Bad Place
There is a staircase out of the subway that fills up at 7:40 every morning, and if you stood at the top of it long enough you would stop being able to tell the days apart.
The monkeys come up first. Good suits, gold on a couple of them, eyes half shut like the whole morning is beneath them. They own the buildings on both sides of the street and most of what happens inside.
Everyone else comes up behind, and everyone else is wearing the same thing over their face. A gray rubber monkey head, the cheap kind, a little too big, with two holes cut where the eyes go. Cats wear it. The gorillas wear it, and the gorillas carry the briefcases.
Nobody made it a law. It just got to the point where showing up without one was stranger than showing up with one, and then it was too late.
Everybody wears the face.
The Loop
The train, then the desk, then the store, then the bed.
On the train you hold a strap and look at the back of somebody else's rubber head. At the desk you make whatever the monkeys sell. On the way home you buy some of it back, in a gray box with a monkey printed on the side, from a monkey who does not look up. Then you sleep in your suit because the alarm is set for 6:10 and the suit is already on.
Vacation is in the store too. Two weeks somewhere warm, twelve payments, and you spend most of the two weeks checking whether the desk is still there.
The thing about it is that it works. You get good at it. Vegas got good at it. He has not been late in four years and there was never a day he woke up and decided to keep going; he just never woke up and decided to stop.
Same day. Every day. Sold separately.
The Mask
His name is Vegas. It has been a long time since anyone at work used it.
The mask smells like the box it came in and like every breath he has taken inside it since. It slides when he walks. He has stopped pushing it back up.
If you got close enough to look through the holes you would see a cat looking back, yellow-eyed and awake, and you would probably look away, because that is what people do here when they see eyes.
Ask him if he is unhappy and he would say no and mean it. He has the desk. He has the box with the vacation in it. He has the rubber head, same as everybody, and it is one less thing to think about.
Nobody looks through the holes.
The Tug
Top of the stairs, 7:43, the line moving the way it always moves.
Something catches his trouser leg and does not let go.
He looks down. A puppy, the color of toast, red collar, has the cuff in its teeth and is leaning back on all four legs, trying to drag him sideways out of the line. It weighs nothing. He stops anyway.
He does not want to go with it. That should be clear. Every bit of him that got him this far is telling him to keep walking, and the line behind him is already closing the gap.
But the dog is looking up at him through the holes in the mask, straight in, the way nobody has looked at him in years, and he stays there one breath too long.
The Shove
A hand lands between his shoulder blades. Then a second one, higher up.
The first belongs to a gorilla. Huge, tired, masked like him, pushing because the line behind him is pushing. The second one has a gold ring on it and is not tired at all. He can hear that one smiling.
Nobody says walk. Nobody has to.
His feet start moving on their own. Four years of the same staircase will do that; the knees remember before the rest of you gets a vote.
The dog digs in and pulls harder.
Fuck It
Fuck it.
He does not say it out loud. His hand is already on the mask, and then the mask is in the air behind him, turning over once, and he is running after a dog he met eleven seconds ago.
The plaza is empty at this hour. The sun has found a gap in the smog and the whole square is gold, his jacket is open, his tie is somewhere over his shoulder, and a sound is coming out of him that he has to think about before he recognises it. He is laughing.
He catches a lamppost one-handed and swings around it with his feet off the ground, and the gray city spins past him once.
Look at his face there. Eyes wide open, mouth open, nothing behind it. He looks about six years old.
He will not look like that again for a long time.
Back at the stairs the line is still moving. Nobody has turned around.
The Alley
The dog goes into an alley and he goes after it, still laughing, and three monkeys are already there.
Not the tired ones. Not the masked ones. Suits, gold, the same half-shut eyes as the ones at the front of the line. They do not ask him where his mask is. A bare face in this part of town is all the explanation they need.
It does not take them long. They are not angry about it. One holds his collar, one swings, one uses the briefcase, and the dog barks at them from behind a bin and does not change anything.
At the far end of the alley there are three figures in hoods, and they watch. They watch for longer than you would expect.
Then one of them takes his hands out of his pockets.
Cats. Hoods up, faces you never quite get a look at. It is loud for about ten seconds and then it is not, and Vegas is sitting against the wall with his mouth full of blood and the dog pressed into his ribs, watching three cats put three monkeys on the ground like they have done it before.
A bare face is an invitation.
Not For You
One of them picks his mask up off the ground and holds it out to him by the ear, the way you hold something you do not want to touch.
They do not say you're welcome. They do not say come with us. The one holding the mask looks at his suit, at the scrape on his face, at the dog under his arm, and says: this isn't for you. Put it back on.
Then they go. None of them looks back.
He sits with that one for a while. The monkeys hurting him made sense. These three were supposed to be his.
The dog pushes further under his arm. It is the only thing in the alley that wants him there.
Put it back on.
The Door
Across from where he is sitting there is a door.
Two planks nailed over it in a cross. A dead sign above it, three letters, one tube cracked. A billboard with nothing left on it. Somebody ran this place once and then stopped, and the city let it sit.
He looks at the mask in his hands for a while.
He thinks about the train and the desk and the box with the vacation in it. About the ring on the hand that pushed him. About three hoods walking away without looking back. About how simple it would be to pull the rubber back over his head and be on the 7:40 tomorrow, and how nobody would ever know.
Something in his face closes. It is not the grin from the lamppost. That one is gone.
They call this a bad place. Fine.
I'm going to make this Bad Place worse.
He gets up. The dog gets up. He crosses the alley and puts his shoulder into the planks, and they come away easier than they should.
The mask stays on the wet ground where it fell, face up, looking at the door.
