you so generally refer to as your life. There's plenty of remote places full of nominees to fill that gap." The solemnity behind the man's eyes left as a much more jaunty expression took its place. He clapped Bradley's shoulder. "You may not understand, but I am handing you freedom on a silver platter. Take my advice and accept your emancipation."
    He went back inside, returning shortly with a jacket and a suitcase while Bradley remained listlessly in place. "I'm off. My boat leaves in a half-hour. There's a bike in the back you can take. Town is waaayyy over there, on the other side of the valley. There's a bridge to it lower on the mountain." He skipped down the porch steps and walked a piece of paper over to Bradley, having to manually place it into his palm for it to be accepted.
    Bradley unfolded the paper. It was a Machivel Media addressed business check for five-hundred thousand dollars.
    "That enough to get you rolling?" Leaven clicked his mouth and jogged to the white little minivan parked on the side of the house. He loaded the vehicle, got in, and rolled the windows down as it buzzed to life. "If I find you in Santa Vidora, Brado, I'll break your kneecaps! Bye!" He waved out window and backed down the driveway fast enough to make Bradley hope the vehicle might careen off the unprotected cliffside. It didn't, of course. Leaven jackknifed it into a K-turn and shot down the road with the soft palpitation of a bumblebee. Bzoooooo!
    Perplexed into apathy toward the large number, Bradley simply folded Leaven's check up and slid it into his wallet, which was unexpectedly on his person in addition to the usual credentials and cards therewithin.
    He didn't find a landline telephone anywhere in the house, but he did discover a bedroom full of his s**t, so he packed a backpack with clothes, food, and soap. Conformable to Leaven's claim, there was a bike behind the estate. Contrary to what Bradley expected, it wasn't motorized but an actual bicycle, colored mint green. But it had a little basket attached to the front of the handlebar.
    He ripped off the basket, ran the bike out of the driveway, leaped onto the seat, and began pumping furiously downhill.
    The CEO of his recently lost job kidnapped him and deserted him on an island. He was bicycling down a foreign mountainside in hopes of sometime coming across a town. Because the CEO of his last job kidnapped him. And deserted him on an island. He could feel the drugs clouding the process of the current events. Or shock. He hoped it wasn't indifference. He wanted to be angry about this. Where did one direct their anger when nothing made sense?
    The corniche road tilted like a roller coaster, brimming the ascending mountainside without surface markers to announce sharp turns nor guardrails to better avoid a fall to one's death. And no sign of life except birds warbling from their cliff side homes in case you did manage to survive a fall and expected help. The sun peeked around the jagged horizon, dividing the road with cuts of light. The green fields on the opposite side of the ravine began to glow. Much like the exposed drops, the exposed wilderness emphasized how far away Bradley was from home.
    Of all the things Leaven said"most of it seemed like the babble of a lunatic, but"one thing he had mentioned resounded true in the back of Bradley mind, like the faint bell of the church: he really could go for a cup of coffee right now. Coff-ee, coff-ee, coff-ee...
    An hour of cold, salty air reclaimed what parts of his mind had been arrested by drugs and altitude adjustment, but most of it lurched in stubborn denial of thought. He expected to find some tolerance for sanity at the bottom of a mug, assuming he found civilization at the bottom of this road. It eventually spat itself across the ravine. He had never crossed a bridge not made out of concrete and titanium-reinforced steel, nor higher than a few hundred feet above open water. This stone bridge surmounted a half-mile drop into a rocky, rapid river. He heard a crumbling noise halfway across and doubled his peddling. Earthy walls and cliffs became a verdant fields on the other side. How ripe green could exist in such bitter cold was a wonder.
    After viewing its picturesque, almost still scene from the opposite side of the valley, peddling up the church's hillside felt akin to entering a painting. The church, whose bell had long silenced, looked over a valley. Within it, a small settlement hid.
    With a rough sigh of relief, he let gravity spin his wheels from vibrant greens, to golden farmlands of grain, to a grey street-sandwich of chipseal wedged between buildings. The town had one road, save for some bicycle boulevard’s bottle-necking their way through the alleyways. The right row of buildings began with a wooden tavern that creaked with the breeze. Across from it stood an actual shoe cobbler, still in business from the looks of the window displays. And actual payphones lining the street. The sign on the way in read "Welcome to Dullard," which he couldn't argue with.
    Maybe the cobbler wasn't still in business, on second thought. The silence had him debating the town itself being out of business until somebody stumbled into view from around the bar's corner, zipping his jeans on his clumsy way back inside. This impressive commitment to drinking in spite of the hour made Bradley wonder what time of the morning it was now. He didn't guess he'd find a clock in a bar, but he was too thirsty not make it his first stop. Also, he needed change to make a call. He couldn't remember the last time he needed phone change.
    Dullard, Kallipyge didn't have any smoking policies, evidently. Indoor smog fumigated the entrance with tobacco and tar. Near the back was a tiny stage complete with a one-man karaoke game of a drunk guy trying to keep up with a jukebox. A worn out dartboard hung on the wall opposite the bar where two worn out men hunched over their drinks. Bradley bet that this cheap, sordid neighborhood dive was the only game in town. An enduring reminder that the more things change, the more working class drinkers remain the same.
    Only the barkeep paid him any attention on his way through. He had a broom mustache and a cratered face. His eyes were narrow and he spoke with a somehow fittingly supportive tone that made Bradley expect he looked at least partially as lost as he actually, literally was. "Hey, partner. Your a new one."
    "Bet you don't get many of those."
    "Hyeh! Hyeh! Hyeh! How'd you guess? What brings you to this town? You're too pale to be a fisherman."
    "Fishermen stop here?"
