Hold Still
| 22 min read
The left gutter broom threw grit against the curb and Wendell felt it come up through the seat the way he always did, and then the radio quit.
Not static. Gone. He ran the dial the whole way across the band and got the same clean nothing both directions, and he was reaching for the two-way to ask Marcus whether the tower was down again when the light inside the cab changed.
He looked up through the slanted glass.
It was a number. It sat in the middle of the sky and it was about the size of a number written on paper and held out at arm's length, white the way a fluorescent tube is white when you catch it sideways.
61:00:42:19
The last pair of digits was going down.
Wendell stopped the sweeper in the middle of Parade Street with the brooms still turning and got out. The night was thirty-four degrees and smelled like the lake. Up and down the block, porch lights were coming on. A man came out of the duplex across from the shuttered pharmacy in a bathrobe and white socks, no shoes, and stood in his own driveway with his head back.
"You see it?" the man said.
"Yeah."
"That a plane thing? Advertising?"
"I don't know what it is."
The man kept standing there in his socks. Wendell walked out into the intersection and turned a slow circle to see where the number moved to, and it didn't move. It stayed in the middle of the sky. He walked half a block north and turned around again. Still the middle.
The two-way crackled. "Wen." Marcus, out on the west side. "Wen, you looking up?"
"I'm looking up."
"What is that."
"I don't know."
"Okay," Marcus said, and then didn't say anything for a while, and then said, "Okay," again.
Wendell finished the run. He didn't decide to. The brooms were already turning and the hopper was a third full and there were four blocks left on Parade before the turn onto Twelfth, so he did those four blocks and made the turn. Somewhere behind him a car alarm started and nobody shut it off.
Rusak's had the lights on at ten of five like every morning. Halina was at the bench with her forearms in flour to the elbow. She looked up when the bell went and looked back down.
"You're late," she said.
"There's a number in the sky."
"I know. I looked." She turned the dough and hit it with the heel of her hand. "Coffee's fresh. The bismarcks are five minutes."
He got his cup and stood at the window with it and watched the sky over the Presbyterian church do nothing at all, except lose a second, and another one.
"You're not going to ask what it is," he said.
"You're going to tell me?"
"No."
"So." She hit the dough again. "Five minutes."
By noon that day every government on earth had said the same thing in a different language, which was that they were looking into it.
Here was the part nobody could get past. Cameras saw clear sky. Phones, security systems, the observatory out at the peninsula, a Japanese satellite that they slewed around and burned half its fuel budget to point at the right patch of nothing. Clear sky. No spectral line, no occlusion, no interference with anything at any wavelength anyone owned. Eight billion people looked up and read the same digits down to the second, and not one machine ever saw it.
The people who couldn't see reported nothing at all, and had to sit through a week of being told they were lucky. Children too young to read described a piece of the sky getting shorter, and drew it as a bar or a slice, and their bars and slices shrank at the same rate as everybody else's numbers. Two men who went under general anesthesia the second night woke up and said they had watched it the entire time.
The hoax theory lasted about six days. It could not survive the arithmetic. There is no projector that puts the same image at the same apparent size directly overhead for a man in Erie and a woman in Perth, and there is no drug in the water that agrees with itself to the second across the Pacific, and there is no conspiracy that includes literally everyone including the people trying to debunk it.
So it went to the other theories. Wendell heard all of them through the windshield on the AM station that came back on the fourth day. Simulation, and the loading bar of whatever was about to overwrite them. Aliens, obviously, though nobody could explain why aliens would use base ten. The rapture crowd, who had the advantage of a text and the disadvantage of a date, which had never gone well for them before. A physicist from Cleveland who said, carefully, that a countdown implies a mechanism and a mechanism implies a builder and he was not prepared to speculate about the builder, and then talked for six minutes about how there was nothing to measure, which was itself the most interesting measurement in the history of the field.
Wendell's own theory was that he did not have one.
What he had was a route. Seventeen miles of curb line, four nights a week, plus the Sunday morning downtown that took until eight. He had it memorized down to the storm grate on Sassafras that swallowed a broom bristle bundle every March. And he could tell you what the two months did to the world better than any of them on the radio, because he could tell you what came off the street.
The first week was glass. He had never seen glass like that. Bottles mostly, thrown at walls, in the gutter in front of the credit union and outside the Sunoco and all down the alley behind the wing place. Sixty pounds a night more than usual in the hopper. He weighed it at the yard because Dwyer made them weigh it.
