The Intruders - Michael Marshall

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on how her new position was going to shake things up for the company, and in a good way. It was not difficult to imagine him greeting his wife and kids in a similar manner every morning, a goals and achievements spiel capped with assurances of his best attention at all times, cc-ed to his personal assistant.

      He left me at the door and I walked out across reception alone. I turned my head just before stepping back out into the world. It seemed to me that there might be someone standing behind the frosted glass door, watching me leave, but I couldn’t be sure.

      I walked down the alley slowly. I hadn’t brought Amy’s organizer but I remembered the contents. Three days full of meetings. Sure, I hadn’t read the details and they could theoretically have been in LA, San Francisco or Portland – the last only a three-hour drive away – but I didn’t believe for a moment that I’d confused the city. Plus I had her phone in my pocket, found here in this city last night. Amy had come here, and until the night before last had been in contact as usual. Now she was nowhere to be found. The hotel was a blank. The people at her job didn’t know where she was, or said they didn’t.

      And neither did I.

      Post Alley deposited me in a stubby dead-end, over which the beginnings of an elevated street set off towards the bay, before banking sharply left to join the Alaskan Viaduct above. The concrete supports had been covered in graffiti, over what looked like many years. ‘Rev9’, and ‘Later’ and ‘Back Again’ it said, amongst other things. While my eyes were wandering over this I felt a sudden itch in my shoulder blades.

      I turned, slowly, as if that was simply what I was doing next. A few people were walking back and forth at the end of the road, going about their business in the shadow of the elevated highway, getting in or out of cars, moving stuff here and there. Beyond that there was a wide road and a couple of piers, and then the flicker of light hitting water out on Elliott Bay.

      No one was looking in my direction. Everyone was in motion, walking or driving. Traffic rumbled over the elevated highway above, sending deep vibrations through the buildings and sidewalks around me, until the whole city almost seemed to be singing one long, low note.

      I found a bar downtown. I scored a table by the window and ordered a pot of coffee – employing the last of my charm to get the waitress to let me use a socket behind the bar to plug in a power adapter for Amy’s phone, which I’d bought on the way. While I waited for the coffee I watched people at the other tables. Bars used to be a place where you came to get away from the outside world. That was the point. Now everyone seemed to be sucking free wi-fi or talking on cell phones.

      Nobody did anything interesting enough to distract me from the interlocking dialogues in my head. The fact Amy wasn’t in town on Kerry, Crane & Hardy business could be explained. I knew that. I was calm. It was still possible there was nothing strange going on here except inside my own head, and it reminded me of a time a year or so before, when Amy went through a period of talking in her sleep. At first it was just a mumbling and you couldn’t make out anything within it. After a while it got stronger, words and sections of sentences. It would wake me up, night after night. It began to screw with both our sleep patterns. She tried adjusting her diet and caffeine intake and spending even longer in the gym on the way to work, but nothing helped. Then it just stopped, though it was a couple of weeks before I started sleeping soundly again. In the meantime I had plenty of time to lie in the dark and wonder what made the brain do such a thing, how it must be organized so that when all of the conscious functions had apparently checked out, some part was still verbalizing about something. How was it doing that, and why? Who was it talking to?

      That’s what it felt like my brain was doing right now. The part under my conscious control was sticking fingers in dykes and providing rational explanations. It was doing good work, suggesting Amy might indeed be here on the quiet in the hope of bringing clients to KC&H as a lock, stock and barrel triumph that couldn’t be group-owned. She lived and breathed office politics. Could even be that was what she had been trying to explain the evening when I didn’t listen properly.

      But meanwhile other bits of my head were running scatter-shot in all directions. Deep inside each of us is a part that mistrusts order, and craves the relief of seeing the world shatter into the chaos it believes lies underneath all along. Or perhaps that’s just me.

      When Amy’s phone had enough charge I retrieved it from behind the bar. Sitting with it in my hands felt strange. This was the only device through which I could talk to my wife: but it was currently with me, and thus made her feel even farther away. We have evolved now, gained a sixth sense through the invention of email and cell phones – an awareness of the utterances and circumstances of people who are not present. When this sense is taken away, you feel panicked, struck blind. I had a sudden idea and called the phone back at the house, but it rang and rang before switching to the machine. I left a message saying where I was and why, just in case Amy got home ahead of me. It should have felt like a good, sensible thing to do. Instead it was as if another road had just been washed away in the rain.

      Amy’s phone was a different brand from mine and the keys were a lot smaller. As a result my first brush with the interface put me in the music player section by mistake. There were eight MP3 tracks listed, which surprised me. Like any other occupant of the twenty-first century who wasn’t Amish, Amy owned an iPod. She wasn’t going to be using her phone for music, but while I could imagine a device might come with a couple of songs preloaded, eight seemed a lot. Seven of the tracks were simply numbered Track 1 to Track 7, the other a long string of digits. I tried Track 1. Tinny music came out of the earpiece, old jazz, one of those crackly 1920s guys. Very much not Amy’s kind of thing – she’d gone on record more than once as hating jazz, or basically anything that pre-dated Blondie. I tried another track, then one more, with similar results. It was like holding the world’s smallest speakeasy.

      I took another scroll through the Contacts section, this time not looking for Kerry, Crane & Hardy but for anything else that stuck out. I didn’t see anything to make me linger. I didn’t recognize all the names, but I was never going to. Your partner’s workplace is like another country. You’ll always be a stranger there.

      So I headed to the SMS section. Amy had picked up the joy of SMS messaging from the younger blades in the agency, and she and I now exchanged texts regularly – when I knew she would be in a meeting, or she wanted to convey information that didn’t need my attention right away. Usually just to say hi. Sure enough, there were four from me there, going back a few months. A couple from her sister, Natalie, who lived back down in Santa Monica, in the house where she and Amy had been born and grown up.

      And eleven from somebody else.

      The messages from Natalie and me had our names attached. These others didn’t, just a phone number. It was the same number each time.

      I selected the earliest. It was blank. An SMS communication had been sent, and received, but there was no text in it at all. The next was the same, and the next. Why would you keep sending texts without anything in them? Because you were incompetent, maybe, but by the third or fourth you’d think anyone could have gotten the hang of it. I kept scrolling. I’d grown so used to the single line of nothing in each message that when the sixth contained something else it took me by surprise. It didn’t make much sense, either.

      yes

      No period, even. The next few messages were blank again. Then I got to the final one.

      A rose by ny othr name wll sml as sweet … :-D

      I put the phone on the table and poured another cup of coffee. Eleven messages was a lot, even if most of them had nothing to say. Besides, Amy wasn’t the type to let her phone be clogged with other people’s Luddite errors. She was not sentimental. I’d already noted she’d only kept the texts from me that contained information of long-term use. A few thinking-of-you ones I’d sent a couple of days before, and which she’d replied to, had already been erased. The couple from Natalie looked like they’d been saved because they were especially annoying, and could be used later

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