4
Marlene worked behind a desk littered with the artifacts of other people’s lives. There were no windows in the office, two ashtrays, both full, and on the walls there were travel posters that showed long stretches of emptiness, white beaches, blue ocean, faraway clouds. Nothing alive.
Her green eyes had an opaque quality, as if she was watching a private video screen somewhere in her mind. She wore a lot of silver jewelry on her fingers and forearms and a grey rollneck sweater with cigarette burn marks. Her eyes bore elaborate makeup that looked like the wings of a Red Admiral. Her hair was almost blond. The only job she could find him was for a legal firm, something called assistant data evaluator.
Before Ric left Marlene’s office he asked her to dinner. She turned him down without even changing expression. Ric had the feeling he wasn’t quite real to her.
The job of assistant data evaluator consisted of spending the day walking up and down a four-story spiral staircase in the law firm, moving files from one office to another. The files were supposedly sensitive and not committed to the firm’s computer lest someone steal them. The salary was insulting. Ric told the law firm that the job was just what he was looking for. They told him to start in two days.
Ric stopped into Marlene’s office to tell her he got the job and to ask her to dinner again. She laughed, for what reason he couldn’t tell, and said yes.
A slow spring snowfall dropped onto the streets while they ate dinner. With her food Marlene took two red capsules and a yellow pill, grew lively, drank a lot of wine. He walked her home through the snow to her apartment on the seventh floor of an old fourth-rate condeco, a place with water stains on the ceiling and bare bulbs hanging in the halls, the only home she could afford. In the hallway Ric brushed snow from her shoulders and hair and kissed her. He took Marlene to bed and tried to prove to her that he was real.
The next day he checked out of the hospital and moved in.