Note: This story was dynamically reformatted for online reading convenience.
 
 M/f; rom, cons





   In a tale without the slightest trace of violence, Algy, 33 y.o., is a
temp at a large bank.  He hates Jerry, the guy in the cubicle next to his,
but Jerry's daughter is a dream.  Barely 13 y.o., Shelby strikes up a
conversation with Algy at an office party.  "Maybe Algy would have
forgotten all about Shelby if he hadn't seen her, by a fluke, the very next
day.  He'd gone for a long walk and seen her graceful figure striding
towards the lake, probably headed home.  Algy called out to her.  It may
have been an imp of the perverse that brought them together then, but he
really did like talking to her, and anyway it bothered him that he
couldn't, that there was always something indecent about an older man
talking to a pretty young girl.  Men and girls can't be friends anymore."
Or can they?











   D O W N S I Z I N G

   Written by Silvio Stoker







   Algernon Harper stuffed the pockets of his trench-coat with packets of
coffee from the break room before leaving the office, a nameless grind in
gold foil.  It was his daily bonus, taken not because he couldn't afford to
buy his own beans but because it was theft, a petty act of rebellion
necessary to Algy's sense of self.  Nodding to the man in the next cubicle,
Algy grabbed his battered briefcase of soft brown leather and left the
office, ignoring the hatchet man who stood outside the boss's door.

   The bank's lobby led to a commuter railroad station, and the building
was supposedly a marvel of modern architecture.  Perhaps its glassy public
spaces were better than most, but they certainly weren't pleasant, and the
upper floors, where the equipment finance division was, really resembled a
Kafkaesque labyrinth for laboratory rats, though Algernon was certain that
Kafka, were he raised from the dead, given a key card and sent to work in
the Loop, would have gone insane without ever having written a single word.

   Jerry Stanton, who had the next cubicle, had an ingratiating smile on
his face every time he saw the hatchet man, as though he looked forward to
doom.  Jerry Stanton was impervious to doom: he had a parachute that if not
golden was at least semi-precious and written in stone; he had very good
prospects elsewhere, he had two point five kids, a boy, a girl and a baby;
he'd recently bought a brand new Bronco, fire-engine red; he had a stock
portfolio he played with every morning over gourmet coffee; he possessed a
stunning and ambitious blonde who'd recently returned to law school ('I
knew she'd make a good mother when I married her'); he owned a condo on
Lake Shore Drive and he had almost paid off the mortgage on a beach house
in the Michigan dunes.  The thirty-four-year-old banker was ostensibly
content, as interested in interest rates as he was in sports (always the
sorts of sports requiring expensive equipment that Jerry could show off to
his wealthy friends) and in the more sedate pleasures he shared with his
model family.  He had security.  Jerry often thought about 'the future' in
a comfortable way, his snuff-colored eyes glazed over.  Jerry Stanton knew
that he had the momentum to remain upwardly mobile whether the division was
closed or not, whether he stayed at the bank or listened to the headhunter
he had courted of late...  so what did Jerry Stanton care about the hatchet
man?

   Sometimes the boyish grin on Jerry's well-tanned and commercially
handsome face seemed genuine, though there was really very little that was
genuine about Jerry Stanton - or, to be precise, the banker was such a
stereotypical yuppie that Algernon sometimes wondered whether he would even
bleed if he was cut.  If you slit his wrists, television would ooze from
his veins, the blue of a bedroom community with orgone blight.  Jerry
Stanton would never slit his own wrists.  Anything genuine in Jerry was
probably on the market somewhere, and Algernon tried to imagine him
grief-stricken, but couldn't.  Jerry Stanton was a walking argument in
favor of terrorism, terrorism against sleep, against the walking dead.

   Algernon Harper had no parachute.  At thirty-three, he was a year
younger than the man in the next cubicle, but Algy made exactly one-eighth
of the money Jerry made.  The hatchet man's appearance before Christmas
discomfited Algy, though he suspected that the bank would wait until after
the holidays before shutting down the division and letting everyone go. 
That would look better.

   Sy Farwell, the hatchet man, was also handsome, olive-skinned and sly,
with cocaine eyes, but Sy's ruthlessness was more readily apparent than
Jerry Stanton's.  Jerry knew that ruthlessness didn't look good at office
parties.  Had Jerry been a hatchet man, he would have been exactly like Sy.


   Algernon did exactly what Jerry did, only he did it as a so-called
assistant account manager who'd been brought in as a temp, twenty grand to
Jerry's one-sixty and no insurance or benefits of any kind, 'we appreciate
what you've done here, Algy, and wish you all the best, and sorry, but we
can't give you any references because you never worked here, you worked for
the temp agency, and anyway the legal department doesn't allow us to give
references anymore...'

   Algernon had been through that many times before, as had many of the
other men working there.  Algy suffered from a sort of nihilism.  He
resembled the truly tragic older men who gaped at the hatchet man with
despair and horror, the ones who had not only been through such things but
were already beaten, who had held promising positions at other banks or in
fields like advertising and were old enough to know that they were utterly
unwanted now except in an unstable status like what they had found in their
sorry cubicles at the equipment finance division, hoping to make it past
Christmas, hopeless, pushing fifty, some of them even losing it, saying
strange things to important clients ('what's a hundred thousand dollars to
you?'), most of them fortunately without families, lonely and of no
account.

   But Algy was only thirty-three.  He lacked the ambition which some of
these beaten men had once possessed.  He did quite well with the actual
work - it was plain and simple inside sales - and Algernon Harper stayed at
the bank because he was used to it, because he did so well that he didn't
have to exert himself, often meeting his quota by Tuesday afternoon and
lazing through the rest of the week, taking long lunches, leaving early,
coming in late.  Such liberties were understood because the temps were
underpaid.  There was no pressure.  They had no future.