    "Sure. There's a harbor at the base of the mountain. If you're here for the sights, that's about the only thing worth seein' near this rusty town."
    A harbor near town? That was the first sign of luck he's had all week. "They must take trips back and forth to the mainland, right?"
    "I'd figure."
    Maybe he could find a sailor willing to drop him off at the continent.
    "So, you want a drink or what?"
    "Just some water would be fine."
    A large, tattooed guy beside him turned attentively. Just as Bradley began to feel irrationally self-conscious about his decision, the bartender raised a spritzer nozzle and let loose a jet of water into Bradley's face, who had to catch himself on the bar to avoid falling off his stool in disorientation.
    "Pfuh! What the hell?!"
    "Sorry, kid, sorry. It's 'policy' whenever somebody orders a water around here. A joke." He held out a dry dish cloth.
    The events of the confounding week decided to wake up and take a recognizable form, carving itself into his soaking wet disposition as the shape of a sarcastic bartender. He slammed a fist on the bar, snatching the cloth with the other. "It wasn't f****n' funny!"
    He wiped his face. With a sideways peeked, he caught a glare from the burly fellow beside him. The guy looked like he'd been waiting all morning to assert himself. Bradley instantly regretted raising his voice when a hand came at his shoulder, striking him sideways.
    "You got a problem?"
    "I don't got a problem." Bradley remained submissively hung in his human hammock position where he had been knocked between seats.
    "You sounded like you gotta problem."
    "No, I'm good."
    The man was a six-foot liquor barrel with biceps the size of average cantaloupes and forearms the size of average biceps. He used these arms to grab Bradley by the scruff of his jacket and lift his six foot frame effortlessly onto the bar. With his spine wrenched over the bartop, he looked to the barkeep for some assistance.
    "Here you go."
    He placed down a glass of water.
    As the ruffian cocked his scar-knuckled fist, Bradley noticed a grumpy looking cartoon fish printed on the front of his sleevless tee.
    "Oh, hey," he was able to grunt through his compressed trachea. "...Nice shirt."
    *
    Bradley sat at a table in the corner of the bar where the karaoke machine, sharing a drink with the massive mailman of Dullard who, minutes ago, had nearly knocked his front teeth out for almost no reason. Turns out, he was a huge fan of MadFish's blogs, reading them daily. He was disgruntled by the news of Bradley's termination. His name was Mortlock.
    "I yoostoo read yor threads ev-ery day on de phone. Nice ant easy to be readink when yor on toilet, yeah?"
    Bradley thanked him.
    "Now what will I read? I am not goink to read an imposter!"
    Bradley was sure somebody on the internet could emulate his gift to rant cantankerously over universally inconsequential matters.
    "Noh, there is nobody to replace original." He struck the table with a frustrated fist. "It iz damn shame!"
    Bradley learned Mortlock had gone to the navy where he, conversely enough, learned to fly helicopters. He moved to Dullard ten years ago to live with his cousin, a fisherman who used to work in the harbor at the base of the mountain. He died five years ago as a consequence of pica, a disorder identified with the appetite for non-food things.
    "De dunderhead, he ate glass," Mortlock explained, tapping a indicative fingernail to his beer bottle. "He bust off piece from whatever and he jest snack on it out of palm of hand when no one was looking." Mortlock peered wistfully into the past, drew a breath, and sighed. "I do not know how he lived so long."
    Mort flew postage all over Kallipyge Island, including much of Callowtown. When Bradley asked whether he ever flew to the mainland, he laughed at his ignorance and explained how costly flying a diesel aircraft as a method of personal transportation would be.
    "I do got buddy who I catch my rides with, though. He iz captain of a trawler that goes to and from, selling catch in 'the brotherland.' A real nice guy, too. He would let you for a ride if I told him."
    His buddy was already on his way back and he wouldn't be going out for another trip until Friday. Today was Saturday. Unemployed and lost, time may have been all of what Bradley had, but there was no way he was spending a week in a petered out mountain town, gambling on the chance some stranger would be friendly enough to give him a lift to the continent. He'd already set his prepossessions about this island's friendliness by the drunkard sitting across from him who'd just nearly punched him out minutes ago.
    "Suit yorself." Mortlock grunted. Bradley rubbed his face in vexation as the man chugged his beer. He put it down with extra vigor. "Ah. Hold it." He burped. "You know what, I willl give damn lift. In the good name ov de MadFish. We fly Monday."
    "That's a huge relief to hear, thank you."
    "Not free. You must do a morning's work for Mortlock before I drop you off! Sort mail, come along on deliveries..."
    Bradley needn't think twice about taking advantage of the first and last time his internet psuedo-fame would provide any real-life application. Besides, getting a helicopter tour of the island didn't sound like hard labor.
    "A deal, MadFish!" Mortlock gave a hand. Bradley shook it and asked him not to call him MadFish.
    His initial order of business when he got back to Santa Vidora would be to report crazy Leaven to the proper authorities. It might not be possible to prove he'd been hijacked by a CEO corporate juggernaut, but he'd be damned not to try. Next, he'd figure out this odd situation he'd been roped into. There was some freaky stalker BS going on involving Leaven, the "deputy" woman, and that fauxhawk guy, and he was going to get to the bottom of it. But first, he'd check on the validity of Leaven's check.
    He wound up finding some no-name community bank in the middle of Dullard. It was crappy looking enough to make him wonder wonder whether they could even cash a quintuple-digit asset. Turned out they could. More importantly, he could. Discovering the check's legitimacy resulted in a sobering deliberation of consequence. With kneecaps already on the line, he decided a few grand wasn't worth accepting from a kidnapper he intended to incriminate. Maybe enough to cover the resulting medical bills.