Over Our Heads

Two Fires

Thursday evening, five o’clock, Chloe and Julian belly up to the bar of the Terminal 3 Chili’s at O’Hare. Palo Alto is four hours behind them; after the layover, it will be two more hours to Boston. Julian orders wings and a beer, Chloe a neat vodka.

They have arrived just in time for happy hour, and the place is filling steadily. The bar stools, and the plastic tables divided from the terminal concourse by a low green fence, are occupied by professional travellers — men and women who pair compact flight cases with soft leather shoes, who curate Delta accounts with miles you could ride to the moon. Some fine-tune presentations on laptops. Others read books with titles like Your Greatest Asset Is … You! The women mask heavy eyes with subtle make-up. The men tug at ties, slap backs and yell at each other.

‘I think,’ Chloe says as Julian’s food arrives, ‘I’ve figured out what my problem is.’

‘Oh yeah? After all this time?’

Between Julian’s fingers, the wings feel gnarled and oily. Their skin is a hi-vis shade of orange. He gulps his beer against their spice and tries with a flailing arm to catch the attention of the bartender, a swollen old walrus with two dozen enamel buttons affixed to his red suspenders, but the walrus just stares right through him and nods at Chloe as she indicates the suds in Julian’s glass with a purple-nailed finger.

‘Am I invisible, here?’

Chloe shrugs. She is five-foot-three in heels, but every meeting is dominated at all times by her presence. Tomorrow morning, the two of them will pitch for a social media campaign worth somewhere in the high six figures, and she will take the lead.

‘I think,’ she says, pulling a celery stem from Julian’s basket and beginning to suck it, ‘that fundamentally, I find men repulsive.’

The walrus sets a fresh beer in front of Julian and slopes away. Julian drinks thirstily between mouthfuls of deep-fried flesh.

‘I mean, I like the idea of men, or of a man. The Platonic concept of man is something I can get right behind.’

‘Right, right.’ Julian adds to the dolmen of chicken ulnas teetering on his side plate.

‘But these earthly men with whom I have to deal? These shadows on the walls of the cave? They just leave me cold, I’m afraid. I find them … somewhat lacking.’

Julian leans back in his stool and wipes from his forehead a smear of grease vaguely scented with cayenne pepper.

‘That’s a shame,’ he says. ‘But wait, what about the chef?’

‘Drug habit,’ Chloe says.

‘Coke?’

‘Meth.’

‘Huh.’

‘You sound so shocked.’

‘I’m not,’ Julian says. ‘Were you?’

‘Not really,’ Chloe smiles. When she sips her drink, she reaches first for the straw with her tongue. Her vodka, slow and viscid, oils the side of her glass. ‘But what about you? You’re still out there, right? Sometimes? Still giving it the old college try?’

‘Still am, yes. Despite past experience.’

‘You, my friend,’ Chloe aims the celery stem at Julian and sights along its length, ‘are an optimist.’ She chomps down with a snap and speaks through a full mouth. ‘That’s what I’ve always liked about — Oh God!’

Her hand shoots to cover her lips. Julian turns to see what she sees. And there, billowing from the kitchen hatch, is a cloud of purplish smoke. Beyond it Julian can make out many tongues of blue and orange flame.

‘It’s a bomb!’ someone shrills, with sad inevitability. And with that, screams are torn from anguished throats, drinks spilled and plates sent crashing as people fumble for bags, slam laptop lids, elbow each other.

‘It’s all right, it’s all right,’ the walrus shouts, and Julian is convinced in an instant of raw lung power that this man has spent time in the military.

A busboy in a white smock rushes through the swinging door and discharges a fire extinguisher. Light smoke replaces the dark and something somewhere sizzles.

‘It’s just a little grease fire,’ Sergeant Walrus reassures. ‘Everything is under control.’

Collective relief is sighed, disappointed and guilty. Julian looks towards his trembling hand and realizes that it, without his conscious agency, has settled on the smooth skin and angular bone of Chloe’s knee. He snaps it back.

‘Sorry, I —’

But he stops himself, for now he is looking into her eyes and what he sees there is something he never would have expected.

‘The next round’s on the house,’ the walrus shouts.

Collective cheers. Julian flails an arm. Chloe gestures with a finger.

Already this year, the firm has doubled revenue, and last month Forbes did a feature on Chloe as part of its ‘30 Under 30’ series. Still, she and Julian are just eighteen months removed from business school and have agreed to reinvest the majority of whatever they bank into growing the business. The hotel in Back Bay is a little pricier than either of them would have liked, but the pitch meeting is early and they don’t want a repeat of the Cleveland RTA nightmare.

