“Yeah, yeah,” said Boris, reaching for the magazine.
None of this made sense.Jack paced around the room, wishing he had a street view, or a working TV, or anything to take his mind off the anxiety pulsing through his veins. He didn’t smoke anymore but sometimes wished that he did—it would give him something to do with his hands. A way to calm himself when life was too slippery and fragmented to grasp.
At this point, even an altercation with the crazy old lady upstairs would be a welcome distraction.
Jack could only assume that he must have gone mad. When he called the neighbor who had agreed to feed Rainy for him, hefound that she, too, expected that he wouldn’t be home till the following evening.
But he’d specifically asked for two nights’ help. Nothing more.
Unsure what else to do, Jack sat on the edge of the bed and emptied his satchel. Unsullied papers spilled across the bedspread. Pens and notepads scattered. A container of lip balm bounced onto the floor. His train ticket slipped from his date book; Jack scrambled to replace it—he doubted the station clerk would give him another one. He’d end up stranded here for sure, probably locked up in some backwards jail for vagrancy.
Would they even give him a phone call? Or would they leave him to rot in a cell, nameless and faceless?
In places like this, who made sure people were being treated fairly? If the clerk at the train station could deny him help, then what else could be done to him?
It had never occurred to him be afraid of rural areas, maybe because he’d never really left the city. He’d heard the occasional horror story but never expected to find that they might be true. There was no one out here to help him, no one to make sure he wasn’t being taken advantage of.
People disappeared in small towns. Race, sexuality, corruption, bad luck—anything could go wrong.
If he vanished, would anyone notice?
A chill hurtled up his spine and lingered there.
He rifled through the papers, found the forms paper-clipped together, and froze.
The pages were pristine, fresh from the copier. There were no numbers scribbled in the margins, no scrawled lists of products. The foreman’s forms were missing entirely. The paperworkshouldhave been in the satchel with everything else. Jack tore apart his suitcase, then backtracked through the lobby, desperate for anything he might have missed.
Nothing.
He’d placed the pages in his satchel, not his suitcase, he was certain of it. When his suitcase split open on the sidewalk, itspilled only undergarments. If the pages had blown away, he would have noticed.
Surely,he would have noticed.
For the next twenty minutes, Jack ransacked the room. He must’ve grabbed an extra copy of the forms at the office and left the packet he’d filled out somewhere else. Maybe they’d ended up under the bed somehow? Perhaps in a drawer? Was there a compartment in his satchel he’d forgotten about?
Were they at the factory?
Impossible, Jack told himself. He distinctly remembered placing the papers in his bag last night after checking his calculations for the third and final time.
They were scratched in blue ink, a stark contrast to the white paper and black print.
Jack paced around the room, ran frantic fingers through his hair. “They have to be around here somewhere,” he told himself, inhaling and exhaling slowly.
Could he have lost them at the train station? That didn’t make much sense; he’d barely had a chance to sit down, let alone unzip his bag. And the bagwasclosed; he’d made sure to check before making his way back to the hotel.
Defeated, Jack flopped onto the bed, leaned against the gaudy velvet headboard and tried not to wonder what sorts of fluids it might have absorbed, or how recently it had been cleaned. The TV droned in the background, occasionally turning to static. Tears pricked at the corners of his eyes.
Right. He had no proof he’d done the audit. He would lose his job tomorrow. There was no choice but to go home and type out his resume. Things were bad, but they could always be worse; at least his previous job had allowed him to keep a typewriter. Though it was a manual and the F key always stuck, it would do. In a worst-case scenario, he could spend a few miserable weeks waiting tables for angry patrons who complained about everything from the shine of his shoes (nonexistent) to the quality of the food (outside of his control).
Maybe this time, no one would throw soup in his face.
It would be alright, Jack told himself. He’d tell Rainy and Mr. Blues the bad news, and then he would live off peanut butter sandwiches and cheap tea for the next two weeks, and there would be enough money for cat food and litter and…
Between the musty sheets and the chattering television, he drifted off to sleep.
CHAPTER
FIVE
