Out of Plumb

Gary sometimes allowed himself to get dinner from the Chinese place ten minutes from his apartment -- sometimes twice a week. He only ever ordered the General Tso chicken, because he couldn't imagine anything else being as good as it. What he did like to imagine were the ways the chicken fit the name. One of his ideas was that like the real Tso, it crushed dissident alternative dishes.

Other than those nights he ate frozen pies, meatloaf, lasagna, or whatever was on sale. He watched YouTube while he ate, and also before and after. He watched history mini-docs and military reenactments but mostly he watched alien videos. He made sure he was caught up with every recent sighting. For Gary had a secret: he was famous on the subreddit r/aliens. Semi-famous. He got a lot of up-votes on his posts. One of them was in the best of all time category. And he'd been tagged, unprompted, in a question someone had.

He was sure this respect was due to the fact that, unlike certain other Truthers, he kept a healthy amount of doubt in a jar in his brain to carefully pull from. The doubt kept him safe. For him, the pithy "I want to believe" was more than empty words. He wanted to believe. He wanted the truth. The only way to do that was to always question it.

In the mornings he was up early for work because he had to drive very far to some client houses. It took thirty minutes for strip malls and gas stations to become forest, and only a minute for the forest to dissolve into gabled two story houses, bright portico columns, and the occasional buzz of other work trucks, planted here and there for lawn care or floorboard polishing or the digging of ponds with mini waterfalls.

 His own truck pulled into a circle driveaway, a door attached to its bed. It was just the one door today, and although he was not a particularly strong or young man, he could carry a door. First he took his tools with him and rang the bell. The woman who opened the door for him looked at him without recognition until he introduced himself. 

“It’s upstairs, to the right,” she said, and stepped out of the way.

Once he had everything up there, he was sweaty and out of breath. He tried to silence himself, feeling his breathing leave tiny dirty marks on the parquet floors. The room he was installing the door in was for a child. The wall’s rectangular wound made a gloss of pink bleed into the hallway. 

He always found rooms without doors slightly disturbing. Maybe a little exciting. Without them, there was no privacy, no secrets, no escape. Until he came to fix one up. 

He was about thirty minutes into the process, finishing the hinges when he got a call from his boss.

“Hey, Gary. We need someone, now. It’s the Willow’s again.”

“I thought you sent Oscar yesterday.”

“He didn’t fix it. Are you busy?”

“I’m at a client right now.”

“Go there right after. These people aren’t happy.” He hung up.

Gary sighed. He hated when he got sent to clients who ‘weren’t happy.’ But it was often what happened. He was always the last resort.

Another forty five minutes later, he finished the door. He went downstairs with his bag of tools, looking for the client to say the job was done, but she was gone. This was also often what happened, homeowners disappearing or hiding from him. At least it was better than getting your neck breathed down or yelled at. This way he could feel the satisfaction of a job done, removed from who or how or why, and they could believe in the magical conjuring power of money. He didn’t have time to search her out, so he left.

The Willow’s house was on the other side of town. By the time he got there, there were three cars in the driveway and two surrounding the street. Five men were on the porch, arguing.

He walked up to join Oscar and Martin. Martin really shouldn't be there because he wasn’t installation crew, but he had probably built this door. He liked Martin, who was the only guy on the job willing to seriously hear about aliens. He got a little out there about some of his own ideas. Other times he said something solid Gary had never thought of before.

 A man who was clearly the home owner was arguing in front of the exterior door with two other people in blue button-ups and jeans. 

“What’s going on?” Gary asked. 

“The window manufacturers brought their reps in,” Oscar said. “I swapped the slab yesterday and reset it and the lock still didn’t work. So I thought to call them, and they get pissy, and say they want to talk to the client and see this thing.”

One of them turned to them. “It’s out of plumb.” 

“Hell no it isn’t,” Martin said.

Gary stopped listening and stared at the door. It was halfway open because it wouldn’t shut. He examined the receiver plates -- there were two, a custom lockset with pins at the top and bottom. He saw almost instantly that it was a manufacturer problem, but not a window one. The top receiver plate was backwards. He took out his Phillps from his bag and flipped over, screwed it back in. The door closed.

They all looked at him. The window reps were clearly angry. Even Martin and Gary looked mad. He felt like anything he could say wouldn’t help.

When Gary finally left, he let himself get Chinese. The worst part was, he wasn’t some kind of door genius. It was not a victory to revel in. He’d just seen what was right in front of him.

Time passed like this. Months. He was comfortable enough. The Pentagon released a new batch of sightings. Someone posted about a floating cigar shape in Ohio that was all anyone talked about for weeks. And then one day he got a note taped to his truck.