‘Checking in together tonight?’ the desk clerk says. She is young and bored and attractively plain, the set of her lips poised on the cusp of gossip.

‘Yes,’ Julian says. ‘But separate rooms.’

‘Of course, sir.’

The clerk clickety-clacks her keyboard in search of their reservation, and Julian knows, as he has done at numerous other reception desks in numerous other cities, exactly what she is thinking. There is something, he supposes, about the way he and Chloe stand together, an enhanced awareness of each other’s space honed by three years of studying and working and travelling together.

The clerk, with a hollow-cheeked smile, hands over keys for adjoining rooms on the sixth floor.

‘Come on, dah-ling,’ says Chloe, her voice hoarse from travel, and leads Julian to the elevator where Glenn Miller bleats from the speakers. She hums along as she reads emails on her phone. ‘You hungry?’ she says, without looking up. ‘I’m peckish.’

‘I told you,’ Julian tells her, ‘to eat something real in Chicago.’

‘But everything there was icky-gross.’

‘You think you’ll find non-gross food anywhere at this hour? What time is it?’

‘Eleven seventeen,’ Chloe says, ‘but I’m still on West Coast time.’

The elevator doors open on a taupe hallway hung with pictures of smoky shipyards. Chloe checks her room number and sets off wheeling her case.

‘If I go to the bar,’ Julian says, ‘I’ll drink.’

‘So, drink.’

‘But I want to be clear in the morning.’

‘So, don’t drink.’

‘It’s just that easy for you, isn’t it?’

‘Well, I’ll order room service, then,’ Chloe says, dipping her key card and jiggling the handle. ‘Come drink. Or don’t drink. Or eat. Or don’t eat.’

In his room, Julian unpacks his suit and hangs it to de-crease. He lays out an undershirt and underwear and socks. Through the wall, he listens to Chloe murmuring, most likely to her mother in Portland, who hasn’t been well, and who Chloe has called every night without fail since Julian has known her. He changes into sweatpants and his red Stanford sweatshirt and lies on the bed to watch CNN. The news cycle is dominated by a hurricane that has hit the Florida Keys. Julian watches footage of palm trees bending, rowboats in the street.

When he hears another voice in Chloe’s room, he kills the TV and gets up to knock on the adjoining door.

‘Go Cardinal!’ Chloe laughs, pointing to his sweatshirt.

The room-service guy is old and thin and smiling. He bows when Julian tips him and walks backwards from the room. On Chloe’s bed lies a tray containing a chopped salad, a brioche roll and two bottles of Diet Coke.

‘Will we rehearse this one last time?’ she says.

‘Why?’ They have gone over the pitch together so many times in the past few days that anyone, Julian thinks, would know it backwards by now. ‘Something isn’t bothering you, is it?’ he says. ‘The unflappable, the indefatigable …’ But he trails off because he sees that Chloe’s lips are taut.

‘It’s my mom,’ she says. ‘Her insurance is just, like … Something about a fucking pre-existing condition … I just — I really need this to go well right now.’

She is within arm’s reach; he could hug her, he thinks, or lay a hand between her shoulder blades.

‘Well, then,’ he says. ‘Let’s fire it up.’

Chloe nods once, twice, then touches each cheek lightly with her fingertips. She tugs her T-shirt over her hips and opens her laptop on the desk.

‘Good morning,’ she says, and at once the stiffness of worry leaves her body; her back is straight, her arms are loose, her chin is high.

She hits her PowerPoint marks cleanly each time, cycling through slides without ever glancing at the screen; spouts fluently the figures that Julian has projected; speaks urgently, persuasively; asks rhetorical questions. Julian knows that even if he weren’t the only other person in the room, she still could make him feel as though he were.

‘And that’s the game,’ he tells her, exactly twenty-three minutes later. He holds a hand high in the air for her to five it. Chloe stretches to throw a jab into his open palm and shadow-boxes on the spot.

Julian twists the cap from a Diet Coke and hands it to her. Chloe makes a fist around the bottle, and for a moment they both watch the cables of her white arm bulge and release, bulge and release.

‘Hey, Chlo?’ he says.

‘Yeah?’

‘Are you going to eat your roll?’

