The Maelstrom

William Barrett looked out his window one night and saw a clown sitting on the sidewalk three stories below.

Blackouts had been rolling through the city all summer, often stranding his entire block without power, and Barrett had woken in a sweat-soaked bed again. His apartment smelled like a greenhouse. Opening the windows did nothing: the air outside was as hot as a breath, even so late at night. Standing in front of his living room window, hoping to catch a weak breeze, Barrett glanced to the street below. In the alley across the street, a man dressed as a clown sat on an overturned milk crate and considered the patch of asphalt in front of him.

At first Barrett thought the clown was a cashier out on a smoke break from the bodega across the street, or maybe one of the area’s homeless. He’d moved to the neighborhood four years earlier, in the winter, and when the cold left he’d begun to notice them. Unshaven, wearing winter jackets even in the summer, sitting motionless on the steps of the neighborhood’s old brownstones. There was a shelter nearby, he discovered. He’d given money at first, then learned to look away.

These men only appeared in Barrett’s periphery now, but even so he had noticed their numbers growing. It had something to do with the trade war, he knew. The economy started failing early in the new year. Each week brought more news of closing businesses, downsizing companies, rising unemployment. The crash had not reached him yet, though. Not personally. Watching cable news at night, he felt the anchors were reporting on another country, somewhere far away, with problems that could not possibly reach him. But how many of the newly jobless had felt the same way only a few weeks before? He tried not to think about it. What good would worrying do?

Barrett quickly saw that the clown was a not a cashier or a vagrant. It was late at night, and the store had closed hours ago. The man was overweight, while most of the area’s homeless were thin, and his spot in the alleyway was poorly-positioned to ask for spare change. He wore a gray suit ripped through the shoulders, elbows, and knees. White makeup paled his face: in the headlights from passing cars, his skin turned luminous. Dark circles enlarged his eyes, stretching the shadow of his eye sockets past his eyebrows. His mouth, ringed with lipstick, was painted in an exaggerated sneer. The red paint on the end of his nose was so deep it looked black. Sitting on his discarded milk crate, chin in hand, foot tapping the sidewalk, it seemed to Barrett he was waiting for something, a bus or train running ten, fifteen minutes late.

Barrett hesitated at his window. He thought about going down and giving the man some change. Maybe it was the hair. The clown was balding, and what little hair he had left spiked away from his scalp like a jagged crown. Barrett began losing his own hair soon after turning thirty, and five years later the same horseshoe pattern circled his scalp. Seeing another balding man always inspired a sense of camaraderie. The clown’s weight endeared him to Barrett, too. Slim for most of his life, he started collecting extra pounds around the same time his hair began receding, weight he fought with tortuous post-work jogs, weekend trips to the gym, and even crash diets before finally accepting it, along with the lost hair, as another inevitable step in the slow march towards his middle-age self.

But he did not go outside, not that first night. As he considered it, the power snapped back on. The air conditioning unit in his bedroom coughed, then sputtered to life. Barrett closed his windows and lowered blinds. Soon it was cool enough to go back to bed. By the time he fell asleep he had forgotten about the clown completely.

***

Barrett woke in the morning to an alarm clock flashing red zeroes. The power failed again in the night. He showered quickly, skipped breakfast, hustled down two flights of stairs, and jogged from his building just in time to see his bus turn the street’s far corner. Walking to the nearest train station, he quickly sweated through his clothes. At the station, he joined the regular crowd rushing through the double doors, the turnstiles, the escalators leading underground. 

Barrett ran again to catch his train, shouldering his way onto the last car. Strangers pressed in on all sides. He could not move, not even to reach for a railing, but with everyone crammed in so tightly it didn’t matter. There wasn’t room to fall. The train stopped between each station while a voice overhead rasped about track maintenance. Once, for a long minute, the lights cut out and the train went completely dark. He closed his eyes. It was exactly the same.