   What Algernon particularly despised in his neighbor was Jerry Stanton's
total lack of compassion for the losers.  It was Jerry who demanded that
men be let go for minor transgressions or 'having a negative attitude.'
Jerry Stanton delighted in stability, and anything out of the ordinary was
a serious threat to his imagination or lack of of imagination.  Life to him
was a soap opera, a tame sequence of pairings and breeding, human because
egotistical.

   It was the Friday of the Christmas party and 'casual day,' meaning that
everyone at the bank wore spotless sweaters and compared boating shoes. 
The lobby that led to the commuter railroad station had a nice bar, a
sheltering darkness - not a few of the bank's employees went there during
the day, visible only to other sinners - and it had also been payday, so
Algy went in and had a martini (Sapphire, dirty and dry), then crossed the
lobby and took the escalator down.  He had no intention of going to the
office party.  Then he spotted Shelby Stanton riding the up escalator with
her mother and brother.  They waved to him, and Algernon changed his mind.
He would go to the party after all, if only to stare at Shelby.

   They'd met at the Christmas party the year before.  Jerry Stanton's
daughter had been only twelve years old then, and Algy had felt
uncomfortable, admiring her.  It was impossible not to, though.  Shelby was
very tall for her age, so pale that her skin seemed semi-transparent, her
face infinitely delicate but for her troublemaker's eyes, their irises a
sort of translucent pistachio, stunning.  She had a serious mouth, her lips
the color of pink grapefruit, and wavy hair that cascaded straight to her
waist, a sort of roasted chestnut, her lissome body languid and willowy,
already almost womanly.  The girl was so breathtakingly beautiful that
Algernon had to study her for a long time before he could begin to hate her
like he hated her insufferable father and even her law student mother. 
Joyce, Jerry's wife, was perfect, too, but her perfection was a cover
girl's, utterly shallow.  Their daughter seemed deep somehow, though,
romantic and mysterious.  Algy had thought her fifteen or sixteen, and
hearing that she was only twelve blew him away.  What allowed Algernon to
despise Shelby was the girl's incipient similarity to her mother, not in
appearance but in her movements.  She was not yet seductive but almost so.
In Joyce this seductiveness veiled calculation and some despicable desire
to be loved while she and her husband cut throats.  In Shelby, it hid an
awkwardness.  He could already see her uncertainty soaked with her parents'
second-hand beliefs and wrapped in 'values,' and Algy thought it a terrible
waste of the girl's strange beauty.  He went back into the bar and ordered
another martini, getting stoked before the party.

   Their boss, the head of the division, who spent December afternoons
sequestered in his glass office with the hatchet man, was himself afraid of
doom.  Fundamentally decent, Lester Wilson was fifty-four and terrified of
early retirement.  Sy knew it, and the hatchet man seemed to take a
perverse delight in hinting at Lester's less attractive options, subtly
torturing him.  Everyone knew that Sy had come to shut them down, and the
more Sy denied it, the more Jerry Stanton smiled.  Algernon wondered
whether _Schadenfreude_, delight in others' misfortunes, wasn't a
requirement for admittance to some secret society of comely and indecent
men, climbing on each other's shoulders to reach retirement unscathed.  It
was baffling, because guys like Jerry simply couldn't see that in ten or
twenty years they'd be in the same position as Les Wilson, praying to last
a few more years.  They'd be like Les Wilson or worse.  At least Lester
didn't lie.  A minister's son, Les possessed some decency, and that gave
him depth.  Lester didn't answer their fearful questions as he made
preparations for the Christmas party.  Les looked like a faded fifties'
advertisement for personal betterment.

   Algernon Harper was apparently indolent, but he had another life which
excused his indolence, at least to him, and he answered only to himself,
living alone in a transient hotel near the Belmont El.  What this other
life was exactly he would have been hard pressed to say.  His arguments had
gotten rather rusty.  Once he would have said he was a writer, but a
writer...  well, a writer writes...  and so he'd taken to thinking of
himself as a poet, which creature doesn't need to do anything, really,
scribbling something down when inspired, which Algy did despite the fact
that the muse visited very rarely of late.

   He might have called himself an alcoholic, which he certainly was. 
Algernon wouldn't have minded this epithet except that it had lost its
meaning somehow, another term for a personal and social ailment instead of
what it was, his no longer young body dying by rote, but actually
suffering, and eloquently, too, as if his brain were a half-drowned rodent
with rabies and disturbingly human characteristics, a pair of broken opera
glasses trained upon death's door - he hoped that death would be a woman -
and clutching at a goose quill, writing self-pitying epistles to no one in
particular, storing nuts for nuclear winter, the inside and outside of his
narcissistic self no longer so easily distinguishable in their mutual
agony.

   Distinguished, though.  Algernon Harper may have been pathetic, but he
had his moments.  He possessed a certain charm and was not altogether ugly.
He was by no means unintelligent.  His intelligence, however, was of the
useless and self-destructive variety, and it would likely have been useless
whether or not he'd drowned it in whiskey.  His brains were full of
disconnected scraps of information that could even sometimes muster a
seductive cohesion, wisdom or a mockery of such, but this knowledge was
slack, undisciplined and without form, or without becoming form, a mindless
brain, half sentimental and half despairing, with few sympathies outside
itself.  He wasn't cruel, but his compassion was purely or impurely sappy.
Sentimentality he possessed - or it possessed him - but he would never have
lifted a finger to help anyone except for his own pleasure, or to get
closer to them, if then, no longer trusting anything to be consummated,
uninspired.  Yet Algernon was perversely in love with himself, even as he
crawled into the bottle, or he knew not love but needed to mount a
perpetual defense of his lovelessness.  His intellect could cut.  He used
it to cut himself, but it was available to others in that way as well. 
People rarely got close to him anymore.

