Straight up, no spiritualist

  His steps beat dull sounds out of the carpet as he ran down another hallway. This one was all grey and steel, but it felt just like the others before it. The bent-off hallway at the edge of an old motel, broken lights and hanging numbers. A long vacuum streaked strip at the ter of a multistory hotel, sterile and breathless. The oh a mirror ceiling and maroon carpet, amber light sparking off brass fixtures. And others. His memory had lost hold of whatever had been before them, and his life was now enclosed by their walls. He took doors at random, trying to break out, but they didn’t lead to the kinds of rooms they should have.

  They lead to suburban homes flush with midday sun. They threw him into a superstore frozen food se, where he scampered across liowards the back stos. They opened onto alleys behind strip malls, and warehouse rows between looming pallet racks. Empty, watg pces, that always ended in another door, another hallway.

  And there were always his pursuers.

  He tried not to think of them. If he did, and remembered or realized who they were, their solidity in his mind would create their solidity behind him. Now, they were only unnamed unformed things which could never get as close as the definite objects and sery he ran past. He hoped.

  Then there was the voice.

  “Hurry the fuck up and use one! I ’t make forever! They’re on you!”

  He knew what that meant. He clutched the . He told himself the same thing he had told himself in every hallway in his entire life.

  The door will wake me up.

  But this time, he said it not in panic, but in relief. Like ‘oh, that’s right.’

  And it did.

  The arm screamed in scratchy chimes. A default tone, broken into something inal by the shattered state of the phone. He had been having the same dream for weeks. Sometimes it was just one hallway that went on forever. Sometimes he would get stu one of the spaces, and the world would roll up on itself, trapping him in a single yer of darkness.

  But he khe dreams were just copycats. His mind was afraid of that other dream, the first one, and was recreating it in pieces every ht, maybe as some kind of g meism. The ohing it could never get right was the voiow, it was usually just his own voice. He couldn’t remember what it had sounded like the first time, or what it had told him.

  The dream fell out of his mind during the first seds of waking and was gone by the time he had tapped off the arm. Hunger, and that vague irritation, like being squeezed by your own thoughts in opposing dires, moved in and kicked out the dreams and anything eveely dreamlike. He got ready for work.

  His apartment was furnished in pstid gss. Bottles and tainers. There was a bare spot on the carpet where the Pystation had been before he sold it. Looking at it reminded him of the break-ins he had dohe past week. Minor, stupid shit. He had taken just enough to put some weight in his bag. It was all still in his trunk. He had dreamed, or maybe just imagined oime near sleep, that someone had broken into his car and taken all of it. It hadn’t bothered him. O was his, he didn’t care about it. Having something stolen from you makes it yours, even more than owning it does. When it had been in his trunk, it had beloo the people he had taken it from. When it was taken from him, it was his, and he couldn’t value anything he had, not even in dreams.

  But the stuff was still in his trunk, for now. So it wasn’t his yet. But the idea that it could be his so easily took some of the value out of it. Cheapehe things.

  He shut the gun in the ter sole and drove out of the lot. Dying scattered fragments of st night’s rain clouds, purple fingers with silver bottoms, fked off the sun, and the sky vibrated like something wonderful was going to break out of it at any moment. Maybe to tell him his life had been a joke that was ing to an end. But all the buildings and lots and cars were still grey in the dimness, and the sky sealed up as he drove.

  Work was a dist department store o a gym in a long strip of storefronts. Pan Asiaaurant. Nail salon. Cell phoore. Another smaller strip right-ahe lot, and shedding tree tops and a bde of horized the gap. The lot was on aed piece of nd, and Cooper wondered if a thousand years ago, murderous nomads had camped here, eyes and arrows fag outward. He had often imagined, in the 2pm boredom of the workday, the strips transformed into a post-apocalyptic fort of salvaged rifles and shackled sex sves, and himself in and. It was something to do, at least.

  He parked in the ter of the crete dip and his boots were good and muddy by the time he got to the door. They were still opening inside and he passed Drew and Micah stog shelves. He waved at them with a bag of breakfast burritos.

  “You te as fud ing in here with donuts?” Micah yelled. Drew tried to gre, but could only manage enough testosterone for a frown borrowed from a worn out divorced dad watg his kid ignore him.

  “Whataburger don’t sell donuts, girl, you know that.” Cooper kept walking and shook the greasy bottom of the bag at her.

  “What do you mean ‘I know that’?” Micah was way on the heavy side, but her smile said she knew some guys liked it. Cooper didn’t, but he smiled like he did.

  “You the Whataburger expert, girl!”

  “What the fuck does that—”

  He turned down the aisle before she was done and her voice faded to mumbles that Drew answered with some pathetic attempt to endear himself to her. Ched at the empty rows, and the sound bounced off the far wall and came back broken. It reminded him of the dreams and his hair stood on end. He made it to his desk in the ba at just short of a jog.

  He clocked in at the buzzing twenty-year-old desktop. Eventually. The cursed like a crippled dog straining against a leash ahought about putting his heel through the CRT s for the huh time. While he was scrolling through emails and closing out of antivirus alerts, his manager Jefferey stood droning in the doorway, his voice about as attention grabbing as the overhead lights or the film of dust on the filing et. But Cot the gist of it.

  Finish the returns as from Wednesday aerday before anything else. A couple O.K.s and a weak “my bad” and then Jeff was fug off down the hall.

  Cave it a sed, then slipped a folded stiote with SKU numbers out of his wallet, and got to work.

  The game was simple. Steal shit, get paid, stuff the evidence where it ’t be found. There were a few ways to go about it, but he had his down fy.

  Hire a junkie or two. Let em do their thing, for a while. Get all your ducks in a roerwork wise. Warnings. Write-ups for tardies, no call no shows, sleeping in a stall for half an hour. Things that show the new guy is one of those people. A puzzle where the only missing piece is theft shaped. Even a child could put it together. And the best part is, they put the st pie themselves. All that’s left after a few months is to roll all your theft into their theft and have it stamped by LP and the higher ups. Damn, what a shame. But, just the way it is now. No one wants to work, and the ohat do, well, good eye anyway, Cooper.

  It was a good deal all around. The jus a few months of paid role pying, eveo keep a lot of the shit if they’re smart, and the cops don’t eve called most of the time. Maybe unemploymes signed off on actally too. Nothing to sniff at. So good, if they were brought in on it, they might’ve even agreed to it. “Oh hell yeah, lets do it!” Only loser is some corporation. Maybe the store cuts overtime for the tryhards. Tough shit. It was so easy, Cooper had started having visions of other him’s running the same game in every dist outlet in the try.

  And that’s not even ting all the shit he rolled into “shrinkage” or their almost weekly snatd runs. Shit, half the boosters running out the doors probably used the same reseller he did.

  It was going pretty good.

  A noise down the hall turned his spit to battery acid, till he realized what it was.

  God damned Drew smming the fug bathroom door like a little bitch.

  But, it hadn’t sounded like that at first. It had sounded like the door to something, some indescribably empty and endless pce, shutting forever, trapping him inside of it.

  Whatever the fuck that means.

  It had been like that the past few weeks. The whole world had felt sloped downward, like some big bad god was sitting on the end of the table, trying to send him rolling off towards a dark pocket without a. Maybe it was being . He had heard you could only do it for so long, despite what the NA guys told everyone. Had to do it in stretches, like fasting. A little bit longer each time. The weed and coke just weren’t really doing it anymore, and every time some wrinkle faced booster wandered in to cash out a gift card, he felt meth at his shoulder.

  Or was it something more?

  What separates the hunter from they hunted, beyond circumstanext time, the team es together. Episode: Push.