Barrett worked in a call center at the top of a twenty-story office building downtown, where he resolved customer complaints about electronics he had never used. He spent his days explaining that the DVD player was not broken, the laptop was not defective, the GPS was positioning correctly but the caller did not know how to use their new, expensive toy. He’d started at the company in college, working evenings and weekends to fit shifts around his classes. He had studied art history, and for a long time considered himself an artist, if only in a vague sort of way. He’d always meant to quit. But Barrett kept the position after graduation, just until he found something better. Then the company offered more hours, more money. A small raise every six months. A holiday bonus he had come to depended on–the city’s soaring rent ate up most of his pay. He started answering phones full-time after his second year, and stopped looking for another job after his third. He stopped considering himself an artist soon after.

Alan McPherson, Barrett’s new manager, called him into his office that afternoon to scold him for being late. McPherson was five years younger than Barrett. At just over six foot, he was several inches taller, too. He kept trim by running half-marathons in the summer, skiing in the winter, and playing racquetball on his lunch breaks year-round. He would always have all of his hair.

Soon after McPherson came to the office from corporate’s upstate headquarters, the economy faltered. Soon after the economy faltered, the layoffs began. Now every few weeks, following a new jobs report, a dip in the market, an economic stumble caused by the president’s whim, the company fired a half-dozen employees and replaced them with kids just out of college for half the cost. From what Barrett could tell, this was the full extent of their recovery plan.

When he first called a meeting to explain about the cutbacks McPherson had described the economic crises as “a maelstrom centered in the financial industry.” Seeing the confused looks, he clarified. “A maelstrom is like a whirlpool,” he had said, “but larger and slower moving, with currents extending far beyond what you see on the surface.” Maelstrom. Barrett liked the sound of the word. When he looked up the definition online, he liked the comparison, too. He did not like the way the word applied to him, though, with malicious undercurrents ready to pull him down to a deep and crushing depth. He did not like that part.

McPherson dismissed Barrett’s reasons for being late that morning. It had happened too many times that summer, he said. Other workers made it in on time, even with the blackouts. As a senior member of the staff, more was expected of him. The company initiated a new policy that summer that required everyone to dress formally, the men in suits and ties. The new dress code was intended to boost performance. The customers can tell when you dress poorly. McPherson wrote in the company-wide email. They hear it in your voice. Barrett thought this was stupid, and kept on wearing jeans and a t-shirt. But hadn’t he seen Shelly in accounting walking towards the elevator at mid-day, holding a cardboard box with her personal effects inside it, her face red from crying and then trying not to cry, just the Friday before? Barrett apologized again for being late, promised to stay an extra hour to make up the time, and returned to his cubicle to finish his shift. The protesting could be left to someone else.

The call center hummed around Barrett as other reps calmed irate customers, recited memorized lines, traded jokes over the cubicle walls. This was normal, and he had grown used to the chaos. But among the clamor were moments when the workers’ many individual pauses accidentally synchronized, and the office fell silent. The quiet usually lasted only an instant or two, rarely longer than a few seconds, but Barrett waited for these moments all the same. Ah, the quiet. The peace! Even the clicking of keyboards stopped. His head cleared. He thought of nothing. Once, the silence lasted for an entire minute. It was like passing through the eye of a storm, and Barrett wondered afterwards if that was what it felt like at the center of a maelstrom, if, once pulled into the whirlpool, one might find serenity at the bottom of the sea.

Barrett stopped at a tailor on the way home and maxed out his credit card on three new suits. The new policy was stupid, but so was being fired over a t-shirt. It was better to go along, put your head down, and do your work, he thought. Better not to draw attention. Better to treat it all like a large storm moving through, and wait for it to pass.

With all the trouble at work, he forgot about the clown.

