The Games We Play at the Intersection of Monday and Sheridan

            The alarm clock wakes me, like it does, like I ask it to, and I’m pissed anyway. Always turn it up and see how much volume you can take, they say. See how loud that clock can go. It’s Chicago, end-of-October dark at 7am, and the floors keep getting colder. These old buildings, their fireplaces all sealed up after one of those citywide fires. No one’s ever stayed warm in this house in winter. I want a rug path to the dresser. I had one. I also have a cat. The two didn’t mix and I can’t bring myself to shop for something better.

            Fast forward forty minutes. Tile kitchen floors remind me of my laziness, and the shower ended a while back. Feet dry, almost ready for work, I finally put on socks, move some empty Amazon boxes out of the middle of the room, and slip some potato-starch toast in a zip-lock for later. I hate diets. I hate I left my Matrix thermos at work again and have to drink work coffee, not that I have time to make a pot anyway. Sun’s comin’ up clear and cold-skyed, and fuck work. And fuck my landlord too, standing outside the back door like a jerk, making me have to feign polite before coffee earns the too-much I’ll have to pay for it.

            “Mornin’, Clarence,” I say.

            “Hey Amy,” he says and points, “a dead guy.”

            Across our alley and alongside a parking lot, from a massive autumn willow, some guy’s hanging by his neck surrounded by gold-brown leaves. It’s a little far off, so I can’t make out his face.

            I must have made a sound because Clarence says, “Yeah.”

            At first, I think it must be a Halloween thing, dead bodies hanging all over. But this one’s different, I dunno, heavy, pulling the branch low, a wet spot across the front of his pants. Below, three cops stare at the guy, like they’re trying to figure out which of them’s gonna climb up there. Sour autumn leaves, pumpkins, my brain decides dead people smell like that and I try to breathe without smelling. I open my mouth to breathe in, but tasting his air is worse.

            “Crazy,” I say and kinda mean it. I mean, I guess I’m sad, guess I’m jealous. Mondays.

            “Yeah,” he says again. I realize he hasn’t looked at me, just staring at that body. If he was my little brother I’d scare him, grab his neck and yell.

            “See ya,” I say.

            “Sure. See ya,” says Clarence.

            My car’s not in its spot. I pat my pocket, but I know the keys are there. I walk the three apartment-lined blocks to the bus stop. Iced-Lake-Michigan wind tears through the tunnel of buildings and pushes tears from my eyes. The bus stop bakery’s open anyway, and I care less than usual this morning about the smell of cinnamon rolls I can’t afford and, even if I could, can’t eat—gluten and all. I spend an hour’s pay on a medium black coffee to go. It’s a short wait for the bus. I decide again it’s the last time I leave my car at work to watch a ball game, to pretend to be social. Don’t care who’s buying. Don’t care if it’s the World Series. The woman who sits next to me in the blue plastic bus seat, with the fabric covers that make your ass itch even through jeans, has ear buds in. I’m not sure why she bothers with the privacy. I can hear it fine even over the shifting bus. TLC, Waterfalls. She catches me looking and I look away, stare through the window and feel stupid. It’s automatic, lonely. The park we pass still has snow piles in the shadows of trees.

            I get to work early and finish my coffee beside the building in what used to be the smoking section before the new rules, before they moved it out and across the parking lot, far enough away we could pretend no one here smokes. When I walk in it hits me how pointless some rules are. They constructed this place in the ‘70s with built-in ashtrays. Been over ten years and the place still smells like stale Winstons. The perforated ceiling tiles hold two generations of nicotine tar in their DNA. I wait near the elevator and carefully hum through Waterfalls. After I’m sure I remembered it right I step inside and push every button for the guaranteed slow ride. Someone I don’t know gets on at floor two and sees the lit buttons and judges me.

            I walk in late and no one notices. We’re all still waking up. I grab my abandoned thermos off my desk.

            “Weird mornin’,” I say to coworker Carol who rolls her eyes.

            “Seriously. I am so hung-over,” she says.

            I walk to the coffee pot, “The Bunn” we call it, even though it says Krups. The Bunn choked on the grounds two pots back, hissed a bunch and died.

            “Weird mornin’,” I say to Greg-Receiving, and top off my thermos, still nearly full with yesterday’s crap work-coffee.

            “Yeah. Can’t believe we lost.” He stirs in the powdered shit. There’s half-n-half in the fridge two feet to his right and he’s told me he prefers it.

            I want them to ask me why it’s weird, to me I mean. It occurs to me, maybe I say weird more than I think, and most times it’s not so weird. Maybe I tell too many weird stories about my cats.

            I do something forgettable in between posting on Facebook about the guy in my alley and noon or so. Autopilot. At lunch, I head down to sit under the lunch-tree, but sitting there feels wrong, so I decide to go to the break room. Buzzing lights, three conference-style white plastic tables, and a few bites of toast go down dry, boring, stick at the back of my throat. My boss comes in, gives me the head nod the cool kids give each other. We’re friends, it says. We’re not really. Someone died in my alley. This day should matter more.