The second week the glass stopped and it was paper. Flyers, printed at home, wet and stuck flat to the sidewalks. Some of them said what to repent of. Some of them had a phone number for a group that met at the VFW. One of them was a photocopy of a hand-drawn diagram of the solar system with an arrow pointing at nothing in particular, and he picked that one up and looked at it and put it in the door pocket of the cab, where it stayed.
Around week three the streets got clean. Not because of him. People came out with their own brooms. Whole blocks of Eighth Street were swept by hand at seven in the morning by people who had never once in their lives swept the public sidewalk. He drove past a woman doing the strip in front of a vacant storefront she had nothing to do with, and she waved at him, and he lifted two fingers off the wheel.
He drafted a text to June eleven times in the first month. He got as far as hey and as far as hey kid, I guess you've seen and one night he got as far as three full paragraphs, sitting in the cab in the yard at six in the morning with the engine ticking, and then he held the delete key down and watched it eat the whole thing right to left, which took a while.
Around day fifty, Halina had a theory, which surprised him, because she'd been the only person in the city who hadn't.
He came in at the usual time and she was scaling dough and she said, without any run-up, "It's a label."
"A what?"
"A label." She kept scaling. Her hands worked at the speed hands work when they have done a thing forty thousand times. "Like on the milk. It's not the milk threatening you. It's just telling you when."
"When what."
"That's not what a label does. A label tells you when. What is your business."
Wendell got his coffee. The bakery smelled the way it always smelled, yeast and hot sugar and the particular hot-metal smell of the proofer, and out the front window the number was over the church again, reading eleven and change.
"You're not scared of it," he said.
"I'm sixty-eight. I have a number over the church and I have a mammogram in June." She set the scale back to zero. "You want to know what I think, I'll tell you, and then you take your bismarck and go."
"Go ahead."
"Nobody counts down to hurt you." She said it flat, the way she said everything, and pushed a tray across the bench. "A bomb doesn't announce. A gun doesn't announce. You count out loud so people have time to get ready. That's all a countdown has ever been for, in the history of the world. Rockets and photographs and cakes."
"Cakes."
"Cakes," Halina said. "Three, two, one, blow."
He carried that around for a week without being able to put it down.
Marcus quit on day thirty-one. He came into the yard in his own truck instead of the crew truck and stood there with his hands in his jacket pockets and said his mother was in Ocala and he was going to Ocala.
"That's right," Wendell said.
"Come with me. I got room. Two days' drive."
"I got the route."
Marcus looked at him for a second longer than the sentence deserved. "Wen. There's no route."
"There's a route until Dwyer says there isn't."
"Man." Marcus laughed, but not much. "Okay." He shook Wendell's hand, which they had never done in nine years, and he got in his truck, and that was the last Wendell ever saw of him.
Dwyer never said there wasn't. Dwyer came in every day in a pressed shirt and made the schedule and made them weigh the hopper, and about half the crew kept showing up, and the ones who did got the whole city between them and ran doubles without overtime because payroll had quit. Nobody discussed it. There was an understanding at the yard, unspoken and total, that if you were the kind of person who came in, you came in.
Wendell knew what he was doing. He wasn't stupid about himself, not entirely. He'd been given the largest possible reason to go somewhere and he had responded by going to work, which was the same thing he had done with every smaller reason for nineteen years.
On day twenty-four he came up Eighth and had to stop, because somebody had put a piano in the intersection.
Not pushed there and abandoned. Placed, square with the crosswalk, with a kitchen chair in front of it and a work light run out on an extension cord from the porch of the corner house. Forty or fifty people were on the street, which had a fire going in a steel drum and a card table with food on it and, further down, a kid's inflatable pool with ice and cans in it. The piano was badly out of tune in the way that only a piano that has lived in a basement gets out of tune. A heavy man in a Cleveland jacket was playing it anyway.
Wendell idled there with the brooms up and let them see him.
A woman came over. She had a can in each hand and she handed one up through the window before she said anything.
"We'll move it," she said. "Give us twenty minutes and we'll move it."
"Take the night. I'll do Ninth and come back Thursday."
"You're still doing this?"
"I'm still doing this."
She looked at him. Behind her the man in the Cleveland jacket got most of the way through something and lost it and started again from the top, and half a dozen people made the noise people make. A girl about nineteen had come up behind the woman and was standing there with her arms crossed against the cold, and she said, not unkindly, "Why, though."
Wendell thought about it long enough that it got quiet in the cab.
"There's a grate on Sassafras," he said. "It plugs every March. If nobody pulls it, the whole block floods, and it takes out the basement of the church and the basement of the house next to the church."