Movement outside his living room window caught Barrett’s eye as he was getting up from the couch to clear away a late dinner that night. Below him, the clown sat in the alley again. He rested on the same milk crate, but his straight posture was gone. Now he slumped into the bricks. A gray-and-white polka-dot tie lay slack across his chest. His face was twisted in grief. As Barrett watched, the clown wiped the tie across his face, his forehead, his neck. He fanned himself with a jagged piece of cardboard. Tugging his collar away from his throat, he rolled his eyes to the sky.

Watching the clown, raising a hand to wipe the sweat from his own brow, Barrett recognized something of himself in the desperation. His AC had failed him again. He laughed. An image of Picasso’s harlequins returned to him from his college classes. Maybe that was the clown’s act, he thought: simple imitation. He walked into his bedroom, shook a handful of change from a cup on his dresser, and stepped into his shoes.

Barrett took the stairs two at a time, change jingling in his pockets like an orchestra of tiny bells. But when he jogged out from his apartment building, the alley across the street was empty. Barrett waited for a break in the traffic, then crossed. The alley looked the same as always: a nest of yellowing newspapers, a split trash bag, a stack of wooden shipping pallets next to the bodega’s side door. AC units cooling apartments above dripping water onto the pavement, dragging stains down the brick walls. There was no clown, just an empty milk crate.

Barrett walked back inside. He returned to his couch. Bright commercials flashed across the television screen. He could not remember which program he was watching, or the one he had watched before it. He could not remember how long he had been watching the television, or why.

***

When he woke up the next morning, Barrett thought of the clown immediately. He thought of the clown while showering, shaving, and dressing in his new suit and tie. He looked for the clown as he walked to the bus stop. He tried to glimpse him through the windows of the crowded bus. Barrett glanced around the train station before hurrying inside. He wondered again about the man’s routine. Many buskers have acts, usually a song or skit, and someone dressed as a clown must perform. But he did not see the him on his bus, his train, or outside the building where he worked. And, of course, he was not resolving complaints in the call center.

Barrett looked forward to seeing the clown all day. It was a secret thrill, as if seeing him again would confirm something, validate some innate strangeness Barrett had always suspected of the world but never been able to prove. He answered each phone call happily. He did not become angry when his last call stretched on for twenty minutes past the end of his shift.

A group of coworkers went to a nearby bar after work. Frank D’Angelo had just quit, giving his two-weeks’ notice instead of waiting to be fired in the next round of layoffs. Neither quitting nor waiting was ideal, but at least Frank had taken action. Barrett spent his nights watching the news for hints at the economy’s next downturn or a possible recovery, trying to decode each fluctuation, hoping to learn how it all might apply to him. Every email chiming in his inbox at work might bring a bad performance review, a note from a supervisor, a request to meet with McPherson at the end of the day. There was a whirlpool swirling around them all, Barrett knew, as likely to pull him under as anyone else.

Frank had been at the call center for nearly as long as Barrett, and the outing was equal parts celebration and farewell. Commuting home afterwards, he felt euphoric. The alcohol he drank had lowered a pleasant cloud over his mind. The shoulders bumping him as he walked through the train station, the backs leaning heavily into his own in the packed subway car, the other riders jostling past him at each stop, all of which normally sent Barrett seething, did not bother him. On the escalator near his home a woman wearing dark sunglasses, even in the subway, elbowed him in the ribs as she squeezed by. Barrett saw his reflection, oblong and pale, in her dark lenses. He grinned at himself. What would her rush bring? An extra five minutes at home gained by hip-checking a stranger? A closer parking spot earned by sprinting up a crowded escalator? A small trade for dignity, he thought, and remembered reading once that dignity cannot be taken, only given away.

Barrett’s calm held as he walked up his building’s stairs and into his apartment. He turned on the lights, dialed his AC unit up high, and made himself a drink from his bar. He sat down in front of the television and let the cold air wash over him. He watched the late news, finished his drink, and went into the kitchen to make another. On his way back to the couch, Barrett looked outside.

