Daniel’s Account

*Post by daniel_k_nights*** (posted 6:14 AM, Monday)

daniel_k_nights: I am Exterminators. I am writing from this account, which I now hold. Its owner has gone, and he went in pleasure. Thank you for your attention.

cold_open_77 · 6:31 AM · 612 likes: lol okay. Hostage account reveal? Bold.

mothlight · 6:40 AM · 540 likes: 2/10. The grammar is off. Exterminators never writes like this.

m_aurelius_jr · 7:05 AM · 388 likes: Index: Realism 1. Cringe 9. A sad attempt at a twist.

The thing about Monday morning was that it arrived whether one wanted it or not, and on this one Asher woke ten minutes before the alarm with a headache and the faint sour taste of last night's tea still in his mouth.

He reached for the phone as he always did. There was a notification at the top, and when he opened it, a quiet little tremor of excitement went through him, a flicker of the old thrill, because the thread had moved. It had moved in the night. A new post had appeared at the head of the forum, and it carried a name he had not seen since the introductions, a plain gray silhouette beside the handle daniel_k_nights.

He sat up. He read it where he sat, with the blanket around his knees.

I am Exterminators. I am writing from this account, which I now hold. Its owner has gone, and he went in pleasure. Thank you for your attention.

It was six lines long, and he read it twice, and then he lay back on the pillow and laughed.

It was such a perfect piece of bad theater. It was so far below the level of what had gone before! The words were stiff and wooden, the syntax was lumpy, the tone was that of a man reading a ransom note off a cue card. And there it sat, at the top of the page, under three thousand eyes, with a hundred and fifty comments already, each one cheerfully tearing it apart. 2/10. Cringe. Exterminators would never. This is a fan fiction. A woman wrote Honestly I think this is just someone from the sub trying to cheer us up after last night, and four hundred people agreed with her.

He opened the spreadsheet, scrolled to a new column, and typed under the heading Plausibility a single figure. 4/10. Under it, in the notes field, he wrote Poor execution. Credible premise. Style inconsistent with author. He was pleased with that. It was fair, measured, and the sort of thing a professional would say. He copied the phrase into the thread, and it received eighty likes in ten minutes, and Marcus sent him a laughing face, and Priya sent the word savage, and the morning was suddenly a good one.

…

At the firm they were giving out the new assignments.

It happened every month, at nine o'clock on the first Monday, in the small conference room on the fourth floor, with the coffee and the stale pastries, while Hargrove sat at the head of the table and read from a sheet of paper in a voice of unemotional boredom. Dana sat on his left with her laptop. Two associates and a paralegal filled the chairs along the sides. And Asher, at the far end, by the window with its view of the parking structure, sat with his legal pad before him and his hands folded, in an attitude of calm and professional readiness, though his stomach was knotted.

The Brennan matter was on the list. He had known it would be.

It was the best case of the quarter, a real one, with a federal court and a deposition schedule and a client whose name appeared in the newspapers. Hargrove was taking it himself. He had told them so. And for three weeks, in a series of hints and half-hints and modest remarks in the corridor, Asher had let it be understood that he would not be averse to a role, a small one, a supporting position, in the preparation of the exhibits.

"Brennan," said Hargrove. "Lead, me. Second chair, Allard. Research, Morales. Exhibits..." He ran a finger down the page. "Dana, you and Corinne will coordinate."

Asher waited.

"Cole."

"Yes, sir."

"The copy room has a backlog. The Pelham binders for the clerk's office, all forty of them. I'd like them collated, tabbed, and bound by Thursday. Two copies of each."

There was a short silence in the room. Dana had looked up, and then, quickly, down.

"The... binders," said Asher.

"Yes."

"Sir, I had hoped that..." He heard his own voice waver. He steadied it. "I had hoped there might be some substantive work on Brennan. I've done a considerable amount of preparatory reading. I believe I could be of use."

"I'm sure you could." Hargrove looked at him, not unkindly, with a flat tired look, as one regards a weather vane. "The binders, Cole. They need doing. Someone has to do them."

"Of course."

"Thank you. Next."

He sat there. He did not hear the rest. He heard only the soft click of the pen on the wood, tap, tap, tap, and the rustle of the associates' papers, and his own blood in his ears. He had been so certain. He had written a note to himself on Friday, in the car, Brennan—ask for exhibits, and the whole weekend, in some corner of his mind, he had been in a courtroom, in a new suit, handing a folder to a judge.

