Author: Rhythm
Rating: PG
Summary: Mr. Mike moved into our apartment building when I was seven…
Spoilers: None.
Disclaimer: Baaaad Robot!
Archive: Probably - but ask me first, just in case.
Thanks to: Celli, for the beta.
Feedback: You only have to send feedback if you read the story…
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{hallway scenes}
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What I'm about to tell you happened six years ago. Even though I was a little boy then, it might as well have been a day ago, because I haven't forgotten anything. It seems important to write it down now, so that I never will.
It starts just as the leaves were beginning to turn red and silver-gold…
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If, in September, you had lived in our apartment building, had played marbles and jacks with the littler kids in the second floor hallway while their mothers did the shopping, if you had spent hours daydreaming at the window by the fire escape, you would have noticed when Mr. Mike moved into the apartment next to ours. When my older sister, nineteen years old, saw him carrying boxes in from his car, she got that look on her face, the one that always reminds me of our cat right before it jumps a bird, and rushed into the bathroom to fix her hair. I thought he looked too old for her, and told her so, but she said I didn't know anything anyway and shut the door.
It was about a week after he first arrived that we met. Seven o'clock in the morning, a school day; I was in the hall by the window, waiting for the bus; that, and avoiding my parents' morning fight. He came out of his apartment in a suit, briefcase in hand, and stopped when he saw me.
Call me Mike, he said, shaking my hand like I was grown up; pleased to meet you. You live next door?
I didn't see him often - he worked an awful lot - and when I did see him he was usually on his way to work or coming back late in the evening. He said he was an employee of the government, which I guess is a pretty important job, because the people he worked for made him go on trips and go to meetings at all kinds of hours. Sometimes when I left for school in the mornings we would meet in the hall, but he would just be getting home. Even when he looked really tired, when the lines in his face were deeper than they usually were, he would always smile and tell me to have fun in class.
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If, in November, you had been sitting with me in the window sill by the fire escape, you definitely would have noticed when the pretty blonde woman brought a cardboard box full of stuff to Mr. Mike's door and threw it on the ground. She asked me if I knew who lived in that apartment, and I told her Mr. Mike lived there.
Well, she said, when 'Mr. Mike' shows up again, you tell him Alice says he can take his job and shove it.
I promised that I would. Turning on her heel, she marched toward the elevator, which no one ever uses because it's broken, and waited with one finger firmly on the down button until I timidly remarked that it didn't work. She glared at me, and stomped down the stairs instead; I heard the first floor door slam as she went out.
When Mr. Mike came home, I watched him stop at his door, and slowly kneel down in front of the box. He pulled out a T-shirt, a can of shaving cream and finally a picture frame, the glass smashed, with a photograph in it of him and the blonde woman. They were both smiling, and I said they looked happy. Mr. Mike put the picture back in the box with the other things, and said that maybe now she would be happy again.
I asked who the blonde woman was, and he sighed, leaning back against his door. Alice was his girlfriend, he said, and then added that he guessed ex-girlfriend was the right answer now. I asked if it was about his job, and he nodded. Remembering my promise, I said,
{Alice says you can take your job and shove it.}
Mr. Mike burst out laughing, which surprised me, because she hadn't said it like it was supposed to be a joke. When I asked him why it was funny he said it was because that sounded like Alice. I thought about this for a minute, and then asked him if he wanted to play jacks.
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If, the day my daddy left us, you had sat with me on the fire escape as I cried, you would have gotten to hear a little of Mr. Mike's theory on love. When he poked his head out the window into the evening sunlight and asked what was wrong, I buried my head in my arms and told him to go away. After a minute, I looked over to see him perched in the windowsill, looking at a little rubber ball he held in his hand.
He asked in a quiet voice if my dad had left, and I asked him how he knew that. He looked a little embarrassed as he said he'd heard them through the walls. I said that was because the walls were really thin; I could hear my sister talking on the phone every night after I went to bed, and said that sometimes she talked to her friends about him. This made Mr. Mike chuckle a little, and he said he hoped she said only nice things. I didn't tell him what she said. What I did tell him was that my daddy was moving to San Diego, and that he didn't love my mom any more, maybe not even me. This made him frown, but he didn't reply for a minute, just tossed the rubber ball up and down with one hand.
Sometimes, he finally said, people don't get to be with the ones they love. He said it's always hard when you can't be with someone you love, but he was sure my daddy loved me.
Are you with the person you love? I asked. He said no, he wasn't, and then shut his mouth tightly. His lips pressed together as he looked at me, like he was trying to figure out what I knew. I asked if it was Alice, but he said it was someone else. Some other woman. When I asked if she loved him, he said he wasn't supposed to ask her that.
He slid off the windowsill into the hall, stretched his hand back out, and opened his fingers to show me the rubber ball. He said it was a new ball for jacks, for me. I said thank you, and let him drop the ball into my open palm.
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If, as the days began to grow long, you had thought you saw a change in Mr. Mike, I would have agreed with you. He started to be gone more often, and would come back looking even more sad than he did tired. When I asked him if something was wrong, he asked me if I remembered his someone, the someone he couldn't be with. He said that she was having trouble at her other job, that her boss suspected her of keeping secrets. He told me, when I asked, that some secrets were okay, that some secrets needed to be kept.
I think he was keeping secrets too, because he started spending even more nights away from home. Every once in a while I would still run into him in the hall, and each time the bags under his eyes were bigger, and his body more tired-looking. He told me, standing in his doorway, although this time I didn't ask, that it was just long hours at the office. Long hours, he repeated slowly, then shut his door with a quiet click. My mother said they shouldn't work him so hard, that they should give the poor boy some rest. She didn't know who "they" were, but said if she ever met "them" she'd give them a piece of her mind.