The sky is low over Dartmouth Street. A salt wind rolls in off the Charles. Chloe’s hair sails behind her, and her jacket, caught on her shoulder-bag strap, rides up to reveal the brass-toothed zipper of her skirt. On Boylston Street, she and Julian join the progress of commuters rising from the Copley T stop and hurrying headlong through the wind towards their offices.

Outside the public library, a raw-boned man in military fatigues dances a one-legged jig and shakes a can. The sky is clear but cold and the last of the winter’s snow lingers on the library steps in diminished heaps. Chloe and Julian enter the Prudential Center, a great biodome of chain-store shopping and food-court dining. At the Tower lobby, they give their names to a desk clerk who furnishes them with visitors’ passes and leads them to the elevators.

‘Ready?’ Julian says as the floors tick up.

‘As I’ll ever be,’ Chloe says.

‘Here,’ he reaches for her jacket, ‘you’re snagged.’

‘I’ve got it,’ she says and steps away from his hand.

The offices of Bobst and Law are spread across three floors, the conference room located at a corner of the seventeenth. Chloe connects her laptop to a projector at the head of the table while Julian takes a seat and pours himself a glass of water.

The CMO, Tom Bobst, convenes the meeting. The nephew of the founder, he looks to Julian as though he skis yearly, golfs weekly, and climbs mountains for fun. He is trim and tall, with a big toothy face. His blue jacket is nipped at the waist and short in the arm to show monogrammed cuffs. His watch, undoubtedly, cost more than Julian’s last two cars. Flanking him are a short bald man from Compliance, with bulging eyes and a collar at least half an inch too tight, and a woman from Fiscal whose glasses have thick frames and whose eyes Julian can’t see because they are locked on her phone.

‘Good morning,’ Chloe says.

The conference room has two glass walls that give on to an open bullpen crammed with cubicle-jockeys, and two floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Boston skyline. As Chloe speaks, Julian watches for the moments when the Bobst people take notes and scribbles answers on a legal pad for the questions they will ask. Beyond Chloe he can see the clay roof of Trinity Church in Copley Square, the collegey-graveyardy stillness of the Common and the golden dome of the Statehouse winking from the hillside. And for a moment, he pictures himself living here, in a tight Beacon Hill brownstone or a big old Cambridge Queen Anne; sees himself riding the T each morning to a salaried job that demands fewer than eighty hours per week, spending weekends in some mall or other. He has never before wanted regularity; the ‘intense, think-tank atmosphere’ of the Palo Alto office is not only, as Forbes wrote, a key to Chloe and Julian’s way of business, it also has been the key to his way of life. But this other life enjoyed by the people assembled here this morning — he sees now how it could offer a different kind of reward.

‘Now,’ Chloe says when she has finished, ‘I’ll turn you over to my colleague.’

Four sets of eyes ratchet in Julian’s direction. His hand shakes slightly as he distributes supporting materials in cobalt folders embossed with his and Chloe’s company logo, but when he turns to actionable time frames and real-world deliverables, his voice is steady. He fields questions that fall within his purview and hands off to Chloe those that fall within hers. He cracks wise with the compliance guy about the Celtics and invites them all to a Warriors game next time they find themselves in the Bay Area.

‘Well,’ Bobst smiles, ‘you’ve certainly given us a lot to think about.’

‘It’s been our pleasure,’ Julian says.

As he is heading out the door, he realizes that Chloe isn’t following. She sits on the edge of the conference table, legs crossed at the knee and a foot wagging. Bobst leans above her with a palm stretched flat by her thigh. She presses his wrist and nods her head and opens her throat to laugh.

‘Chlo?’ Julian says.

The smile on Bobst’s face freezes.

‘She’ll catch you up,’ he says.

‘I’ll wait for you in the lobby.’

‘I might —’ Chloe says. ‘I’ll see you at the hotel, okay?’

‘I’ll walk you out,’ the compliance guy says, his hand brisk at Julian’s elbow. ‘And what about baseball? Can you get good seats for the Giants when the Sox are in town?’

Julian tells him, ‘The best.’

He had hoped for the opportunity to wander around the city a bit between meeting and flight, maybe eat a celebratory steak with Chloe in one of the places on Stuart Street, but now, back at the hotel, Julian finds his energy drained, his appetite depleted. He calls down to reception to arrange for late check-out, then changes into his travelling clothes — good jeans, a collared shirt — and packs his suit and shoes. Out the window he can see the Prudential Tower’s severity of glass and angle. What the hell could Chloe still be talking about in there?

