Chapter Four

I had been correct in my assumption that things wouldn’t seem all that bad in the light of the morning. The only downside was that Elijah could not let things be upon learning that I was sent so far away from home for an indefinite amount of time.

First, he blew up my phone with a barrage of voicemails telling me to call him back with increasing urgency. I did not, in fact, call him back as I needed to drive North and get settled in as soon as possible.

When it came to Elijah, a phone call was never just a phone call. I would more than likely be forced to pull over and find several extra batteries for my cell phone. Once he got a bee in his bonnet, the man never quit until he was certain he had gotten his point across and then sometimes he would rant and rave for even longer, I think, because it was the only thing left in the world that gave him any sense of relief.

Instead, I drove on, passing the never-ending swaths of corn and soybeans endemic to Northern Illinois and Southern Wisconsin. I didn’t have to blast the air conditioning in my modestly priced company car which was initially nice, but another grim reminder of how cold and unpleasant things were about to get. I don’t think I even knew how to turn on the heat in a car; my entire life had been different degrees of air conditioning while I drove.

During the first rest stop, I saw that Elijah had switched tactics, blasting me with a series of text messages, telling me that he didn’t know what kind of game I was playing, but I needed to text him right then and there.

Now, in anyone else this would be concerning behavior and it sort of was in Elijah, but only because I knew what I was doing was reinforcing the negative view he had of the world. He had always been the intense friend in the group, the negative naysayer who could always foresee the downside of anything. The worst thing of all about Elijah, though… was that he was always right. As I got older, the reality of the world got grimmer and grimmer and I would think of my friend Elijah. We all used to scoff and roll our eyes at him, but as time passed, I would remember the things he had said and realized that I was turning into him.

Now, with this completely awful situation, I knew he was gearing up to give me an earful.

That would have to wait, though. I texted him back: driving right now; will call when I get there.

Then I turned off my phone. Was that the safest thing to do? No. If there were an emergency from Green and Associates, I would have no method of knowing until I turned my phone back on, but at the rate Elijah was texting and calling me, it was unlikely that my phone’s battery would survive the assault from across the country.

Even though the question of what he could be thinking nagged at me, I knew there was nothing I could do about it in the moment, so I tried to enjoy the landscape passing by. This was a difficult task as all the apprehensions and resentment I had about being there in the first place marred the aesthetic beauty in my mind.

Run down little towns filled chock full of fast food franchises and massive, deteriorating parking lots pockmarked the endless grids of fields that were boxed off by backroads and lines of trees. Maybe it was just me, but it seemed as if the grass and the leaves weren’t as green as they were back home as if there were a layer of grime on everything. This appeared to be the case by the time I got to Wisconsin as there were honest to goodness barns by the farmhouses, many of them with faded or peeling paint.

Yeesh, I thought, trying to wonder what I would do if I were the teenage child of the people living within those houses. I wouldn’t want to invite my friends from school over; everything looks like it’s in pretty rough shape and the smell of manure from the cow pasture or pig pens is overwhelming!

Then again, there appeared to be a lot of farms and farm houses in the area and so maybe everyone else’s house was exactly like that and therefore, it was the norm? Either that or all the kids were so busy helping their parents out on the farm (which I heard children on the farm tended to do) that they really didn’t have time to spend with friends outside of school. Either way, the whole situation seemed kind of sad. There just wasn’t any escape.

Then again, what kind of escape had there been for me at that age? I lived in a nice house with my parents who gave me everything I ever needed, but they had been very strict with me. I was required to get on the honor roll every semester in school or I wouldn’t be allowed to leave the house until the next time I was on the honor roll. My parents picked out all my friends for me based on who the children of their friends were and if, God forbid, I strayed off this path, I wasn’t allowed to spend time with any new friends until I had introduced my mom and dad to them. It would be after that that my parents gave the yea or nay. More often than not, it was a nay.

It was no wonder I had never dated anyone all throughout high school and by the time I had gotten to college, I had been alone for so long, I couldn’t introduce a romantic element in my life without it causing a huge disruption. This trend continued until my mid-twenties as I worked my way through job after job in the consulting firm until I was here: driving down a back road in southern Wisconsin, virginal and oh so very lost.

At least I won’t be living in the country like this, I thought to myself.

Based on everything I heard, Milwaukee was large enough to constitute a city, an exceptionally small city, but a city nonetheless. I hadn’t had much time to read up on it before my flight took off as the file on the Fresh Face Co-Op took up the bulk of my time, but I was led to understand that there was a small artistic community, sports teams and even a good deal of lore. The lore consisted of mostly serial killers and drunken celebrities and public figures being surly, but it was still something of which the inhabitants had to be proud of.

If that’s the sort of thing they’re proud of up there, I thought. This is going to be an interesting time to say the least.