In July, there were two weeks when he didn't come home at all, and the newspapers started to pile up in front of his door. After five days, my mother asked me if I knew the name of the place where Mr. Mike worked, but I said he'd never told me. I told her he said he was an employee of the government, but I don't think she knew what that meant either. I told myself I'd ask him, when he got back.
After eleven days, my mom called the police. I was sitting by his door, bouncing the rubber ball he gave me against it, when they came and had the super let them in. They rummaged around for a few minutes, then came back out and told my mom there was no evidence of a crime, and to be patient and wait. She got kind of upset, and yelled at them some. She said she spent her whole life waiting on men and the government. The policemen looked sorry, but I guess there's really not much you can do when a man decides to leave.
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If, on the last day of July, I had told you it was my birthday, you might have understood why it was so important, and so perfect, that it was also the day Mr. Mike came home.
We all heard the door close through the walls, and the three of us skidded out into the hallway, me from my room and my mom and sister from the kitchen where they were making my cake. We stared at his door, real hard, as if we could see through it with just the power of our minds. My mom told my sister to knock, and then my sister told my mother to knock, and then they both told me to knock. I stepped forward and rapped softly on the door.
It opened quickly, and Mr. Mike appeared in the doorway, wearing his suit pants, a rumpled button down, his tie half undone, and a happier face than I had ever seen on him before. Maybe happy isn't the word. Maybe relieved. Maybe lighter.
He scratched at the whiskers on his face, which hadn't been there before, and grinned a bashful hello. My mom and sister and I were kind of dumbstruck, I don't know why. I do know we never asked him why he'd been gone. We kind of stared at each other, the three of us with solemn faces and him with that big grin. When I finally kicked at the floor and said it was my birthday, his grin just got bigger.
We had a thunderstorm on my birthday, and the power went out in our building. It ended up being kind of fun, though, because we had candles everywhere in the apartment when I blew out my cake. My mom and my sister wore party hats, and we invited Mr. Mike over. My sister made him wear a party hat too, put it on him even. He turned a little bit red, but laughed a lot.
I won every game of cards we played that night, and Mr. Mike told my mom he couldn't beat me at jacks, either. He reached over and tickled me, and I kicked and screamed and pretended not to love it, even though I used to only let my dad tickle me. When I wriggled away and ran over behind the couch, he took a flashlight and shone it up on his face, like you do when you pretend to be a ghost. He couldn't do a good ghost voice, though, and when he tried it just made him laugh instead.
I keep pictures in my head, of things that I really want to remember, and the one of Mr. Mike, wearing a party hat and shining a flashlight on his face and laughing is one that I flip to often. It is the last memory I have of Mr. Mike that I don't want to forget.
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If, in the end, it seemed to you like the sky was falling down, Mr. Mike might have known how you felt. In fact, I'm sure of it. His sky fell down on the first day of August, the day after I turned eight years old.
It didn't rain that day, but about the time it got dark it started getting windy, and I went and sat on the fire escape and let the wind blow my hair into little knots. It was beautiful, the way the moon lit up the trees and made them look like they were bowing and dancing. The weather was hot, but with the wind blowing so fierce I hardly sweated at all. I sat, and let it all come over me and through me.
The screeching of car tires into the parking lot made me sit straight upright, and I watched as Mr. Mike double-parked and jumped out, leaving the engine on. He made it inside before I could hello down to him, and I slid back into the hallway to be by his door when he got there.
From the sound of it, he took the stairs two or three at a time; he nearly beat me to his door. I said hi to him as he fumbled for his key, but he didn't seem to recognize me when he looked down. He jammed the key into the lock and turned it, but stopped with his hand on the knob and spoke.
{I didn't even get to tell her I love her.}
{Who?}
{They found out. They found out.}
I followed him into the apartment, trailing him around as he yelled something about a passport. I asked him who, who was gone, who'd found out, and he stopped dead again.
{Dead, not gone, dead. And sudden. It was…sudden.}
Then he tilted his head, like he was listening for something. There was no sound that I could hear, but he heard something, because he grabbed me up and ran with me to the door. He let go of me in the hall, and pointed his finger, telling me to get inside, inside. I heard a noise then, a sound in the stairwell, and Mr. Mike slammed his door.
They came in quiet, and didn't pay attention to me as I sat pressed up against the wall. There were no faces, just black masks to go with their black clothes and black guns. They were quiet right up until they kicked Mr. Mike's door in.
There was shouting after that, lots of shouting and banging and crashing of furniture, and I was right there, pressed up against the wall, when they dragged Mr. Mike out into the hallway. He fought them really hard, and I like to think he might have gotten free if one of them hadn't stuck him with a stick that gave him an electric shock. It made him fall down, and they leaned their knees on him as they put handcuffs on. He started yelling again, and tried to twist away, but they pulled him up and took him to the stairway.
He shouted most of the way down, and I think once he shouted my name.
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I told my mom, after, that I never wanted to have a special someone, not ever. She shushed me, said I had lots of time before I should be thinking about that, and asked if I wanted blackberry pie. I said no, I didn't want anything, not ever, and she sighed soft and squatted down to look at me in my eyes.
Not everyone leaves, she said. I dropped my eyes to look at the floor and nodded once.
Sometimes, though, as I sit out on the rusting fire escape, I wonder.
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End
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