Yet I knew from my job that this was old news.
I had no reason to remember the driver.
He had a beard.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
He might have had an accent.
I remember I feared he came from some place we were bombing.
We didn’t talk about anything important.
The driver might have believed I was a reasonable person, a normal person.
Just a little larger than most.
I dressed, in those days, in custom-made gray business suits because nothing store-bought fit right.
I had an expensive black down coat.
I didn’t think much about where the softness came from, at what cost.
My faux heels were decoys: comfortable, just worn to preserve some ritual about what women should wear.
My main indulgence was a huge purse that doubled as a satchel.
Because I frightened him.
“So, what do you do?”
I stared out the window as he began to tell me everything he knew about computers.
The driver stopped talking.
So many one-story houses with slanted roofs and flat lawns, gravel driveways glinting through thin snow.
The mountain range like a premonition twisted free of gray mist, distant but gathering.
I hadn’t done a search on the address.
That felt too much like being at work.
Didn’t make my pulse quicken.
Emblazoned over the gates, the legend “Imperial Storage Palace.”
Because I have to give you a name.
It had seen better days, so call it “Better Days Storage Palace,” if you like.
I’m sure, by the time you found it, the sign was gone anyway.
The light darkened in that almost-tunnel.
I could smell the fresh air, even through the stale cigarette smoke of the backseat.
Anything could exist in the thick mist that covered the mountainside.
A tech bro campus.
The lampposts in front of the entrance lent the road only a distracted sort of light.
The vastness of the storage palace, that faux marble facade, collected weight and silence.
The murk felt like a distracting trick.
What was it covering up?
The pretentious nature of the Doric columns?
The black mold on the plastic grass that lined the stairs?
Nothing could disguise the exhaustion of the red carpet smothering the patio.
Beyond the shadow of the two-story complex lay a wall of deep green, merging with ever-higher elevations.
The pressure of that pressed against the car, quickened my pulse.
This was the middle of nowhere, and I almost didn’t get out of the car.
But it was too late.
Too late as well because the world was flypaper: you couldn’t avoid getting stuck.
Someone was already watching.
“Should I wait for you?”
I ignored that, lurched out of the backseat.
I need time to get up and depart.
“Are you sure I can’t wait?”
he asked across the passenger seat out the half-opened window.
I leaned down, took his measure.
“Do you not understand the nature of your own business?”
Sometimes I am just like him.
Inside, gold wallpaper had turned urine yellow.
The red carpet perked up as it ran past two ornate antique chairs with lion paws for feet.
Beyond that lay the storage units, through an archway.
A legend on a sad banner overhead read “Protecting your valuable since 1972.”
What do you want?"
the woman asked, no preamble.
As if might want almost anything at all.
“What do you think?”
Showed her the key, as I wiped my shoes on the crappy welcome mat.
“Which one?”
“Got ID?”
“I’ve got the key.”
“Got ID to go with that key?”
She held out her hand.
“Identification, like, and I’ll check the list.”
I considered pushing a twenty across the counter.
That idea felt strange.
But it felt strange to let her know who I was, too.
I handed her my driver’s license.
She was much younger than me.
Practically a uniform in some parts of town.
She might’ve been a brunette.
I remember her expression.
Doing nothingand I wasn’t making her life less boring.
“I’ve come a long way,” I said.
Which would be true soon enough.
I would’ve come a long way.
That’d be great," I said.
Struck by how meaningless language can be.
Yet I remember the conversation but not her face.
The woman found a line on the page with a ballpoint pen, gave me back my ID.
“So go in, then,” she said.
Like I was loitering.
“Over there.”
She pointed to the right, where another door waited, half disguised by the same piss-pattern wallpaper.
To take my ID.
I wouldn’t see her on my way out.
The cage would be empty, as if no one had ever been there.
As if I had emerged years later and the whole place had been abandoned.
All those rows of doors.
So many doors, and not the usual roll-down aluminum.
The smell of mold was stronger.
Sound behaved oddly, as if the shifting weight of clutter behind the doors was making itself known.
What did I know about storage units?
And what you wanted kept at arm’s length could be precious or fragile as memory.
Even a bad memory.
Nine through eleven followed one through three.
Had I missed a passageway?
It was a warren, with several crossroads.
Perhaps the storage units went on forever, the space wandering beneath the mountains in some terrifyingly infinite way.
But I found the right door.
Or the wrong door, depending on your point of view.
(3)
“It was all meant to be” is a powerful drug.
Or how long it might take to separate the two.
All I saw at first was the emptiness of some square stripped-bare cliche of an interrogation room.
A modest wooden chair stood near the back, under flickering fluorescent lights in the ceiling.
A medium-sized cardboard box sat on the chair.
I stood in the doorway and stared at the box on the chair for a long time.
Left the door open behind me, an instinct about doors slamming shut that wasn’t paranoid.
The trap could be anywhere.
It was so still, so antiseptic, inside.
Except for one moldy panel of the back wall.
I don’t recall dust motes even.
Like a crime scene wiped clean.
But I checked the far, dark corner, the ceiling, before walking up to the chair.
I did that much.
Just an ordinary cardboard box.
The top flaps had been folded shut.
Lightweight, when I gave it an experimental nudge.
No sound coming out of it, either.
Nothing like a puppy or kitten, then.
Immense relief in that.
I put down my purse, pulled back first one flap and then the other.
I think I laughed, nervously.
But there was no moment of misunderstanding, of recoiling in horror.
A small object lay in the bottom of the box.
Like the horse figurines my mother used to collect.
Which is when it struck me this might all be an elaborate joke.
A tiny bird perched down there.
A hummingbird in midflight, attached by thick wire from below to a small pedestal.
Thank you for knowing that wasn’t necessary.
