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 alarm 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 morning. A weekday in a life scrubbed raw of any peaks and valleys.

His eyes found a glob on the cinder 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 on the flat face of time.

Wallpaper 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.

Wallpaper paste.

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

“Don’t eat too much of that gravy, little dude. Them Mexicans put fucking wallpaper 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 vanilla-scented yellow-gold glow in his memory, the boyfriend’s warning had lodged behind his tongue and sent jumpy tendrils down to his stomach as the car ride progressed, becoming a sensation like fear teamed up with nausea by the time they arrived at the fried chicken chain (which in his memory was all white besides the red lettering on the ketchup packets) and made even the soda taste somewhat like “wallpaper paste” (a flavor his mind concocted 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 plate, 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 flat as the rest of it. The only things that stood out in the not-quite-white drone of his life were the dreams and the drugs, and he had the same apprehension about pursuing either. Like their pull canceled 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 cement tomb with a cardboard infestation, and out the back of the store. The door slammed shut and the sound echoed back the way he had come, 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 last forever.

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He took a cigarette out of the pack and fumbled around for the lighter. A few yards in front of him, past the cement half alley, the land dropped down sharply to a woodland ravine that separated this retail zone from the suburbs. A plastic bag hung to a thistle and waved above the drop. Downtown looked like a cluster of toys in the distance. There was a smear of clouds jutting past him at an angle that took no notice of the direction of everything else. And that was it.

He smoked his cigarette with the cement and the sky and the trees and with the towers if he noticed them. His mind kept 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 and reports, to that other world of cash and your-cut-my-cut, and e-sellers, little more than fences with a tax id. He counted the prices in his head. Divided, added, and rolled the final number around like it could find a crack in his imagination and fall out into the real world.

Something in the daydreams disturbed him. A sensation that this was all coming to an end. The feeling of “this can’t be all there is?”, the base flavor of a life measured in hourly wages and apartment leases, cranked up to the point that the feeling became sickeningly 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, laughing at him. He stamped the two-thirds cigarette out and went inside.

“It’s in my office,” Jeff said.

Cooper walked down the hallway and a new scenario 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 want me to bring the car down to the station to do one of those forensic files tire tread comparisons.

My fence got 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 Dallas who had an elevator in his house to move all the shit.

He walked into the small humming linoleum office that smelled like hash browns and picked 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 center behind the voice. He exhaled with relief into the mouthpiece and it whooshed in his ears.

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

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

Cooper slammed 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 and he stammered.

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

Cooper shrugged and went out to the floor.

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

“He’s there. Call it in.”