Fly on the wall, fly free

  The first two hours of reviewing the reports, and not reviewing the reports, and of thinking about getting high, and not thinking about getting high, wore on like a car arm in the middle of the night. Annoying, but how long had it been going off anyway? The text on the printer paper sheets floated in the air. Melted into everything else. All one feeling. The almost-white flickering dusty drone of ten in the m. A weekday in a life scrubbed raw of any peaks and valleys.

  His eyes found a glob on the der brick walls, where the white paint had made one desperate attempt to do something beyond itself, and stuck there. It was all like that, he thought. All of his life was one big thick syrup smeared o face of time.

  aper paste. The words drifted out of his mind, summoned by the blob, or maybe it only seemed that way after. The words had bits of his childhood stuck to it, like the flecks of white stuck to a badly peeled cough drop.

  aper paste.

  They had been on their way out the door, heading to a fried chi , when one of his mother's boyfriends stopped him with a yellow-toothed warning.

  “Dooo much of that gravy, little dude. Them Mexis put fug aper paste in it.”

  It had drawn a lot of what the man would have called sass from Cooper’s mother, but while her words faded to a vaguely vanil-sted yellow-gold glow in his memory, the boyfriend’s warning had lodged behind his tongue a jumpy tendrils down to his stomach as the car ride progressed, being a sensation like fear teamed up with nausea by the time they arrived at the fried chi (whi his memory was all white besides the red lettering ochup packets) and made even the soda taste somewhat like “aper paste” (a fvor his mind cocted from half dissolved memories of tasting Elmer’s glue as a toddler). Everything but the gravy, which he had refused to even have on his pte, no matter how much his mother pleaded and mocked and finally sulked.

  The memory, despite the power he was sure it once had over him, was now just as ft as the rest of it. The only things that stood out i-quite-white drone of his life were the dreams and the drugs, and he had the same apprehension about pursuiher. Like their pull celed out to zero, leaving him floating in an off-white void. A sister void to the dark one in his dreams.

  Someone coughed or dropped a box somewhere and the glob on the wall slipped its grasp of his focus, and the clock picked it up. Break time.

  He went through the receiving area, a t tomb with a cardboard iion, and out the back of the store. The door smmed shut and the sound echoed back the way he had e, like the building was falling apart without him. He saw, briefly, that the inside was now just a pile of rubble and cardboard and his break would st forever.

  He took a cigarette out of the pad fumbled around for the lighter. A few yards in front of him, past the t half alley, the nd dropped down sharply to a woodnd ravihat separated this retail zone from the suburbs. A pstic bag hung to a thistle and waved above the drop. Downtown looked like a cluster of toys in the distahere was a smear of clouds jutting past him at an ahat took no notice of the dire of everything else. And that was it.

  He smoked his cigarette with the t and the sky and the trees and with the towers if he noticed them. His mi falling back towards the night before and other robberies, as if his life was stood upside down. He pulled his thoughts against the gravity, back to the cigarette and the shipment of Fitbits he had seen in receiving. He saw them on the shelves, then shoved into a cart and sprinted out the door, thrown into a backseat and vanished from the universe of the store, from its ecosystem of shifts as, to that other world of cash and your-cut-my-cut, and e-sellers, little more than fences with a tax id. He ted the prices in his head. Divided, added, and rolled the final number around like it could find a cra his imagination and fall out into the real world.

  Something in the daydreams disturbed him. A sensation that this was all ing to an end. The feeling of “this ’t be all there is?”, the base fvor of a life measured in hourly wages and apartment leases, ked up to the point that the feeling became siingly physical.

  The door scraped open. Jeff leaned into it and twisted the handle nevously.

  “Phone for you. Something about your car.”

  Cooper saw the stolen things glittering in his trunk, ughing at him. He stamped the two-thirds cigarette out a inside.

  “It’s in my office,” Jeff said.

  Cooper walked down the hallway and a new sario where the phone call lead to his arrest jumped up with every step.

  Someone saw my car leaving the neighborhood.

  Someone saw me loading the stuff into it or out of it.

  They wa the car down to the station to do one of those forensic files tire tread parisons.

  My fe caught and he had my name and number on him. He’s too small time to stand up to the heat. Should have gotten someone like that guy in Dals who had aor in his house to move all the shit.

  He walked into the small humming linoleum office that smelled like hash broicked up the ass-colored desk phone. Every benign sight and smell reminded him of freedom, as if he had already been in prison for years.

  “Hello?”

  “Yes, may I speak with Mr. Davidson? Cooper Davidson?”

  They sounded nervous and he heard the drone of a call ter behind the voice. He exhaled with relief into the mouthpied it whooshed in his ears.

  “Yeah, this is him. What do you want?”

  “Good m, Mr. Davidson. I’m calling about your vehicle warranty. I’m showing—”

  Cooper smmed the phone down.

  “Everything all right?” Jeff had followed behind him. Nosy fuck.

  “It’s a telescam, man.” Cooper shook his head and walked to the door. Jeff’s face wrinkled and writhed like a paper towel crumpling itself aammered.

  “Oh, sorry Cooper, I thought… They sounded like…”

  Cooper shrugged a out to the floor.

  Oher side of the city, Sergeant Garcia smiled as he hung up the phone.

  “He’s there. Call it in.”

  What would your Hardworld-turned-jail-cell look like? ime, Cooper's past catches up with him, and the team gets a test of preparedness. episode, Loss Prevention.