This was confirmed when I entered the city limits. I was greeted with vast, empty lots and condemned factories as I entered what was known as the fifth ward. All this emptiness was punctuated by clusters of moderately priced looking homes with chain-link fences, run down looking taverns and a massive block of concrete with no adornments, not even windows, except for a massive digital clock at the top. The clock flicked back and forth between the time and the temperature (80 degrees Fahrenheit).

Whoa, I thought to myself. It’s like something out of either a dystopian or a utopian narrative.

Whether it would prove itself to be dystopian or utopian remained to be seen, but based on what I was seeing around me, I had a pretty strong idea. The litter situation rivaled that of the poorer neighborhoods in L.A. and that is not something I say lightly. I’ve never been one of these sticklers who thinks that everyone needs to live off the grid, eat only nuts and berries and recycle their own urine for drinking water, but the sheer amount of garbage blowing around in the wind gave me the impression that the people cared very little for the presentation of their neighborhood.

Maybe it’s all coming from the downtown area, I thought to myself. I’m getting close.

Indeed, the high rises endemic to what all cities call their downtown areas were looming in the distance, getting larger as I approached. The bridge, before I got there, lifted for a passing boat and I had to wait as it did so, but as soon as I crossed it, everything around me became much more appealing.

There was an old-world appeal to everything around me. Many of the buildings were covered in gothic adornments and the bridges were a deep forest green. Girls in sun dresses and expensive sunglasses clutched to rolled up sleeve clad arms of men in khaki pants in an astounding display of heteronormativity. They were able to take up the entire sidewalk as they did so.

Is there some kind of holiday or natural disaster that caused everyone to leave the city? I wondered to myself. I have never seen a city center so abandoned!

To be fair, it was a Sunday afternoon by the time I got there, but even the restaurants that should have been overflowing with customers were scantily populated with only a few tables on the outdoor patios enjoying early dinners and the most ridiculous bloody Marys I had ever seen. Each blood-glass was so overpacked with garnishes, I could see them from where I sat in my car.

Huh, I thought. I thought those were supposed to be breakfast drinks.

I was beginning to realize that, in Milwaukee, the people did things their own way.

The downtown area was beautiful and almost idyllic in how sparsely it was populated, but it seemed to end as soon as it began. Before I had even registered the city around me, I was in a more residential area. The streets were impossibly narrow and I puckered my lips and squinted my eyes, searching for a place to pull over so that I could plug in the address number of the apartment I would be housed in while I did the job.

The apartment itself was much larger than what I was expecting. It was situated in the exact center between the downtown area and the dense, cloistered campus of the state university. Based on my online research, it was located fifteen minutes away from the Fresh Face Co-Op if I went by car.

The building itself was a good four stories higher than all the other houses and apartment buildings in the residential area. I noticed, with some dismay, that it was so decidedly residential that it lacked access to businesses of any sort. It looked as if I would have to take a long drive if I ran out of toilet paper in the middle of the night or decided to get the paper in the morning, as I didn’t like the song and dance of subscribing and unsubscribing from various publications as I was wanting to do.

Other than that, the neighborhood appeared to be fairly nice. It was clearly an affluent area compared to the rest of the city, if not upper middle class.

My apartment was on the top floor and when I first laid eyes on it, I wondered how Green and Associates could afford it. Sure, it lacked style with its featureless eggshell white walls, plain-Jane beige Berber carpet and naked unadorned light bulbs hanging from the ceiling (I made a mental note to myself to check in if it was legal around there for landlords to keep lights unadorned and fixture free like that or if there had been theft on the part of the last tenant), but the apartment itself was HUGE! Honestly, it was bigger than anywhere I had lived in my life, even the house I lived in with my parents.

I left my suitcase with the little wheelies on it next to the door with my carry-on bag and hung the long, slick, black bag I used to carry suits next to the door. I then proceeded to explore the place.

What is the economy like around here if the company was able to afford a place as big as this? I wondered. I know the Fresh Face Co-Op is a relatively large account, but Green and Associates never spends more than it has to when it comes to accommodating their agents.

A preliminary search on my phone revealed that this was the case. I looked up another empty apartment in the building on a real estate site with similar features and square footage. It revealed that rent was one third of what I paid monthly back in California.

Wow, I thought to myself. Maybe I should take my savings and move here. I could live for years here on my savings without having to work.

Trust me when I say that the impulse to do so did not last long.

The downside was that the apartment was more or less unfurnished. With the exception of a few necessities. There was a refrigerator in the kitchen, which I noted was beige enough to match the entirely beige kitchen.

Beige fever seems to be sweeping this apartment! I thought to myself. I wonder if that’s what’s stylish around here.

They did say that the Midwest always took ten years to catch up to what was stylish on the coasts, but, by all appearances, this apartment appeared to be thirty years behind the times. The bedroom was in a similar state, but I was thankful to note that the bed was there already. However, the linen that covered the bed was the stiff, unappealing rigid kind that one would find at a cheap hotel and there were no blankets.