   Algy finished his second martini and went back to the office tipsy. 
About half of his co-workers were there.  The rest had drifted away.  It
was a dismal party, with bad pizza and peanut butter cookies, soft drinks
only.  People sat around in the cubicles or stood near Lester's door,
munching slices of the cardboard pies and chattering.  Shelby was standing
at the window, the skyscrapers beyond bleak monoliths in the dreary winter
dusk, talking to the hatchet man.

   She'd changed, but subtly.  Her hips had widened slightly, but otherwise
her strange maturity seemed to have been arrested, stagnant, as if she were
scared of becoming a woman.  Shelby was wearing a black velvet dress and
kind of clunky, funky shoes, her coltish legs in black stockings, her
chestnut hair in a thick braid.  She looked almost sad, but she seemed to
be attracted to Sy, or if not attracted then interested in flirting with
the hatchet man.  It made Sy nervous, and he looked over at her parents,
who were talking to Les in the next row of cubicles, and then he walked
away, leaving her distressed, then looking as though she had always been
alone, like some monstrously lovely pre-Raphaelite damsel.  Algernon got
himself a Coke and went over to her, still carrying his briefcase.

   "Hi, Shelby," he said, resting his hand on the edge of the chair nearest
her.  "How are you?"

   She seemed to be surprised that he remembered her name.  They'd seen
each other only a couple of times since the party the year before, when
they'd talked only briefly.  "Okay...  I'm sorry, I forgot your name."

   "Algernon...  Algy."

   "Oh, I remember...  that's English, isn't it?  Like out of Oscar Wilde
or something."

   "You read Oscar Wilde?"

   "I love the fairy tales...  and I read _The Picture of Dorian Gray_."

   "Hmmm...  now that's a dangerous book for a girl like you, isn't it?"
He'd started to like her again, or her proximity, her deep-set eyes,
crystal pistachios stuffed with ink, disturbingly curious and thatched with
coy dark eyebrows.

   "What do you mean by 'a girl like me?'"

   She liked to talk about herself.  Most girls do.  "A beautiful girl like
you." She didn't blush, but averted her eyes.  "Did you like Dorian?"

   "Him or the book?" She smiled.  Shelby had gotten braces, but even so
her smile was very mischievous and disarmingly inviting.  "I liked Lord
Henry," she said.  "Dorian was kind of naïve...  I don't know, like being
dumb was what made him evil, maybe...  like he didn't know what he wanted.
That's what made him bad.  Maybe he was just...  bad, not really evil."

   "Do _you_ know what you want?"

   Shelby's voice was girlish but trained, birdsong and sleet, coy and
conspiratorial.  "If I did, I wouldn't tell you," she said.  "You remind me
of Lord Henry."

   "But we never do get to find out about the nasty things that Lord Henry
does, do we?  Other than the pleasure he takes in corrupting Dorian. 
'Talking to him was like playing upon an exquisite violin.' Like talking to
you."

   Algernon could remember some passages almost word for word: 'he answered
to every touch and thrill of the bow...  there was something enthralling
about the exercise of influence.  No other activity was like it.  To
project one's soul into some gracious form, and let it tarry there for a
moment...  to convey one's temperament into another as though it were a
subtle fluid or some strange perfume...'

   "That's what I mean," Shelby said quietly, quite close to Algy,
enveloping him in her girlish grace.  "Dorian just lets him take over,
doesn't he?  But, then, he would have been nothing without Lord Henry's
evil influence.  Just another pretty boy with nothing inside."

   "You must be thirteen now," Algernon said, changing the subject. 
"Seriously, what are you interested in?"

   "I like to read and stuff," she said, a faraway look in her peridot
eyes. "I take ballet.  You remember him good...  _well_, I mean...  I mean
Wilde.  I wish I had a memory like yours."

   "You're a strange girl."

   "How?" It was a question.  She wasn't fishing for compliments.

   "What are you in, eighth grade?"

   "No...  high school.  I'm a freshman.  I thought you meant...  something
else." She looked at him, unsmiling.  "I mean, I know I'm brilliant and
stuff."

   "What did you think I meant?"

   "Nothing." She looked at her hands, leaning against the wall of the
cubicle.  She had long fingers, the nails cut short.  Fragile wrists.  "I
guess I want to be interesting.  It's dumb, isn't it?"

   "You are interesting.  In a hurry to grow up?" He'd had two martinis,
but even without them Algy felt that he would have gotten into a
conversation like that then.  Her precocity and innocence were so
provocative in combination.

   "What's interesting about that?  It's typical, isn't it?"

   "You don't talk typically," Algy said.  "You talk like an adult."

   "Well, I'm not." She pouted.  "Not until my daddy says I am."

   "That's tough, isn't it.  Let's see...  four years of high school, eight
years before you can get into a bar.  Try drugs." Algernon sneered in a
friendly way.  "Or have you?"

   "No." She looked at him appraisingly.  "You drink a lot, don't you?"

   "Yeah.  Want some?" Casting a glance at her parents, who were still
talking to Lester and the hatchet man, Algy pulled a pint of whiskey from
his briefcase and poured four fingers into his Coke, then handed it to her.