"That's it?"
"That's it."
The girl kept looking at him. Then she nodded, once, like he'd said something else.
He backed the sweeper down to the corner and went around by Ninth, and when he came back through on Thursday the piano was gone and the intersection was covered in candle wax and paper plates and about four hundred bottle caps, and he ran it twice and got most of it.
The photograph was in his wallet behind his license, where it had been since 2007. June took it when she was seven with a yellow disposable camera she got for her birthday and burned through in a day and a half. Twenty-four exposures of nothing: the dog's back end, the kitchen ceiling, her own thumb. Number nineteen was him at the kitchen table on a Sunday, and it was overexposed by the flash and it was tilted about fifteen degrees, and the top left corner of his head was outside the frame, so what you got was a man with most of a face, holding a coffee cup, half-turned.
He got it out one night at the corner of Twelfth and Sassafras and looked at it with the dome light on, and then he put it back and finished the run.
She called on day twelve.
The phone woke him at two in the afternoon, which was his three in the morning, and he had it against his ear before he knew whose name was on it.
"Did I wake you up," June said.
"No."
"You always say no."
"I'm awake now, so."
There was a pause with a lot of room in it. He heard something on her end, a hose, water on gravel.
"I'm at work," she said.
"You're at work."
"Yeah. We're open. People are buying tomato starts, Dad. Like, everybody. We sold four months of tomato starts in nine days. I had a woman in yesterday who bought eight kinds of squash." He heard the hose shut off. "I'm not calling because of the thing."
"Okay."
"I'm calling because of the squash."
"Okay."
"She's not going to eat that squash," June said. "You plant it now, it's August. And she knows that, she's not an idiot, she had a soil test and everything." Her voice did something on the last word and came back. "So what is that. What is that, that people are doing."
Wendell sat on the edge of the bed with his feet on the cold floor and looked at the blackout curtain he'd hung nineteen years ago.
"I don't know," he said.
"I know you don't know. Nobody knows. That's the whole. That's the entire." She stopped. "Sorry."
"You don't have to be sorry."
"I've been mad at you for three years and it turns out that's not a thing you can just carry around anymore. It got heavy on like day forty."
He didn't say anything, because everything available to say was a way of getting out of it.
"You called me back," she said.
"I know."
"Six hours."
"I know."
"I wasn't in the parking lot anymore."
"I know, June."
"Okay," she said. She breathed out. Somebody in the background asked her about a hose, and she said the thing you say to somebody about a hose. Then, "I have a flight I've been sitting on. I bought it in April and I didn't tell anybody."
"To where?"
"Don't be stupid," June said.
She got in on day nine, and neither one of them was any good at it.
He picked her up at the little airport and they got most of the way to the house on weather. She was taller than he remembered, which made no sense at twenty-four. Her hands were wrecked, cracked across the knuckles, with dirt worked permanently into the creases, and he noticed it at a red light and didn't say anything about it, and she caught him noticing and put them under her legs.
They cleaned out the garage. That was what they did with the nine days, mostly, because it was the only thing available that had a beginning and an end. Twenty-two years of the garage. He'd been saying he would since before she left for school.
Day seven they did the shelving. Day six they did the boxes on the shelving. Day five they took four loads to a transfer station that was still running because the guy who ran it was also still running.
On day six, at the kitchen table, with the shelving done and the light gone and neither of them willing to turn on the television, she told him about the parking lot.
He had built it up over three years into something enormous. He had assumed a hospital, or a man, or the kind of trouble that has a name. What it was, she said, was that she had gotten to the end of a nine-hour shift at a restaurant and gone out to her car and sat in it and could not think of a single reason to turn the key. Not a dramatic thing. Just an absence of the reason. She had sat there for an hour and then she had called him at three in the morning because he was the only person she knew who was awake at three in the morning.
"And you said you'd call me back at the end of your shift," she said.
"I remember what I said."
"I know you do." She turned her cup on the table. "That's the part I couldn't get over. It wasn't that you didn't care. If you didn't care it'd be easy. You were just going to finish the route first."
"Yes," Wendell said.
June looked up.
"That's what I was going to do," he said. "You're right. I was going to finish the route."
She waited for the rest of it, the part where he explained why, and when it didn't come she sat back in the chair and let out about half a laugh and rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands.
"God, you're consistent," she said.
"Yeah."
"I'm going to bed."
"Okay."
She stopped in the doorway with her hand on the frame. "Six hours is a long time, Dad."
"I know it is."
"Okay," she said, and went up.