“Please help,” it read. “Apt. 721.”

It was a jolt. He didn’t talk to his neighbors. He didn’t even know what they looked like. He was a good person, though. He was nice. Someone needed his help. After work, he would go knock on their door. Simple enough.

The whole day he could barely think about what he was doing. He couldn’t even think about aliens or fully listen to his favorite bits of Coast to Coast AM. What if it had been an emergency? No. In an emergency you didn’t put notes on people’s trucks. You called the police. 

In the late afternoon he stood in front of apartment 721. He held the note with a shaky hand, as if ready to use it as proof. See, he imagined saying. It was me you wanted.

He knocked four times firmly, his work knock. It came out without him thinking and suddenly it was unbearably loud. 

A woman answered the door. She immediately made him want to turn around and give up. Surely she wasn’t the one who needed help? She had black lipstick. She had tattoos everywhere. She had a nose ring. 

“You’re the Entiam guy, right?” she asked.

He stared at her for a moment longer. One tattoo stood out, cursive along her neck: 12/8/24. He looked down at his work shirt, with the Entiam logo. “Yes.”

“Oh god, thank you. Come in, please.”

He came in. Her apartment was dark and smelled smoky. The floors and furniture seemed to be growing piles of clothing, the walls were choked with folded posters or hanging rugs with dancing skeletons or frogs. The oddest part was that he realized the structure of it, the placement of the kitchen counter (crowded with cups) and rooms beyond, was his apartment but reversed. It felt very strange, like he had been placed in an alternate universe. Those were always the scariest abduction stories to him.

She was heading towards the rooms in the back, and stopped in the middle of the hall. He didn't find her attractive in the least, but he couldn't stop staring at her numbers along her collarbone. “It’s my bathroom door. It won’t close. And you know how the maintenance here is. I’ve been putting in requests since I moved in. I’ve been trying to ignore it, but… it’s my bathroom. So I’m desperate, and I will give you coffee and a free reading.”

So it was not that she had sought him individually. For some reason, he hadn’t put two and two together when he saw the note. Obviously she needed door help. That’s why she’d put it on the window of a door company’s truck. 

“A… reading?” he asked. He didn’t really like to read.

“I do aura readings. And naeviology.”

“Oh,” he said. “That’s interesting.” It was. Sometimes fortune tellers were fakes, sometimes they were seriously attuned to the ethereal plane. He wondered which she was. 

“Deal,” he said.

“Great. I’m Cindy, by the way.” 

“I’m Gary.”

The next day he brought his tools in to fix her door. He didn't accept her coffee because he was already so jittery. Last night he'd realized something and he wasn't going to leave until he'd figured out a way to bring it up. It only took him twenty minutes to find that it was a misaligned hatch and to fix it.

Meanwhile she was setting something up in the living room. The lights turned off behind him halfway through. When he finished he had to stumble through the dark to find her, and he stepped in a pile of her clothes. “Oh, sorry --”

A flame lit from the floor. She was bent over, lighting the next in the circle she’d set up. “Have you ever had an aura reading before?”

“This is my first…” He watched the circle of flames light up and swallowed. Something occurred to him. “You’re not a Satanist, are you?”

She stared at him in the dark. The fire played over her eyes. “I’ve dabbled. But aura reading has nothing to do with that. And if you think it does, I’m not gonna get anything out of you.”

Dabbled? he wondered. She looked the part. But he held up his hands, not wanting to offend by default. “Okay, I get it.”

She sat down in the circle of flames and patted the ground across from her. He carefully stepped over the candles. He couldn't remember the last time he'd sat on the floor and his back hurt as he did so.

“Okay,” she said. “Breathe.” Her voice was deep and calm now. “I need to hold your hands for this. Is that alright?”

He nodded. She reached across with both her hands and took his. She held them in the space between them.

“Close your eyes and breathe in time with me.”

To do this, he had to listen through the silence of her apartment to hear the air whistle in her nose and the tone of it change in the purse of her mouth.

“Good,” she told him, after they fell into a rhythm. “I'm starting to see it.” For a few more long breaths, she said nothing. Then she lifted her hands from his. He felt her arms brush the air around his head.

“You're very… not dark, not vivid. Plum, viridian. You're blocked here, that's not uncommon. You're apart from the world.” Her hands moved downwards, where his belly protruded. “This spot is stronger. It's radiating negativity. You're heavy with self-consciousness.”

He let his hands drop and his eyes open. Her eyes were already open as she felt the air around him. “Are you playing a game with me?” he asked. “What the hell does that mean?”