   She smiled and drank some.  "Thanks...  what's my dad really like?"

   "What do you want to hear?"

   "He's an asshole, isn't he?"

   "Yeah...  your mother is, too, I think."

   "My brother's on his way to being one." Her brother Rob was talking to
one of the tragic temps, self-conscious and bored out of his mind.  "I
really hate my family.  That's typical, too, isn't it?"

   "Probably.  So why don't you try drugs?"

   "I'd rather try sex," Shelby said, her eyes on his.  It wasn't an
invitation.  She was only being a brat.

   "They're good in combination," Algy said with a sardonic smile.

   Mrs.  Stanton came over to them, walking like a mannequin.  "Hi," she
said to Algernon, then stood between him and her daughter, half
protectively and half interested in attention.  "How have you been?"

   "Oh, fine," Algy said.  "How's law school?"

   "Oh, it's a lot of pressure!" The woman had probably never said anything
real in her life.  Shelby rolled her eyes.  "We were thinking of going to
the bar downstairs," her mother said.  "Shelby, you and Rob can go to the
Ben and Jerry's."

   The woman turned away, and Shelby looked like a little girl again,
deflated, maybe a little drunk.  "See you," the beauty said, and followed
Mrs.  Stanton.

   Algy drifted after them, caught the next elevator down and watched a few
of his co-workers straggle into the bar with Les and Sy, Shelby and her
brother headed for the ice cream place.  Then he drifted home to the
transient hotel, where he jerked off and drank until he fell asleep.

   Algernon didn't jerk off to Shelby Stanton.  He hadn't been with an
underage woman or girl since he'd been sixteen, and Shelby wasn't the sort
of person he masturbated to.  She was too young, too little despite her
maturity and height, still a child.  He could imagine kissing her, but
going to bed with her was unimaginable.  She'd hinted at it, though, under
her bravado, and after Algy ejaculated into his hand, thinking about an old
flame, he thought about Shelby.  Her hatred for her parents shocked him,
actually.  He would have expected her to defend them even if she'd had
nasty thoughts about them, and really there was no reason for her to think
ill of Jerry and Joyce.  Jerry was probably somebody's ideal of a dad. 
Rich, handsome, caring and all that.

   Maybe Algy would have forgotten all about Shelby if he hadn't seen her,
by a fluke, the very next day.  He'd gone for a long walk - it was
something he did to keep from drinking until afternoon - and seen her
graceful figure striding down Barry, going towards the lake, probably
headed home.  Algernon called out to her.  It must have been an imp of the
perverse that made him call out to her then, but he really did like talking
to her, and anyway it bothered him that he couldn't, that there was always
something indecent about an older man talking to a pretty young girl, even
in an innocent context unless it's official, the man a teacher or other
professional, the girl below, or unless the man is kin.  Men and girls
can't be friends anymore.  They both felt uncomfortable, standing on the
sidewalk in the cold, and the sense that their meeting was forbidden made
it seem intimate somehow.

   "Wanna go to a café or something?" It was Shelby who asked.  He said
yes, and they walked back up to Belmont, keeping a distance that was more
than safe, an uncle and neice, perhaps.  They went to a punk kind of place
near the corner of Broadway, not trendy but pleasant, real somehow, or more
real than most of the places around there.  The waitress, a pretty girl
with a pierced nose, looked askance at them, proving Algy's depressing
musings to be true.  Shelby noticed.  "It's too bad we can't be friends,"
she said.  "It's like the virgins in 'not to touch the earth, not to see
the sun,' you know, the Doors."

   "It's not Jim Morrison, actually...  he took it from Sir James Frazer."

   "I know, _The Golden Bough_.  How come you know that stuff?"

   "How come _you_ know it?"

   "I'm bored.  I read because I'm bored." It had started snowing outside.
The waitress brought her tea and Algernon's double of bourbon, coffee.  "My
dad said you're a writer."

   "He did?  I'm not." Algy winced.  "I'm a writer who doesn't write."

   "Oh...  one of those." She smiled, though, her braces glinting in the
winter light that poured through the plate glass windows.  "Where do you
live?"

   "Down the street...  in a hotel, actually."

   "You mean like a seedy hotel?" She grinned.

   "Exactly.  Above the tattoo parlor."

   "Is it exciting?"

   "What's 'exciting' to you?"

   "Oh, I don't know," the thirteen-year-old answered, sipping her tea. 
She had draped her coat over the back of the chair.  She wore a heavy
sweater, virgin wool the color of oatmeal.  Her hands looked like liquid
paper had trickled from the thick sleeves.  Her chestnut hair was divided
into two thick braids, her high forehead like an eggshell.  "It's exciting
to be sitting here with you."

   "Why?" Algy was getting nervous.

   "Why do you think?" She took a cigarette from Algy's half-smoked pack of
Havana Ovals and his Zippo.  She'd smoked before, but she was still
self-conscious.  " 'Cause my dad'd kill me."

   "I think he'd just lecture you."

   "Sometimes I wish he would kill me," she said, her peridot eyes catching
fire.  "And it's exciting 'cause you like me," Shelby pronounced, gazing
steadily at Algy.

   "Why do you hate your parents?"

   "'Cause they're boring.  I loved my dad till I turned twelve...  till
when I got my period.  That's typical, I suppose." She stubbed out the
strong cigarette, exhaling through her nose.  "I started to wonder if he'd
care if I was somebody else...  I mean, what it was he loved about me... 
or even what love really is, you know?"

   "That's a good game.  I suppose you decided Jerry loves having a
daughter more than he loves you?"