Across the street, the clown had fallen from his milk crate. He sat on the asphalt, slumped into the brick wall, a gray blanket wrapped around him despite the heat. His mouth hung open in a loose grin. A glass bottle rested on the sidewalk: as Barrett watched, the clown picked up the bottle, brought it to his lips, and sloshed back a mouthful of liquor. The clown belched once, then dragged his sleeve across his mouth. He held the bottle up before him, swinging it from side to side, and even though Barrett could not hear anything through the closed window, he knew the man had begun to sing.

What does he have to celebrate? Barrett thought. Then he considered the drink in his own hand.

When Barrett looked outside again, the clown’s eyes were tracing the bottom of his apartment building, scanning slowly upwards. Although panic bloomed inside him when, watching the clown’s gaze climb past the first story, then the second, he realized it would soon be staring into his window, into his living room, and directly at him, Barrett could not look away. Their eyes met. The clown set his bottle on the sidewalk and raised a gloved hand to wave. Beckoning with one finger, he invited Barrett to join him.

Barrett pulled down his blinds. He walked into the kitchen and poured out his drink. He went to bed. He stayed awake for hours, staring at the ceiling. Unformed thoughts revolved through his mind. When the power failed, he did not get up to open his windows. He waited under his sheets, sweating, until the electricity turned on again.

***

Barrett did not look out his window the next morning. 

Walking to work, he kept his eyes fixed on his feet. He took the crowded bus to the train station, rode the crowded train to his stop, squeezed into the crowded elevator at his office.  Barrett did not see the clown that day. Or, more accurately, he saw him everywhere. The other office workers commuting in with him, the construction crew repaving the opposite lane, the crossing guard halting cars at the school downtown, the President glaring at him from the newspaper stand: all looked clownish and ridiculous if he stared long enough. 

Barrett answered his customer’s complaints absently that day. He spent long minutes staring at his desk while distant voices squawked in his ears. There were no periods of calm, no needed distraction, no quiet in the center of the storm. 

At home, Barrett avoided his windows. When he forgot to look away, preoccupied with other thoughts–fighting with his AC unit, smarting from the bad performance review the email he dread finally held, wondering if he should return the new suits and buy cheaper clothes–the smudged shape in the periphery of his vision, still sitting in the alley across the street, chased him away.

***

Barrett was fired the next week. 

McPherson sited poor performance, repeated lateness, a bad attitude. He’d been too tired, Barrett argued. It was the heat: with all the blackouts, he couldn’t sleep at night. He knew he looked bad. Dark blue semi-circles ringed his eyes, as if his eyes had receded into their sockets. There was little sunlight in the office or his apartment, and his pale skin only made this worse. But a lack of sleep did not explain the terse answers, the frequent cursing, the laughter that interrupted him as he spoke with irate customers. Barrett promised to improve, brought up his long tenure at the company, even offered to take a pay cut down to whatever the new temps were making, anything to keep his job. Finally, he begged, dignity be damned. He stayed fired all the same.

Human Resources gave Barrett a cardboard box for his personal effects. He stopped packing when he saw the box would hold almost nothing, and left it on his desk as a statement. Commuting home, he saw what an empty gesture it had been. The box would have been smashed flat on the crowded train.

Barrett caught his normal bus at the train station. He squeezed into the last space available, in the back. The driver argued with someone on her cell phone as she drove. When she passed by his stop without slowing, Barrett did not say anything. He rode to the end of the route as the other passengers filed off. The empty bus switched drivers in a distant suburb before turning around and driving back into the city again.

***

Barrett woke at his normal time the next morning. He showered, shaved, dressed in a new suit, knotted a new tie. He sat down before his television and turned to the news. The economy was about to enter into recovery, the anchors promised. The market was just days from stabilizing. The record unemployment could not hold. It was all almost over. Barrett watched for half an hour before realizing he had seen the segment before, over a month ago. The numbers were different, and the news anchors had traded places with each other, but it was a rerun all the same. 

After the program ended, the TV snapped to black. All the lights in the apartment went next. Another rolling blackout. He considered his reflection in the empty screen. Stranded. Helpless again.