Would it be better to have someone send my blankets or just buy new ones while I’m here? I wondered.

It hardly seemed worth it to buy too much furniture. After all, if things went as I hoped, I wouldn’t be staying there for too long and I didn’t want to have to deal with giant, bulky pieces of décor when I inevitably moved back to the West Coast, but I was an adult and it seemed equally ridiculous to live without things such as a table or a couch or really even anything to sit on at all besides this poorly laundered bed.

Then I realized who I had entrusted with the key to the apartment: Elijah. He would have to be the one that I called up to ask for all the things I wanted shipped to me. Such a task would entail calling him and I wasn’t so sure I was ready for that.

Since there was nowhere to sit, I slumped down on the floor right in the middle of the bedroom and exhaled an exasperated puff of air.

It was only then that I realized how quiet the place was. I could hear the hum of the refrigerator from all the way across the apartment. It gave the place a sterile, mechanical, feel. The blankness of the wall and the lack of décor had that effect as well.

Maybe I should have him send some of the artwork on the walls from home? I thought. No. That would be a silly waste of money and effort. I’m not going to be here too long. Besides, I don’t have much in the way of art, anyway.

It’s not that I disliked art. Quite the opposite: I loved having paintings to look at! It’s just that every time I ever saw a painting in a person’s house I had to wonder how often they really looked at it. Based on my understanding of things, not all that often. Instead, they opted to hang up pieces that blended in with the aesthetic or, at best, invested in paintings created by somewhat famous artists who would make the work a conversation piece. One of my bosses had even purchased a painting done by an infamous serial killer while in prison.

“It’s outsider art!” The ridiculously wealthy man had exclaimed to me while I peered at it with a quizzical look. “Crazy people see the world differently than we do and this is the best glimpse we have into their world! Isn’t it genius?”

I had been staring at the painting assuming that somebody’s grandchild had done it because that’s how much skill and artistry was put in. However, I couldn’t very well tell my boss that he had thrown away his money on the overrated scribblings of a disgusting human being.

“That’s a really interesting thing to have,” I settled for saying.

At least it wasn’t a lie. Anyway, I would have settled for even that terrible, scary, murderer painting for my apartment at that moment. There was something even more scary about the neutrality of the place. It made me feel like I was in some kind of a pod, being used as a human battery for my robot overlords.

I would figure out what I needed from my home at a later date. It was imperative that I call Elijah anyway. He had been my friend since Freshman year of college and, in a way, he had always grounded me like no one else could. That was what I needed more than anything at that moment in time. I turned on my phone to see that he had stopped texting me after I had texted him that I couldn’t talk. You had to hand it to him; he was persistent, but he understood when a situation was futile.

I took in a deep breath and dialed Elijah. He didn’t pick up until a handful of rings in. I knew this was a tactic of his. I knew for a fact he had the phone in his hand at that exact moment, waiting for me to call. It’s just that he didn’t want me to know that, so he was holding off on answering. Unfortunately for him, I knew him better than this. He had done this to every single girlfriend he had ever had. This attitude toward interpersonal relationships was one the reasons he had trouble working in an organization or maintaining any sort of romance.

Luckily for him, I was just the sort of friend to put up with this kind of thing.

“Are you sure you’re okay to talk?” he asked immediately upon answering the phone. “I wouldn’t want you to get into any car accidents or anything if you happen to still be driving.”

From the way he delivered that (not) sick burn, I could tell he had been working on it for the past ten hours.

“Fair enough,” I said.

He had every reason to be salty; I sort of just skipped town on everyone and basically said to everyone “oh yeah, by the way… deal with it.”

“Ron,” Elijah said in an exasperated tone. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“I’m on an assignment, Elijah,” I responded back with what I deemed an appropriate amount of assertiveness. “You know, the kind of thing that made you drop out of this kind of career in the first place?”

“Damn straight, it is,” said Elijah.

Ah yes, Elijah had never lost his ability to curse casually in a conversation. I doubt he would have even if he’d gone the same route as I had, which would have harmed his career in the long run. Sometimes I compared us and wondered who was more psychologically healthy and who was less psychologically healthy. In the end, I always baffled myself into deciding we were dead even.

“What the hell are you doing going all the way out to bum-fuck nowhere in the middle of Wisconsin?” Elijah asked.

Ah yes, Elijah had never even lost his ability to curse not-so-casually in a conversation. In fact, he could be quite vulgar. Sometimes, I think this was a defense mechanism. He was so afraid of living the life I lived, that he incorporated habits into his language to ensure that he would never have to do so.

“Milwaukee’s a fairly large city,” I said. “It’s not nowhere.”

“May as well be,” said Elijah.