   "Yeah...  and, natch, I started wondering who _I_ was.  I guess that's
pretty philosophical, huh." She had a disarming smile.  "Like, would you
want to talk to me if I'd been hit by a truck and looked ugly?" She was
gorgeous.

   "The answer is that you haven't been.  You have an adolescent lust for
violence."

   "And what do you have?  A middle-aged desire to drink yourself to
death?"

   "No - I think it's an adolescent desire, actually.  I started drinking
when I was your age."

   "Why?"

   "'C'est l'Ennui!  L'oeil chargé d'un pleur involontaire, il rêve
d'échafauds...'"

   "I don't know French," she said, though drinking in its sonorities.

   "Baudelaire, sort of: 'boredom bejeweled by an involuntary tear, a
bright eye dreaming of the gallows...'" Algy sighed.  "I can't remember it
very well."

   "It sounds sexy," Shelby said.  "It's not, though, is it?  It never is.
I'm bored all the time."

   "Well, go out and get hit by a truck, then." Algy ordered another
double.

   "I thought about taking sleeping pills and slitting my wrists in the
tub. That way, if I didn't bleed to death I'd go into a coma and drown. 
I'd be naked, too, and my daddy would have to watch the big policemen carry
me away like that.  Naked." She giggled, then had a sip of Algy's whiskey.
"I'm too scared to, though.  I like your idea of trying drugs.  Would you
get some for me?" She looked at him coyly.

   "I've got some.  Wanna come back to my seedy hotel with me?"

   "Will you rape me?"

   "No."

   "Not even if I want you to?"

   "I think you're too scared for that, too."

   "To want you to or to get you to do it?" She took another sip of the
whiskey and then Algy downed it.  Two doubles were enough for him to lose
all caution.  He wasn't drunk, but he was careless.  "Okay...  I have to be
home in a couple of hours, though," Shelby said, and a slight shadow of
suspicion actually crossed her face then.  She trusted him, though.  She
probably didn't have anyone else she wanted to be close to.

   Algy paid and they walked west along Belmont.  It's a dingy but
fashionable street, if Marilyn Manson and poseurs in ersatz darkness are
considered to be the fashion.  They reached his hotel and went in.  There
was no one at the window on the landing, and Algy was glad there wasn't,
though he didn't think he'd get into trouble.  He was only taking her to
his room...  well, and he was about to give her drugs, but that wasn't a
sin, not anymore, anyway, not really.  We don't sin anymore.  We do things
that detract from our personal development, and it's not the same.  The
police didn't feel that way, of course, but seedy hotels don't call the
police unless the crime is directed against the hotel...  or if it's
violent, a 'police matter.' This wasn't a police matter because it was
almost invisible and still ostensibly innocent.  Algernon Harper was still
respectable, or he would be respected no matter what he did because he
_seemed_ respectable, a well-spoken gentleman.  Seedy people rarely
respected him, not out of some irony but because they recognized their
vices in him, something they easily do in everyone but themselves.  They
don't respect themselves, and they had no reason to respect a middle-aged
lush.  Algy didn't respect himself.  But Algy still had a sort of
self-regard and so did not appear to be a total wreck.  He meant to wreck
himself, and that kept away all but the very curious...  like this girl. 
Shelby wasn't afraid of his self-destructiveness; in fact, it made her
trust him, because she possessed it, too, or its germ, though hers was
recent and romantic, adolescent, and because she couldn't imagine him
hurting others, only himself.

   "You actually live here?" The beauty stood in the center of the room, or
in the small space that was left in it between its iron bedstead and the
rickety little desk covered with oilcloth.

   "Why, wanna move in?"

   "It's disgusting, Algy," she said, then sat down in the only chair. 
"Why do you live here?"

   "Why do people live in seedy hotels.  There's no security deposit.  You
move into a vicious circle..." Algernon lay down on the bed in his shoes.
"Actually, I like it here.  I like the atmosphere.  I like hotels.  I like
what other people don't like about them."

   "I guess I'd get used to it, too."

   "There's some brandy on the shelf," he said.  "And a dirty glass.  And a
joint next to that."

   Algy felt uncommonly relaxed.  He wanted to be with her, and she wasn't
nervous anymore.  He stared at the ceiling.  He sometimes saw shadowy
figures in the peeling paint, looming, descending.  Shelby took the cheap
brandy, Christian Brothers, and poured some into the filthy glass, handed
it to him, and took off her coat.  He remembered the bottle as it had been
before they tried to make the stuff look snazzy, and he felt old, only not
repulsively old, nostalgic, even paternal.  She lit the joint, hesitated,
and sat down on the edge of the lumpy bed to suck on the thin jay, then
passed it to him.  The view was of a wall twenty feet away, the windows
bricked up.  Desolate, and her there, in the light of the naked bulb.  He
admired her.

   "Do you really think I'm beautiful?" She let down her hair, vain for an
instant, seriously vain, vain and serious.

   "Yes."

   "I want to be beautiful."

   "You are."

   "I don't want to be pretty.  I want to be beautiful."

   "You're not pretty."

   "I'm not?" She smiled coyly.  "You're kind of awful-looking," she said,
stabbing him in the ribs.  He caught her wrist and pulled her towards him.
There was a flicker of fear in her eyes then, but he didn't try to kiss
her. He held her with one hand.  She let herself be held for an instant,
then withdrew like a tame snake, taking the joint from his fingers and
looking at the wall beyond the window.  "How come you live here, really? 
Don't you want anything?"