As someone who reads signs and makes predictions for a living, Julian hates it when he misses things — has he missed something?

He goes to the bathroom, fills the sink and dunks his face. Water runs in ribbons down his nose and cheeks. He towels off, breathing slowly. He brushes his teeth against the bitter taste that has gathered on his tongue, then slumps on to the bed and grinds his teeth and presses a thumb into his eye. He turns on the TV to a hotel station where a man in full colonial dress stands in the lobby of a seafood restaurant. The camera zooms in on a bowl of bubbling chowder. A cartoon lobster with rubber bands around its claws scuttles happily across the screen and winks.

After a while, through the wall, Julian hears the click of Chloe’s door.

Then the second fire starts. The alarm begins as a low, two-tone hum out in the hallway, after which Julian hears a series of heavy clunks that he understands to be the fire doors falling shut.

‘Christ,’ he mutters, thinking drill or false alarm, but pockets his phone and his wallet just in case. He tries to open the adjoining door but it won’t budge.

‘Hey, Chlo?’

There is no answer. He goes out into the hallway where the alarm is louder — its low notes hoarse, its high notes shrilling — and knocks on Chloe’s door.

‘Hey, Chlo? Come on, Chlo, I think this might be serious.’

A family from the far end of the hallway hurries towards him. The children, a little girl and a little boy, are in pyjamas; hers — weirdly, Julian thinks — have pictures of football players on them, while his have pictures of ponies. And now all of the phones in all of the rooms are ringing. And now all of the lights fail and it is dark. The emergency lights flick on and everything is blue and nocturnal and submarine. The little girl screams and the little boy whimpers.

‘It’s okay,’ the father says.

‘We’re just going on a little adventure,’ the mother says.

Chloe’s door opens. ‘Jesus Christ,’ she says, the skin of her face blue and in her eyes the same thing Julian saw at the airport.

She starts towards the elevators but Julian reaches for her hand and leads her towards the stairs instead. In the stairwell it is very hot and very loud. The air is dense with smoke. Women in suits and men in bathrobes join them at each landing. Julian’s heels are stepped on. Someone breathes in his ear. They make it to the lobby where hotel employees wave their arms and shout directions. Firefighters in heavy coats hustle through the lobby doors. And now everyone is running, pushing over potted ferns and leatherette chairs and ottomans and each other. Julian’s shoulders and knees are jostled and his grip on Chloe’s hand strains and, finally, breaks.

He turns to look for her but, as he does, the woman in front of him trips and falls and he slams into her hip and vaults over her shoulder. He lands with an elbow jammed under his ribs; someone’s leg falls across his shoulder blades and flattens his lungs. He drags himself to his feet and looks around for Chloe but he can’t see her. He tries to push back the way they’ve come but there are too many people and they are moving too quickly. Their eyes are too wide. They push and they keep pushing.

‘No returns,’ a firefighter shouts and points to the door. ‘You need to get out. Sir, you and everyone need to get out right now.’

The sidewalk is crammed but firefighters are shepherding people behind a tape perimeter the police are scrambling to roll out at a block’s distance in both directions. Julian backs towards it, craning his neck up to see gouts of smoke eddying from the hotel’s top three floors. There is something sinister, he thinks, about a fire in the daytime; the clarity of dark smoke against blue sky is awful. He can see shards of curtains waving, individual lampshades aflame and, a floor below them, identical curtains and lampshades waiting.

Behind the barrier, he takes out his phone to call Chloe but the network is down or the tower overwhelmed. Police sirens scream and fire engines honk. Overhead, already, a news chopper is whirling, and on the corner, two crews of EMTs have unloaded gurneys from the backs of ambulances parked at hasty angles. The EMTs stack the gurneys with oxygen canisters and heavy medical bags and fistfuls of supplies wrapped in pale blue plastic. One of the bags bursts and rains pipettes to the ground. A roll of gauze falls free and bounces and unspools. Sitting on a kerb, Julian sees now, is Chloe.

As he runs to her, he notices the bright stream of blood dribbling at her temple. She holds a hand to her head and is missing her left shoe. Julian is standing next to her before she recognizes him. She looks up at him and frowns.

‘Are you okay?’ he says. ‘Boy. Two fires in two days.’

‘Yes,’ she says, but her face is uncomprehending.

‘That has to mean something?’

‘Are you hungry?’ Chloe says.

Julian kneels beside her and folds his arms around her shoulders. He lays his cheek against hers; and he holds on, even as she tries to pull away, tight.