The Filing Error

The key was stuck; it was always getting stuck. 

Maybe one day he’d get the mechanism fixed. But if he were going to put money on it, he’d bet against himself. At any rate, he couldn’t do it on his own. He would need to call Facilities and he didn’t like the guys from Facilities, with their thick foreheads and their t-shirts and their muscles and their bellies and their smirking. He thought these things as his wrinkled elbow spasmed and his nerve-slicked fingers grasped.

A door opened somewhere down the little outcropping of faculty offices and Dr. O’Brien froze. He bit his lower lip so that it hurt. His heart thumped. Hypertension. Even with all the fucking weight he’d lost. His doctor – ten years his junior with expensive frames and grey eyes and nice clean, even pores – had expected it to improve. But it hadn’t. And so the prescriptions and the regular check-ups and the inability to eat grapefruit and the gripping knowledge of how he would probably die. He was nearly sixty already and it was only a matter of time. 

And his doctor’s expression never changed.

He listened carefully. He eyed his office door, which he’d left open. It was late after all. Eight on a Wednesday night. The college was a ghost of its daytime self. A few night classes ran; that was it. And so he’d left his office door open.

And the thing was in his hand. It bit the flesh of his palm. And the lock was stuck.

And here came the footsteps.

He could close the door, of course. He looked at it. It would be easy to do. You might even say it was designed to be closed. The wood was heavy and the hinges were smooth. The gentlest of pushes would send it sailing home on its own energy. Though his fingertips warmed at the prospect, he couldn’t send them to do the job and they flitted obscurely as the steps got closer, as though they were instruments measuring the passage of cosmic rays.

The posters and comics on his office door rippled. The envelopes he left on the door for late submissions swayed like the barren pouches of strange flat creatures.

He looked at his hand and then at the bookshelf behind him. There. Top shelf. A small space on the left side, next to his very small poetry collection. No more than twenty or so volumes. He always felt he should find more; he was a lit professor. But he never had. Just like the lock. There’s meaning to do a thing. There’s doing a thing.

His arm shot to the free spot and he set the object there. It stood out. The color and texture were in open argument with the dark wood laminate and the narrow spines. But, he thought, only if you look at it. And so he looked away.

There was a cheerful electronic bing! from down the hall and he relaxed a little. It wasn’t one of his colleagues. It was a security guard, doing the rounds. The sound was their phone scanning a check-in code.

The guard ambled down the hall. She was a middle-aged woman with long grey hair and a quiet manner. He had seen her a million times; he had never noticed her. 

She nodded at him.

“Hello,” she said.

“Hi there.” He realized the keys were still in his hand and he lowered them. They sang a guilty little song.

“Quiet night,” she said. There was a tiny frown in her eyes. He didn’t like how clear they were.

“Sure is,” he answered. “But I like it. I get more work done when it’s like this.”

“Well,” she said. She looked past him for a moment and he saw her take in his spartan office. No pictures. Just books. He saw her eyes go to the bookshelf and his stomach tightened.

“Have a good night,” he said.

She nodded but didn’t answer. Her eyes had stopped moving. She squinted a little.

“That’s familiar,” she said, and his stomach contracted further.

“Huh?” was all he could think to say.

She nodded at the shelf. Her hair moved across her shoulders. He could see dandruff flakes above her collar. 

He wondered where she lived. Somewhere where the rents were cheaper, out of the city. Did she drive in?

“That sculpture. It’s familiar,” she said.

He turned casually. She was looking right at it.

“That?” he said. “One of my students gave it to me.” 

As soon as he said it, he regretted it. That was his name on the door. This was his office. His intonation was off. It wasn’t breezy as he had intended. His words guttered in his throat like a burning marshmallow.

The thing on his shelf. It was a bleak thing. Ugly. Very simple. 

A hand emerging from a pool of hardened clay. 

It looked like the plastic destruction of a character in some stupid science fiction movie. That was his thought on first seeing it last night as he walked through the deserted main concourse, where the graduating students in the college’s small fine arts department displayed their work. About ninety percent of it was like this hand sculpture. Hot garbage. But there were always a few surprises. 

He assiduously avoided taking those; it would be wrong to do so.

“One of your students?” she repeated, bemused. She snorted. “What were they trying to say to you, do you think?” She laughed and then stopped herself. 

“Sorry for laughing,” she said. “Just a strange thing to give your prof. Or don’t you think so?”

“I guess,” he said. His pupils settled only on the woman’s forehead, as though she were one of his students in the front row: He was both god and worm. 

“Anyway, I need to pack up.”

She looked at his office. The laptop was open. There was a fresh cup of mint tea next to the window. The room was sweet with its steam.

“Right,” she said. Her eyes went back to the sculpture and she sighed, shaking her head. “I could swear I’ve seen that before,” she said.

He shrugged and at the same time slowly moved his arm to the door. His index finger came out like the menu-seeking tongue of a barnacle and began to very gently push the heavy door closed.

“Well,” he said. His tone was that of a small warm-blooded thing moaning under the swoop of a wide-winged shadow. “Have a good night.” His fingers shook from the shoulders.

She smiled and nodded. Her eyes glimmered in the dark hallway as the door shut.