   Algy downed the brandy.  "What did Pascal say about all the misfortunes
of man stemming from his refusal to stay quietly in his room?" Algy sat up,
then got out of bed and refilled his glass, watching her smoke.  She truly
was wildly beautiful, even if her body was hidden by her heavy clothes, the
oatmeal sweater and wide-wale cords, moss green, gray wool socks, clogs. 
Clogs in winter.  Her clothing seemed to float, though, as if she wasn't
meant to wear any, or what she wore wouldn't become her.  Monstrously
lovely pre-Raphaelite...  "You should have been the Lady of Shalott," he
whispered.  Algy sat down in the chair and let her loll on the threadbare
apricot bedspread, the only color in the sordid room, really, other than
her.  She was white, with pale lips and those peridot eyes, bratty and
brilliant, smoldering, her chestnut hair so rich, released.  Algy sneered.
"What - you want know why I'm a failure?"

   "You're a loser," Shelby said.  She meant it, too.  She wasn't joking
anymore.  "You're okay, though," she pronounced.  "I have to go."

   "I'll walk you home - "

   "No." Her refusal was oddly final.  Algy had collapsed inwardly.  "It's
okay," she added, seeing the hurt in his eyes.  "I want to be alone.  I
like to be alone, like you." She gave him a peck on the cheek, and then she
was gone.

   That night Algernon had a dream about her.  He could remember only a
bare instant, kissing her, almost chastely, and he woke with his accustomed
hangover and a profound new sadness, his bladder full, lying on his back,
the figures on the ceiling forming in his dissolute eyes, falling.  He had
slept in his clothes, like always.  Algy got up, went down the corridor to
piss, threw on a coat and went back to the café where they had talked.  He
drank coffee and wrote.  He hadn't written for weeks.  He wrote about her.
'The Lady of Shalott' kept running through his head: 'But in her web she
still delights / To weave the mirror's magic sights, / For often thro' the
silent nights / A funeral, with plumes and lights / And music, went to
Camelot: / Or when the moon was overhead, / Came two young lovers lately
wed: / "I am half sick of shadows," said / The Lady of Shalott...' He wrote
and he wrote and when he was done he read what he had written there was
nothing there, a few reflections of Tennyson's mysterious old poem couched
in his curiously stillborn phrases, strands of dead sentences about
Shelby's beauty, dead words...  Algy's writing had no addressee.  And if he
wrote to her?  'Out flew the web and floated wide; / The mirror crack'd
from side to side; / 'The curse is come upon me,' cried / The Lady of
Shalott...' Algy's _life_ had no addressee, Algy thought, ordering a brandy
and snapping his pencil in two.

   'I am half sick of shadows.' Why did he pretend that he liked how he
lived?  His brain slumped lugubriously, the thoughts he'd had the night
before the slender towers of a sand-castle.  The sea-water would seep from
its parapets and soon the structure would collapse, or the tide would come
in.  Sterility?  Was sterility his complaint?  As a boy, Algernon had
stared wide-eyed through the windows of the El - the old green cars with
the little lamps stenciled 'read while you ride,' the handles you turned to
open the windows in summer - and he was fascinated by the bleak wall near
the Wilson station, the faded mural: 'Wilson Club Hotel for Men, Rooms $1'
Skid row?  A flophouse?  'For men only,' to keep the place from becoming a
cathouse.  It had seemed _romantic_ to him!  As a boy, he had pictured
receiving sudden power and knowledge upon maturity, coming of age a mystic
threshold.  Algy had imagined strength and wisdom being bestowed upon him
automatically in a sort of half-dream.  'I am half sick of shadows.' He'd
dreamt of waking up wise at eighteen or twenty-one, of knowing what
grown-ups seemed to know.  Of a strange certainty conferred by figures as
yet unknown, like the shapes he saw on the blistering ceiling, a conviction
he could _feel_, holding it in his hands like an apport, like matter.  His
father or mother would be beside him while he stared out the windows of the
sweltering train at the rickety back porches of Uptown.  They didn't live
there, they lived in Evanston, in a nice part of Evanston, and Algy was
drawn to urban decay.  Because it was _romantic_!  His mother, who had come
up in life by marrying his father, would look at Uptown with horror in her
pale blue eyes.  When Algy was in high school - the secret wisdom seemed
nigh - he read about the place, about the coal miners from Appalachia dying
of black lung behind the torn screens, about the corrupt cops and
prostitution...  and it was _romantic_, bewitching, picturesque.  Wisdom
never came.  Instead of secret knowledge, he discovered the emptiness of
his elders.  He discovered that their certainty was a sham.  'The mirror
crack'd.'

   And why?  He thought of the novelist Malcolm Lowry, who'd realized when
he was little that his ambition was to become a drunkard.  When Lowry found
literary success at last, he fell apart, drinking himself to death. 
Ambition!  Not that Algernon had never had any guts.  He'd fallen in love,
several times.  Often, and badly.  Sometimes it inspired him.  He'd gone to
school, dropped out, gone to school again.  He drank, steadily.  'You're a
loser.' Yes, Shelby, you hit the nail on the head!  A few years before he
would have sat before his brandy bitterly, inventing arguments for why he
wasn't a loser, defending himself to himself.  He rarely dragged those
arguments out before whatever had hurt him.  Now, Algy simply accepted the
sentence.  He wished it was for hard labor, but hey, it was Sunday, and the
day lay before him, a graveyard marked out with glasses glinting in the
cold sunlight, offerings.  He tore up what he had scribbled.  He wished
that Shelby Stanton would cut to the bone.  She'd be beautiful with a
knife.