On day four she found the shoebox with the photographs in it, sat down on an upturned bucket, and went through the whole thing in about forty minutes without saying much of anything. The garage door was up. It was that first stretch of real warmth Erie gets in May, and the light came in low and yellow and made the concrete dust visible everywhere.
"I took this," she said, and turned one around.
It was the fifteen-degree one. The doubles from 2007, which he'd forgotten existed.
"You told me to hold still," he said.
"I did not."
"You did. You said hold still, and I held still, and then you took about ninety more seconds to press the button, so I turned around to see what was taking so long."
"That's your version."
"That's what happened."
"Yeah, well," June said, and looked at it a while longer. "You moved."
She put it back in the box and she put the box in the keep pile and she got up and went back to the shelving, and Wendell stood there in the yellow light for a second before he did the same.
The last morning they went up on the parking garage on State Street, because it was the highest thing downtown you could get to without a key.
Zero was at five o'clock in the morning, Eastern. That had been known for sixty-one days and it had done a number on the eastern half of the country, everybody's ending landing in the dark before dawn. The garage roof was full. Two hundred people, maybe, on the top deck of a parking garage, in coats, sitting on the hoods of cars. Somebody had brought a folding table and a coffee urn and there were paper cups going hand to hand down the row and nobody was charging anybody. A woman had a dog. Two kids were riding scooters in the empty half, and their scooter wheels made the only real noise up there for the last ten minutes.
June stood at the rail with her coffee. He stood next to her. Down below, the streets were the filthiest he had seen them in nineteen years, because for four days the entire city had been outdoors.
At sixty seconds the numbers came down.
That was the part nobody had predicted, and the part everybody afterward described the same way. The digits left the middle of the sky and came down and forward, and settled at eye level, in front of every single person on the planet, at what each of them would later say was about four feet, and they were no longer white. They were the color of the inside of your eyelid with a light behind it.
Somebody on the far side of the deck started laughing, one of those laughs that has nothing to do with anything being funny.
At ten seconds the scooters stopped.
Wendell had his hand on the concrete rail, and he could feel the cold of it, and he could hear June breathing next to him, quick and shallow, and he had a thought that he had time to finish, which was that he wanted to look at her and not at the number.
He didn't get to. At one, every human being on earth held still.
Not fell, not froze, not was struck. Held. The way you do. Eight billion people made the same small adjustment at the same instant: chin up a little, shoulders back, weight settling even. The two kids stood off their scooters. The dog sat. Wendell's hand came off the rail and went down at his side, and his back straightened, and he did not decide to do any of it, and he was not afraid while it was happening, which he could never afterward explain to anybody.
Then there was a click.
Not a sound. He felt it in the hinge of his jaw and in the small bones behind his ears, the way you feel a door shut in a house two rooms away.
And then it was just sky, going gray in the east, and the wind coming off the lake the way it does at five in the morning in May, and a man near the coffee urn saying, over and over, "What. What. What."
June turned to him.
"Were you looking up?" he said.
"No," she said.
Nothing happened after that. That's the thing that people have the hardest time with, still.
No signal, no follow-up, no second number. The instruments that had never seen anything continued to never see anything. There was a week of waiting for the other shoe and then a month of it and then the general shape of the argument changed from what is going to happen to what already did, which is a much worse argument to be in, because it has no date attached.
He drove June to the airport on the ninth of May. At the drop-off she got out and got her bag and then leaned back into the car through the open door and said, "Christmas," not as a question, and he said, "Christmas," and she shut the door.
He went to Rusak's that night at ten of five. Halina had the lights on and her forearms in flour, and there was a tray of bismarcks cooling on the rack, and the front window looked out at the Presbyterian church and a completely ordinary sky.
He got his coffee. He stood there.
"You want to tell me now," he said.
Halina turned the dough and hit it with the heel of her hand.
"Wendell," she said. "You know what a person does when somebody says hold still."
He didn't answer that. She hadn't asked it.
He drank the coffee standing up and took the bismarck in a napkin and went out to the sweeper, which was idling at the curb with its lights on and the hopper empty and seventeen miles of curb line in front of it that had not been touched in four days and looked it.
In the cab he got his wallet out and took the photograph from behind his license. Him at the kitchen table on a Sunday in 2007, blown out by the flash, tilted, most of a face, half-turned toward whatever was taking so long.
He tore a strip of electrical tape off the roll in the door pocket and put the picture up above the tach where the dash light would find it. Then he brought the brooms down and pulled out onto Twelfth and started in on the street.