#

After she had gone, he leaned on the closed door. It was heavy, much heavier than the doors in his apartment. Even the front door. Well. There was the computer. The college owned that. Plus his precious gradebooks. His students might like to get at those.  Best to have a strong door if you’re a prof.

The thick wood supported him easily. It didn’t buckle. He slid down, one hand atop his balding head like a small and sweaty pink umbrella. He sat like that for a few minutes and then got up. He needed to get out of here before she came back. 

Before she remembered something.

He looked up at the filing cabinet, looming like a prison tower. How many things sitting in there among the grades and lecture notes? How many half-formed, insipid things? He had no idea. But he’d moved into this office six years ago. That was six graduating shows, with at least one small item from each. And then there had been the previous decade in the office nearer the main hallway. He’d removed those things late one night before the office move, taking them home in three haphazardly-packed banker’s boxes, two or three different stories bouncing around in his brain depending on who caught him on the way to the taxi. But no one had, and now those three boxes sat in the bottom of the tiny storage space in the basement of his lowrise building. He hadn’t opened them since bringing them home. 

He looked around his office quickly, scanning the tops of the bookshelves for a box. No luck. He could wander down to the mailroom in the B Building. There were always stacks of them there. But then the dark eyes of the security guard flashed to life in his mind and thought better of it. 

Not tonight. 

But over the next few days, he would again load his magpie’s haul into boxes, bundle them into an Uber, and deposit them like eggs in his basement.

He looked at the hand. The fingers grasped. The knuckles were exaggerated and the fingertips bent back at strange angles, but he had to admit a certain verisimilitude. In fact, looking at it now, he saw why the security guard had been drawn to it. It had a power. It was a quiet power, but it was, nonetheless, a power. It stood there, grasping on his bookshelf. 

What could it be reaching for?

He stood up. He saw his mistake. The hand was of a different quality to the other things, the things locked away in the filing cabinet and the objects buried under his memories in the basement, where slow spiders crawled and watched each other in the darkness. Had one of those lesser things sat on his shelf, there would have been no problem.

He realized the way forward. He reached for his coat and knocked it off the door peg in his haste. He put it on and grabbed his briefcase, opened it, stuffed his laptop in. He made sure the kettle was unplugged and then took the hand by one of its probing fingers, sliding it into the deep pocket of his coat, which was bulky enough to disguise any bulge it might cause.

His thin hair blew across his forehead; he’d forgotten to close the window. Not that it really mattered. As far as he knew, it never rained sideways. But he attended to it anyway. And then it was time to go. He checked his filing cabinet as he always did; it was locked. It rattled like an aluminum crypt as he tested the latch. He stepped into the hall and closed the door behind him like a spy. His heart beat and it made him want to throw up.

The little corridor was dark. He used his phone flashlight to get around the corner where there was more light. All his colleagues’ offices were here. Their doors were locked and all their offices were dark. Gary Chen’s was near the end of the hall. He was teaching right now, but his office was deserted. Funny that. Dr. O’Brien had spent a few years in that same office nearly two decades earlier. And he had moved offices twice since. Life goes on, he thought. The ravages of seniority.

He walked down the stairs and there was the main concourse. He stood there for a few seconds, taking his phone out so as not to look conspicuous. He scanned the big hall and saw nobody. Of course, someone could be hidden behind one of the temporary exhibit walls. But for now, there was no one there as far as he could see. And so he began to walk, slowly, as though his back were hurting him, toward the exhibit.

He saw the clock next to the entrance to the cafeteria. Nearly nine now. Only a handful of classes on campus. As dead as it got, really. 

The concourse was well-lit as usual. The exhibitors had brought some extra lights as well; these were suspended from the ceiling, and it all looked pretty haphazard to Dr. O’Brien.  His hand went into his pocket and he felt the cold glassy fingers of the sculpture. His stomach rolled. He held in a fart. 

He had taken it from the part of the exhibit near the main doors, maybe fifty feet and behind a temporary wall from where he now stood. He took his phone out again and opened Google Maps, frowning into the screen as he tried to decide where to deposit the fucking thing.

He had zoomed in on a neighborhood at random. The app told him that this particular intersection boasted both a Safeway and a liquor store. He nodded at the phone as though it had spoken to him and put it away.

He would leave the thing here, he decided. He took one last lingering look around and then took the sculpture out of his pocket. He deposited it on a pedestal on which there stood a life sized papier-mâché torso whose skin had been opened up to reveal gears and cut-outs from perfume advertisements. He bit his lip as he looked at them and then looked away, his head turning like a shark. He tasted blood; he had bitten his lip in the same place twice tonight. 

He began to walk away without looking back. He got to the front door and walked outside. It was a warm evening. He was overdressed. Spring had arrived. Someone was smoking just inside the entrance to the college grounds, right at the top of the steps near the bus stop. 

He slowed down. He saw the uniform. It was her. But there was nowhere else to go and so he walked up the stairs. She noticed him and nodded. Her eyes were dark. He couldn’t understand them. She was smiling. It was too dark to see and her eyes were also too dark to see. He had to get by her and get home and get to bed and wake up tomorrow and feel different. He made his legs line up and do their thing.

“Have a good night,” she said.

“You too,” he replied.  He felt her looking at him as he passed her.

He usually caught the bus in front of the college, but this time he walked to the next stop, the one by the subway station that always has the big lineup.