   Perhaps cynicism _was_ the secret wisdom?  Sterility!  The coal miners
had died, Uptown was being gentrified.  What did it matter?  Yuppified coal
miners' daughters were worse than the suits.  Feminism, instead of freeing
women, had turned them into white bread.  Under them, others suffered, no
longer picturesque to him and not romantic at all.  Plain poverty, and not
even poverty - who's really poor in America?  If poor people learned to
live with what they had, to _live_, clear-eyed, not wallow in Velveeta
sitcoms, swaddled in memes...  who was he kidding?  Did _he_ live?  What
did it mean to live?  Algy ordered another brandy, downed it, put on his
coat, and went towards the door, turning up the collar.

   "Hi!" Shelby looked radiant.  Algy looked like he didn't recognize her.
"I looked for you in your seedy hotel...  I'm sorry about what I said," she
said, her eyes almost pleading.  "You're going?"

   "Don't be sorry.  Coffee?"

   She nodded happily and sat down in the window, slinging her coat over an
empty chair.  He sat down, and the waitress came, the same waitress they'd
had the day before.  She looked at the girl with disdain.  Shelby was
wearing an angora sweater, moss green like the cords she'd had on when
they'd met by Barry.  Today they were gray, narrow-wale and tight.  Wool
socks.  Clogs in winter.  It wasn't snowing, though.  It was dreadfully
cold, crystalline.  The window was dripping, the light catching the
droplets, gold.

   They began to meet regularly, especially on weekends, sometimes in the
early evening during the week.  They always went to the same café, and now
and then they went back to his dreary room and lay in the lumpy bed, next
to each other, six inches of space separating them, smoking pot or
drinking, not much, talking.  During her Christmas vacation they saw each
other every day.  They never touched, except for the peck on his cheek when
they parted.  He wanted to touch her, but he didn't.  He couldn't tell
whether she wanted him to touch her.  The thing was that she would have
said so if she did.  She talked him as if he were her best friend, more
than that, even, her only friend.  She wasn't afraid of him at all anymore.
She was comfortable, the distance between them 'like bread in a toaster,'
as Algy remembered it from some old poem.

   The ax fell on the day after New Year's.  Lester called everyone into
the conference room and the hatchet man gave an eloquent speech about how
much they were appreciated.  Unfortunately, the bank was going after bigger
customers.  They didn't want or need to lend a few hundred thousand dollars
to small or medium-sized businesses anymore.  Then Les, with the eyes of a
frightened pet, told them that they would be paid through the end of the
week.  "The passwords in your computers have been changed, and an officer
of the bank will accompany you if you'd like to remove your personal
belongings..." No severance, no notice, nothing.  The temps slinked off to
collect their things under the watchful eyes of Sy and Lester, Les who
wouldn't lie, but wouldn't talk to them anymore, either, he a minister's
son, and Algy saw Shelby's father in Lester's glass office, smiling
contentedly.  The man wouldn't even say goodbye.  No one would.  Some of
the temps had been there for two years or more, and they were cut loose
now, their departure not even dignified by a farewell.

   Algy hated looking for a job.  It was much worse than working, slinking
through fluorescent offices and smiling.  The temp agency, faced with the
loss of one of their major clients, had no work, and Algy had no savings.
The hotel room was paid for through the end of January.  He had no future,
and it seemed about to arrive.

   "Why don't you find a real job?" Shelby was wearing the oatmeal sweater
and moss green cords.  Her clogs had given way to ankle boots.  It was
snowing in heavy wet flakes, traffic oozing sluggishly through the slush.

   "Because I'm a loser," Algy said, sipping some bourbon.  If he kept
going out his money would run out before he got evicted.  "I'm thinking of
going away."

   Her face fell, and a film of tears veiled in her glistening green eyes.
Shelby looked away.  "Where?"

   "Down to New Orleans, maybe."

   "I thought you didn't have any money?"

   "I might be able to borrow a little.  I hate Chicago."

   "I do, too," Shelby said.  "Take me with you?" She was dead serious.

   "Transporting you across state lines is a federal crime, kid," Algy
said. Shelby bit her lower lip.  Pink grapefruit, her teeth perfect pearls,
the braces off.  "Besides, you haven't even slept with me."

   "Do you want me to?" She looked him straight in the eye.  "I can't
believe you'd leave me."

   "I'm a loser, remember?"

   "Oh, stop feeling sorry for yourself." She took a sip of his bourbon and
bummed a cigarette.  "Take me with you.  I want you to take me with you."

   "Shelby, you're thirteen years old.  We'd be fugitives.  You couldn't go
to school."

   "We'd be together, though," she whispered, drawing a circle in a little
pool of spilt whiskey.  "Don't you...  want me?"

   "I can't have you, Shelby."

   "Yes you can.  Love conquers all, remember?  We can live in a seedy
hotel.  I'll cook mac and cheese on a hot plate.  You don't even have to
bring home the bacon." Then she gazed at him again.  The crystal pistachios
of Shelby's almond-shaped eyes were unutterably limpid.  "I love you,
stupid," she said in a tiny voice.

   He didn't say anything.  It was anticlimactic somehow.  What was he
supposed to do, hop into the sack because she...  because she'd let him? 
Permission didn't suffice, and she was too small to truly desire him.  He
no longer believed that love conquered all.  Algy ordered another brandy.
She was a strange creature.  There was no sadness in her eyes when he
didn't respond to her.  The girl had offered herself without expecting to
be taken.  She expected nothing.  He forked over the money for the drinks
and watched the waitress's dull hatred.  Everything conquers love, he
thought.