Photocopies, he thought. He's given me photocopies.

He ground his jaw until it ached. He thought of the many people in the world who took things away from other people, and of the few who gave, and of how a man like Hargrove, in his tailored shirt, with his pen, would go on his whole life as he was, untouched, while others waited at the copier with their arms full of paper. It was unjust. It was cruel. And the worst of it was that no one saw.

…

At four in the afternoon he went up in the elevator with a cup of coffee in his hand.

He had been in the copy room for six hours. There was ink on his cuffs, a gray smear, and a paper cut on his thumb. The binders stood in stacks on the floor behind him, twenty-two done and eighteen to go, and he had been told by a clerk in the stairwell that he had been calling the wrong office, and had gone down four flights to apologize. He was tired, and sticky, and nearly at the end of his reserves, and he stepped into the car at the fourth floor and pressed the button for the fifth, where Hargrove's assistant kept the binding tape.

The doors began to close.

A hand slid between them. They opened again, and a man in a gray suit stepped in, and the doors rolled shut behind him.

It was Hargrove.

He had a leather folder under his arm and his reading glasses pushed up on his forehead. He nodded to Asher, once, without interest, as one nods to a piece of furniture, and turned to face the doors. He did not say anything. He took out his phone and began to read.

The elevator rose. It was a slow old car, with a brass panel and a mirror on the back wall, and a faint hum in the cables that seemed to Asher to grow louder as they climbed. He stood a little behind and to the left. He looked at the back of Hargrove's head. He could see the gray bristle at the nape of the neck, where the barber had trimmed it, and the stiff white collar, and a small mole just above it, and the dry rhythm of a man's shoulder blades moving slowly under good cloth.

He could have touched it with his hand.

If he would only go, he thought.

It was a very small thought. It crossed his mind and went, quick and cold and thin, as a fish crosses the dark under a pier. He did not examine it. It had no shape and no plan, and it was not even, in the strict sense, a wish. It was a little exhalation of tiredness, a little hollow in his mind where the word away seemed to sit. If he would only not be here. If I could only turn around, and the elevator was empty, and the pen was lying on the floor.

The cup in his hand tilted.

He felt it before he saw it. The warmth ran over his fingers, and a dark stain was spreading across the cuff of his shirt, and a thin brown stream had begun to patter on the floor of the car, drop by drop, an inch from Hargrove's polished left shoe.

"Oh," said Asher.

Hargrove turned. He looked at the coffee on the floor, and at the cup, and at the young man holding it, and his face did not change. He opened his mouth and for a moment seemed about to speak, and then the doors opened on the fifth floor with a soft chime. He stepped out. He said, without looking back, "Get someone to clean that," and went away down the corridor, and the pen in his pocket clicked once as he walked.

Asher stood alone in the elevator with the stain on his sleeve.

His heart was pounding, and he did not know why. He had spilled a cup of coffee. It was nothing. It would be forgotten by evening. But the car was very quiet, and the small cold fish of the thought was still moving somewhere inside him, in the dark, and he found that his hands, both of them, were trembling. He wiped them on his trousers. He told himself it was fatigue. He told himself that a man could not be held responsible for what flickered through him in a lift.

He went down to the copy room again, and sat on the floor among the binders, and for some time did not do anything at all. He felt empty. He felt as if something had been taken out of him that he had not known was there. A clerk came in with a stack of paper and stared at him, and went out again.

…

It was after nine when he opened the spreadsheet that night.

He had eaten nothing. He sat on the bed with the laptop on his knees and the light off, and went through the rows without seeing them, the long columns of names and dates and numbers that he had been building for seven weeks. At the bottom of the page was the entry for Daniel. It said Credibility: 3. It said Intro, week 3. Interest in film. Close to Ex.

He remembered the strange gray account at the head of the forum that morning. daniel_k_nights. He remembered that Daniel had not posted since the night before the great day, since the evening when everyone had been waiting. He remembered, vaguely, that a man who wrote so often, who gushed and joked and made small shy puns in the threads, should have said a word by now, and had not.

He typed in the cell next to the name. Daniel—last active 3 days ago. Check later.

He looked at it, and he thought that there was something he was supposed to do about that, some small obligation that tugged at the edge of his mind, and then his stomach growled, loudly, in the dark room, and he closed the laptop and went to find the cereal. By the time he had found the bowl, he had forgotten it.