She jerked her head back like he’d been the one to call her fat. Then she rolled her eyes and stood up. “You realize you're proving the reading, right?” She blew out a candle and moved to the next.

His teeth ground in frustration. He'd fixed her door. He'd tried out her reading, even though she was just insulting him. And for some reason she was the one who got pissed off at every little thing, because he wasn't allowed. 

It wasn't important, he reminded himself, breathing in. Not as much as what he needed to ask. 

As she neared him to finish with the candles, he said, “Wait. I’m sorry.” And the magic words: “You're right.”

When she met his eyes, hers were softer. She blew out the last candle and went to flick on the lights. “It's fine. A first reading can be intense.”

He stood up and stretched himself out, suppressing the urge to make a comment at that. “I wanted to ask you something.”

She crossed her arms over herself.

“Your tattoo. The one on your neck.”

In surprise, her hand reached protectively over it.

“I was thinking… Do you know what happened in Colorado that day?”

She stepped back from him. “You need to leave.”

His heart was beating rapidly. It was. It was a tattoo of one of the greatest sightings of the past decade. The video of the floating lights. Ten separate campers -- someone of them had been in pairs or groups, but all of them -- they’d seen a creature in the valley.

She was totally closed off from him now, her eyes blank.

He swallowed. “Please,” he said. “I -- I need to know. You don’t have to tell me about it in detail if, if it was scary. I know it can be scary. I just need to know that it’s real. Please.”

She sighed, and turned away, taking a drink from something on her counter. She drank for a long time. He was frozen. 

“Yes, I was there. That was the first night I saw someone’s aura.”

He felt himself go slack with awe. “The alien, it, it gave you --”

“No. It had nothing to do with that. It was me. It wasn’t an alien. I could tell, it was a person. Just a person. My girlfriend at the time and I, we woke up in the middle of the night. We heard… sounds."

"Like a buzz, or a mechanical scream," he interjected forcefully.

"That's what she heard," Cindy admitted. "We saw something shoot across the valley, tearing up dust. We argued so much after that night. She thought it was too fast for a human. But I could see it. It was a person. Their aura was in serious pain. I think... She, everyone... I think it's easier to think it wasn't human. Because then it wasn't our fault we didn't help. Or, I don't know. That it can't happen to us." Her fingers smoothed over her neck.

“You’re wrong,” he said. He couldn't stop shaking his head. “Its not easier to believe that. That's what everyone wants you to believe. They want you to say it was just a weather balloon or a drone or some streaker --"

"Whoa," she tried to interrupt him, which made him irrationally angry. It was the you're a weirdo tone of voice.

"And it’s always your people, too, online, calling us crazy --”

“‘Our’ people? Excuse me?”

“I don’t have anything wrong with that lifestyle, but clearly, you all have something against us.”

“We have something against you?” Her face was more than angry, it was as shocked as he’d seen her that night, like he’d bowled her over. “Like I said, you need to get out. Now.”

“Fine,” he threw up his hands, heading toward the door. At the last second he turned around. He would regret it if he didn’t say a few more things. “But you people should stop playing the victim all the time, when it’s you throwing me out. You telling me I’m delusional, when you can’t see beyond what's right in front of you!”

An annoying half-smile came into her face. It wasn’t a smile of victory, or smugness. It was pitying. “No, Gary. You can’t see what’s right in front of you. You think the world rejected you? You rejected the world. But it’s the only one you’ll ever get.”

Then she slammed the door in his face.

He went to work the next day, and the day after that. He bought frozen meals at the grocery store under heavy fluorescent lights and sweated when he got out from under them, caught between the hot sun above and the reflection on the tarmac below. And he told himself he was the same and that he never thought about what she told him.

He went to work for weeks, months. Sometimes he thought about apologizing to her. He passed by strip mall after strip mall, and mansions dancing above trees. And he went into the houses and dirtied the hardwood floors and the owners looked at him with dirtier looks. How was he the one rejecting the world? The very pavement rejected him. His knees ached and there were stairs everywhere. He couldn’t afford better Chinese food.

He had to install nine doors in a brand new house one day and he was so tired after he sat in the nearest puddle of shade. He laid out, watching the little dots of leaves playing under the sun. Who knew, maybe the owners would want this tree gone by the time they moved in. He patted it absently. Maybe they had both been rejected by the world, him and the tree. Both old and useless. Yes, he thought, he liked that. And he wondered for the first time about the real lives of the other people on the subreddit, if they were rejected from the world too. But what he wondered most was about Cindy. He thought about how easily the door had been to fix, and why she’d only had him to call.