   "I don't want to have sex with you," Algy said slowly, watching her turn
his glass in her delicate hand.

   "You're scared to," Shelby whispered, gazing at the amber liquid as if
she would glimpse something important there.  "You said I was scared to,
but you're scared to."

   "You're probably right." He took the glass from her fingers and drained
it.  She put on her coat, and they departed.  She didn't give him a peck on
the cheek.

   Algy borrowed money from his brother.  He hated doing that, and he hated
it even more that he was scamming, telling his brother that the two grand
was to tide him over between jobs, to get a decent apartment.  His brother
was successful.  His brother wouldn't have given it to him if he'd known
that Algy meant to take the geographic cure, moving away again.  Algy had
moved away before.  He always came back.  Leaving his brother's house in
Wilmette and walking down to the Linden Street station, Algy tried to
recall the Cavafy: once you've fouled the nest, the whole world is covered
with shit.  Something like that, and the word for shit had been an odd one.
_Faek, faek_, Algy whispered under his breath.  Shit at Odysseus's door.

   He transferred at Howard and took the El all the way down to Harrison to
buy a bus ticket, discovering that Greyhound was offering a companion
ticket for next to nothing.  He didn't get one, resolute.

   There are a lot of dismal saloons downtown.  They close early, when the
Loop is deserted.  There's a burst of people coming in after work, then a
few stragglers, drunk, then darkness.  The rush was over, and Algy sat on a
torn stool, drinking tequila and staring idly at the bartender.  She must
have been in her mid-twenties, a woman certain men would consider
beautiful, most men, a beach girl, tasteless and effervescent.  She was
devoid of beauty.  It was all bounce.  A few middle management types
drinking longnecks ogled her bouncy breasts.  She had a boyfriend.  They
flew to Cancun and Acapulco, working on their tans.  They ate and shat and
sought recreation.  Algy envisioned this girl filling the world with yet
more self-aware veal.  She was pneumatic.  O, brave new world!  Only the
reality was worse than Huxley's vision - there were no Controllers, unless
you counted what gathered at Davos.  People controlled themselves.  There
wasn't any need for repression.  Most of the kids against the system were
lemmings, just like the kids inside.  He ordered a double of mescal and got
the worm.

   He meant to leave the next morning.  For a moment he imagined taking her
with.  He wanted to more than anything in the world, but he _couldn't_.  He
didn't trust himself with her.  He didn't want to drag her down with him.
He pictured Jerry Stanton's face, reading his daughter's note: don't look
for me I'm gone.  What would she learn in high school, anyhow?  He had
hated high school.  Didn't everyone?  Everyone except the bouncy girl
behind the bar and her beaming suitors?  The guys drinking longnecks
swaggered around, reeking of machismo.  God, he hated men.  Hated them.  At
that moment he hated everyone except Shelby Stanton.

   He could get hold of her.  She'd given him her number.  She already had
a private line.  Her father probably looked forward to his daughter going
out on dates, learning the ropes of love until she couldn't love anyone
anymore except in the way he did, the objects of his love crosses between
pets and property, second-hand ideals thrown in for spice, sex some tangy
acrobatics.  His ideal for her life resembled a tampon commercial, maidens
leaping through fields of flowers into insipid marriage and a career
retirement.  Did Algy judge him harshly?  But Shelby's father didn't have a
clue!  He had no idea who his daughter was.  He had never once suspected
her of having...  a relationship?  Did Algy and Shelby have a relationship?


   And Algy's misanthropy?  Wasn't it simply misdirected self-hatred?  To
tell him not to feel sorry for himself only made him sink deeper into
self-pity.  Here he was speculating about the horrors of self-control, when
Algy was himself inert.  He finished his tequila and staggered back to the
subway, caught a northbound train and returned to the transient hotel.  He
had few possessions and didn't need to pack.  He lay on his back, the
figures on the peeling paint of the ceiling louring, glowering...  goodbye
to them.  But he couldn't shake them.

   The temperature dropped steadily in the night, and by morning the air on
Belmont was unbreathable, one of those days when everything fragile looked
like it would break if one touched it.  Algernon naufrage.  Algernon in its
own sauce.  Carrying his only possessions in a canvas bag, Algy stopped at
a liquor store to buy some booze for the voyage, then went to the café
where they'd always gone together, half hoping that she would appear.  It
was a school day, though.  Shelby would be sitting demurely in English
class.  Algy drank a double espresso, walked back to the El, schlepped his
bag to the Greyhound station - he remembered the old terminal; this one was
designed to keep the underclass out - and boarded his bus.  Thankfully, it
was almost empty.  He closed his eyes.

   Shelby slid into the seat next to his just before the bus backed out of
the station.  He smelled her before he saw her, her shamelessness.  She
didn't look at him.  Arrhythmia.  Late Mahler, villous panic.

   "I'm not Dorian," she said quietly.  "You don't have the slightest
influence over me, milord.  You drunk yet?"

   He looked at her.  Shelby was dressed in a dark rugby sweater and cords,
hiking boots, her eyes cut peridot, clear.  "You're crazy," Algy said
simply.

   "I am half sick of shadows," she whispered.

   They kissed.  It was like taking off a coat that had eaten into him, the
body beneath it getting a transfusion of her, guiltless.  Her tongue
skipped wetly across his lips, then slipped into his mouth.  He reached the
present for the first time in years, ever after falling from its happily
like dead, shed snakeskin, Ouroboros, the Greyhound groaning into gear.



   ===============================

   This story is a work of fiction.  Names, characters, places, and
incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used
fictitiously.  Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons,
living or dead, is entirely coincidental.



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