Hours passed.

Barrett left his apartment in the afternoon. He walked across the street and bought a plastic bottle of vodka. By nightfall, he was drunk. Images moved across the dark television screen as daylight drained from the living room. Barrett did not turn on any lights when the power returned and his television cracked back to life. He let his apartment sink into darkness with the sunset. Around him, shadows made huge by the flicker of the television danced across the walls.

At first Barrett did not notice when the power cut out again. He was content to let the silence build as the heat crept back into the room. The quiet grew into a kind of pressure. The humidity became a weight on his chest. He would sit without moving, he decided. He would withstand it all. Perhaps he would find peace at the center of this new storm. 

When he felt as if he could no longer breathe, Barrett stood, crossed his living room, and jerked open his window.

The clown sat on his milk crate across the street, illuminated by a large moon. He stared into space. He lifted his liquor bottle absently. In the dim moonlight, his red nose and dark eyes looked black and empty, like the hollows of a skull.

“Hey!” Barrett shouted. The clown turned his head towards the noise, searching the building until he found Barrett’s window. He shook his head slowly when he saw him. His mouth twisted into a sad grin.

Barrett ran from his apartment, thumping through the third-floor hallway. He jogged down the stairs two steps at a time. He did not know what he would say, only that it was important. At ground-level, he banged through his building’s front door and hurried into the night. But the alley across the street was empty. The clown was gone again. It was the same as always.

Cursing to himself, he jogged inside, up the stairs, and back to his apartment. His heavy footfalls shook the glassware in his cupboard. A picture jumped from the wall and shattered on the linoleum floor. Barrett ignored it. He focused only on reaching the living room window and looking through it. Outside, as Barrett knew he would be, the clown was lowering his bulky frame to his crate, his throne. He wiped his brow with his tie, then lifted the glass bottle again.

“You!” Barrett’s slurred shout was barely a word. The clown paused mid-drink, eyebrows raised, bottle to his lips. “Stay put!” Barrett threw himself from the window again. His head spun from the heat, the alcohol, the movement. He thudded through his bedroom, kitchen, doorway. His feet moved far away below him. As he ran down the hallway, neighbors appeared in the periphery of Barrett’s vision. In the stairwell, he took the stairs in a controlled fall, shoulder sliding along the wall. Outside, the heat steaming off the pavement hit him like a slap. The sight of the alley, empty again, twisted something inside his chest.

Someone tried to talk to Barrett on the way back in; he shouldered his neighbor aside. Running up the stairs, hauling himself along the railing with both hands, he felt the left arm of his suit’s jacket come loose. The conversations traded in the hallway stopped when he burst from the top of the stairwell and sprinted unevenly to his doorway. He ran through his kitchen, ignoring the broken glass. In his dark living room, he kicked his coffee table: pain lanced through his foot. Barrett ignored the ache and hobbled to his window. He took a breath, steeling himself to look outside again.

The police would arrive to find Barrett drunk and incoherent, one shoe gone, the bottom of his foot shredded on broken glass, and take him in overnight for observation, for his own safety: to dry out. His landlord, unsympathetic by then, would terminate his lease at the month’s end. Without a job, with his credit card overextended, he would not find a new apartment in time. One life would end and another would begin, and he would marvel after at how quickly it had all happened, how little control he had over the important things. He would not find the peace he imagined at the center a maelstrom, but would give in to its pull all the same.

Before the power returned, Barrett saw the clown sitting outside on the sidewalk again. He saw the tears streaking the pancake makeup, and felt the warmth on his own face. He guessed the clown’s act just as the lights snapped back on and turned his window into a mirror, showing him the horseshoe of thinning hair standing up from his head like a jagged crown, the circles stamped around his eyes, his too-pale skin. His nose red with exertion. His own mouth twisted into a sneer. He saw what had been there all along: himself, reflected in the dingy night.