I didn’t know why I was getting so defensive about it; Elijah was saying the exact same things I had resentfully grumbled to myself on the way to the airport. There was something about his constant, ever-present, negativity that had always compelled me to be insanely positive.

“Listen,” I said. “This is going to be a difficult one, but if I pull it off, there’s no way I can be overlooked for a promotion again.”

I thought about the top-secret information I had received from Shelby just after receiving the assignment. I trusted her more than anyone else at the firm.

This is a reason to be optimistic, I assured myself. You’re not simply being reactionary to Elijah right now. It’s not a lie.

Sometimes I took it a little too far in that regard. I would just get so irritated at the negativity that sometimes our friendship bordered on toxic. Our mutual friends had all felt that way too, apparently, since I was the only person from the old gang that Elijah spoke to on a weekly basis. That kind of personality wears you down unless you have the right sort of coping mechanisms.

“So you’ll get the promotion,” said Elijah. “And then you’ll be working to the next promotion and then you’ll be working for the one after that…”

“So what?” I asked. “Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do?”

“Is that what you want to do?” Elijah asked.

Darn him. He had an annoying habit of asking questions to which he already had the answer. Of course, I didn’t want to live this way for the rest of my life, being pushed around for the sake of the next form of validation.

“It’s the only thing I can think of to do,” I said. “It’s better than sitting around doing nothing.”

I shouldn’t have said that, especially not with so much pointed acid. Due to his non-conformist ways, Elijah had been in an unfocused muddle for the entirety of our adulthood. He still lived like a college kid.

“Is it, though?” Elijah shot back.

“I don’t know,” I said honestly.

Elijah sighed on the other end of the phone.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I know your priorities are… more conventional than mine. It’s just that this all has been quite a shock.”

I forgave him for how snotty he sounded when he said the words “more conventional”. Even though we were just friends and not even best friends, I understood why he was so upset. His personality had always been a bitter pill to swallow and it had only gotten worse over the years as he became more and more disenchanted with the world. Nobody wanted to talk to him anymore, not even his own parents. As far as I knew, I was the only one talking to him even though I absolutely did not have to.

Ten years before, I would have questioned my motives in this. All the hippy dippy Southern California types had told me that you should remove toxic people in your life, but there was something poignant about Elijah’s toxicity. It was like he was injecting me with a little bit of poison every time I talked to him. So, by the time I received what would have been a lethal dose from the outside world, I had developed immunity from it. I’m pretty sure that’s how I was able to survive all those years at Green and Associates.

That said, Elijah never managed to curb how annoying he was and sometimes he was a little too much even for me.

“You’re making money for people who are taking advantage of you,” he told me. “They’re like vampires, promising you treasure each time if you give them just a little more blood. Only, they never give you what they promise, and they’ll be done with you as soon as you’re drained.”

“That’s not true,” I argued. “Nobody promised me anything. Well… not anything except for a pay check, which I still continue to get, thank you very much.”

Elijah sighed again. This time it was clearly exaggerated to show how disappointed he was in me.

“They didn’t need to promise you anything to owe you what they haven’t given you,” he said. “You had promise, and so they need to keep their promise.”

“That didn’t make any sense at all,” I said.

“I was being poetic!” Elijah shouted at me, causing me to pull the phone away to spare my ear.”

“Yeah… yeah…” I said. “Anyway, I’ll fulfill my promise when I’m done with the less promising stuff.”

Even I didn’t believe the words coming out of my mouth. This was all a reaction to combat the negativity of my toxic friend and even he knew it.

“This shouldn’t take long anyway,” I said.

“You always do that,” said Elijah.

“Always do what?” I asked.

“Downplay how much you’re being taken advantage of.”

“Oh, come on! Sure, this is not the most agreeable job Green and Associates has sent me on, but I wouldn’t say they’re taking advantage of me!”

The silence on the other end begged to differ.

“You’re reading too much into this,” I said for the millionth time since I had known Elijah.

Elijah, in kind, responded with a single word.

“Casino,” he said.

He had used that word to make a point only once before. It had been when I had found an apartment through my Realtor. The place seemed perfect with hardwood floors and granite countertops. The rent wasn’t bad either. I went for a second showing with Elijah in tow for his opinion.

“Casino,” he said, as we glanced the place over.

“What?” the Realtor asked.

Elijah gave no response, but rather, gave her a dark look.

“I’ll have to think on it a little longer,” I said.

But by the time I got around to sending in the application saying that I wanted the place, it had already been rented out. I was furious at Elijah for a week until the place got condemned. Apparently, massive, cat-sized rats had been living in the walls and coming out at night to bite the tenants on the face when they slept. Elijah had picked up on the fact that something was seriously wrong just by listening to the Realtor talk. Seeing through the artificial was a gift of his.

So, I knew that just based on one word, he was seeing something that I couldn’t or refused to see.