            “Hey Greg?” My boss’s name is also Greg. Boss-Greg, Greg-Receiving. I’ve stepped into his office on a Monday after lunch. We all feel it. His big game for the day: sign and send time sheets. They’re laid out across his desk like a battle plan.

            “What’s up?” the head nod, again.

            “Can I cut out early today?” I say.

            He looks at me for the first time. Honestly, looks at me, a caring lift in his eyebrows. He walks to the door of the office. He’s going to close it, he’s going to take me in his arms and hug me awkward and tell me it’s alright to feel this way. And then he’s going to ask me.

            He looks around the corner into the five-foot-high-cubicle crowded room, gray and fluorescent lit. He takes in the spirit of it, turns back, leaves the door open.

            “Long night?” he asks.

            I look confused, I guess. Not the question I had prepared for. I flip through my mental note cards.

            “Know what, it’s none of my business,” he says. “Yeah, Amy, we’re good here today. Wish I could leave with you. Sure looks nice out. I’m not all business 24/7, you know? We should hang sometime.”

            I just don’t know what to say.

            “Anyway.” He yawns. “Enjoy the afternoon. And relax, we’ll win tonight for sure.”

            “Thanks.” I say. I try to feel nothing. I picture my blood exchanged for Novocain.

            “Can you shut the door on your way?” He doesn’t look away from the pile as he says it.

            I see the nap he’s going to take in the fingers he barely lifts to point towards the door.

            I round office bases like a numb ghost, desk, elevator, parking lot. But in the safe space of my car I’m blood again. I’m solid. I’m yelling, “Why doesn’t anyone give a shit?!” And Greg-Receiving knocks on my window, scares me enough to do a quick bladder check. I let the window down.

            “You forgot this.” The thermos in my face says, I know kung-fu. He’s shaken.

            “Oh. Thanks,” I say.

            He takes a step back, makes an unnatural half turn, stops, you can see his brain grinding, turns back, forehead raised to wrinkles, “You okay?”

            Actually… I nod anyway. It seems to work. Composure on his face and conscience, he walks back and is lost among cars. Greg-Receiving: the hero who asked.

            I kill time driving the beach strip of Lakeshore Drive with the windows up and the heat on just to filter the Autumn smell. I flip through radio stations and don’t care what I play as long as it’s loud. I follow the deserted stretches of sand, the golden domes of trees that line them, north first then back, and again until the sun dips and afternoon traffic starts to get bad. I look for distraction in every stoplight face.

            At home, I walk through the front door, gently lift the cat off the keyboard and google. Google used to be a number, now it’s a verb. I browse crime. The cat purrs my ankles. There’s about twenty local news blogs repeating the same source story. A woman in her 30s hung herself on Sheridan. The apartment super says, “She was just doing her laundry Friday night. Weird. She never caused any trouble.” I promise myself to never use that word again.

            She had nothing to do on a Friday night. The two comments on the news story say, “Worst piñata ever,” to which Anonymous replies, “Your (sic) ignorant.”

            I was there. Friday night. I’m always there on Friday night, laundry night, when the machines are open. She had looked away from me when I looked at her and she stared into her clothes tumbling in the dryer, whites and grays. I could have said anything. Instead, I returned to my book about another vampire love triangle.

            It bothers me I got her gender wrong, that I couldn’t tell. There was nothing masculine about her. I pull up Facebook to make it right, and people are commenting on the World Series.

            I curse, spin the chair. The cat hisses at me and trots off to an empty box. The remote finds my hand, and the TV beeps on. Bottom of the 2nd. Cubs v. Indians, game four. I’m not too late.

            Some rules don’t change. We know what comes first. This is Chicago, and this is baseball. We know what it takes to live here. When we aren’t on the field, we root for the team who lost to us last, or beat us least, or lives farthest away, or bought the fewest of our players.

            Top of the 3rd and these umps are morons. “Really?” I yell. There’s the occasional gray maybe, but no way was that a strike. And it gets worse. My guy slides in and stands on the bag. A perfect steal. The asshole by 2nd doesn’t see what we all see and calls him “out.” They’re killing us.

            I yell, “What the fuck! Are you blind? She was right there!”

            Of course, I meant he. I increase the volume. I move in closer, fill the room with innings and fuck it all.

            Baseball. Volume. Chicago, these are the games we play. Yesterday five people were killed in you, not even a record. Drowned by your immensity of numbers, statistically, no one died at all. We yell to make it matter. I turn it up more, and maybe my mascara’s running, and maybe some things you can’t change, maybe dead is dead before it ever gets that far, but it’s the top of the 9th, and we’re way down, and the bases are loaded, and I have to believe there’s redemption in broken rules.

            The pitcher uncoils through air, and the batter swings for the trees.

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