Shattered Horizon

The first thing I notice about the man on the floor is his shoes. They're brown leather, polished to a shine that catches the fluorescent lights of the bank lobby, and they're completely wrong for the rest of him. His suit is rumpled, his tie is undone and hanging loose around his neck like a noose he's given up on, and there's a coffee stain spreading across his shirt pocket. But the shoes are pristine. Expensive. The kind of shoes a man wears when he's expecting to be looked at.

He's lying on his back, staring at the ceiling, and he's not moving.

"Sir?" I crouch down beside him. The marble floor is cold through my pantyhose. "Sir, can you hear me?"

His eyes are open. Brown eyes, the color of weak tea, and they don't blink. For a second I think he's dead, that someone's dropped a corpse in the middle of the First National Bank of Providence on a Tuesday morning, and I'm going to have to call the police and explain why I didn't notice until I nearly tripped over him on my way to the break room.

Then he says, "I've been here for three hours."

"Three hours?"

"Maybe four. I lost track after the second hour." He doesn't sit up. Doesn't look at me. "The ceiling has forty-seven tiles. I counted. Twice."

I should ask him if he's hurt. I should call someone. My manager, Diane, who's probably watching from her glass office, her mouth pressed into that thin line she gets when I do something she hasn't pre-approved. But instead I say, "Forty-seven? That seems like a lot for this ceiling."

"It's a big ceiling."

"It's a bank lobby."

"Exactly." Now he looks at me. His face is ordinary in a way that's almost aggressive. Brown hair, brown eyes, a nose that's been broken at least once. But there's something in his expression, a kind of tired amusement, like he's the only one who understands the joke. "That's the problem."

I don't know what to say to that. I'm twenty-six years old, I've been working at this bank for eight months, and I still don't understand half the things customers say to me. They come in with their hands shaking, their eyes darting around like they're being followed. They ask me to check their balances three times in a row. They cry when I tell them they've overdrawn their accounts. And I sit there behind my desk, my nameplate gleaming under the lights, and I say, "I'm sorry, there's nothing I can do."

That's my job. I'm a teller. I tell.

"Are you going to rob us?" I ask.

The man on the floor laughs. It's a real laugh, not the polite kind people do when they're humoring you. "No. I'm not going to rob you."

"Then why are you on the floor?"

"Because if I stand up, I have to leave. And if I leave, I have to go home. And if I go home, I have to tell my wife that I lost my job, and she's going to look at me the way she looked at me when I told her I wanted to be a writer, and I can't do that again."

The words land in my chest like stones in still water. Ripples. I know that look. I've given that look. My mother gave it to me when I told her I was moving to Providence to work at a bank instead of going to graduate school. She said, "At least it's a job." Which is what you say when you mean, "I expected more from you."

"Okay," I say. "Okay."

I sit down on the floor next to him. The marble is cold and hard and my skirt is going to wrinkle, and Diane is definitely watching now, her face a mask of disapproval. I don't care. I've been on my feet for four hours, and I've been on my feet metaphorically for much longer than that.

"What's your name?" I ask.

"Adam."

"Adam, I'm Maya. And I'm going to need you to get up, because my manager is going to come over here in about thirty seconds, and she's going to ask you to leave, and if you don't leave, she's going to call security, and then you'll have a story to tell your wife that's worse than losing your job."

Adam considers this. "What's the story?"

"You got arrested for loitering in a bank."

"That's not worse. That's better. That's a story."

"You're not going to be a story. You're going to be a cautionary tale."

He sits up. Slowly, like his bones are made of glass. When he's upright, he looks at me properly for the first time. "You're not what I expected."

"What did you expect?"

"I don't know. Someone who'd call security."

I stand up and offer him my hand. He takes it. His palm is warm and dry, and there's a callus on his middle finger, the kind you get from holding a pen. A writer's callus. I notice it and I don't let myself think about what it means.

"I'm not going to call security," I say. "But you need to leave. And you need to go home. And you need to tell your wife."

"Why do you care?"

It's a good question. I don't have a good answer. Maybe it's because I recognize something in him, something I've been trying to bury for months. The feeling that you've made all the wrong choices and now you're just waiting for the consequences to catch up. The feeling that you're invisible, that you could lie down on the floor of a bank and no one would notice.

"I don't know," I say. "Maybe I'm just tired of watching people give up."

Adam smiles. It's a sad smile, the kind that doesn't reach his eyes, but it's real. "You don't know me."

"No," I say. "But I know what it looks like."

He leaves. He walks out the glass doors and into the gray Providence morning, and I watch him go, and I think about the forty-seven tiles on the ceiling and the shoes that didn't match the man and the callus on his finger. I think about my mother's voice on the phone, saying, "At least it's a job." I think about the fact that I haven't written anything in two years, not since I graduated, not since I packed my notebooks into a box and shoved them under my bed and told myself I was being practical.

Diane calls me into her office at lunch. She wants to know why I was sitting on the floor with a customer. She wants to know if I understand the bank's policies regarding disruptive behavior. She wants to know if I'm "committed to the team."

I tell her I'm sorry. I tell her it won't happen again. I tell her I'm committed.

But I'm thinking about Adam. I'm thinking about the way he said "exactly," like the bank lobby was the answer to a question I hadn't asked yet. I'm thinking about the coffee stain on his shirt and the polish on his shoes and the way he laughed when I asked if he was going to rob us.

I'm thinking about the fact that he didn't ask for my number. He didn't ask for anything. He just left.

And I'm thinking about the fact that I wanted him to ask.

That night, I go home to my apartment, which is small and beige and smells like the Chinese food I ate three days ago. I take off my heels and my pantyhose and my sensible skirt, and I stand in front of the mirror in my underwear, and I look at myself. Really look.

I'm not old. I'm not ugly. But there's something tired in my face, something that wasn't there two years ago. I look like the kind of person who sits behind a desk and says "I'm sorry, there's nothing I can do." I look like the kind of person who's given up without admitting it.

I pull the box of notebooks out from under my bed. It's dusty. The pages are yellowed at the edges. I open one at random and read a sentence I wrote when I was twenty-three: "She wanted to be the kind of person who said yes, but she kept saying no."

I close the notebook. I put it back in the box. I shove the box under the bed.

But I don't sleep. I lie awake, staring at the ceiling, counting the tiles. There are twelve. Not forty-seven. Twelve.

And I think about Adam, somewhere in this city, telling his wife that he lost his job, and I wonder what she said. I wonder if she looked at him the way my mother looked at me. I wonder if he's on the floor of his apartment right now, counting tiles, waiting for something to change.

I wonder if anyone ever gets up.