Just when Andrew Cavaletto thought he had finally caught a break, Mel Billingsley collapsed to his knees and died, the victim of sudden cardiac arrest brought about by a set of very clogged arteries.
Mel’s death, tragic as it was, might not have had any bearing on Andrew Cavaletto’s improving fortunes-- the two had only met a half-hour prior -- except that, just before his ailing heart finally called it quits, Mel had vigorously shaken Andrew’s hand and, with a wide grin, declared:
“Andrew, I think you’ve got the job!”
No one knows what Mel thought his last words would be, but it’s highly unlikely that it was these.
It was a swift and painless death; it may have hurt Andrew worse than Me. Even after he realized what had happened, with Mel lifeless on the carpet of his office, Andrew retained an ironclad grip on the dead man’s hand. It was a little morbid and, yes, he felt a little foolish with his long lanky frame sidled up next to Mel’s lifeless body. Starting to sweat, he had to use his other, unengaged hand to keep his slick red hair from falling into his face. This was, after all, a job interview and he wanted to look professional.
Mel’s secretary’s teary recriminations weren’t enough to get Andrew to let up: not when he had finally done enough to get a job again. He wasn’t just about to surrender; after all, he wasn’t the one who died. He was still very much alive and had just received what virtually amounted to a guaranteed job offer!
By a dead man.
It took two paramedics and some vigorous cajoling to get him to finally give up Mel’s
hand and climb to his feet.
“He said I had the job,” Andrew muttered to the paramedics. It was the same thing he had said to Mel’s secretary when she first burst through the door. He was willing to keep on saying it, too, right until they took down his information for direct deposit and told him how to login to his corporate email.
“I’m sure he did, sir, but we’re going to need you to give us some space here,” one of the paramedics said. History hasn’t recorded anything more about this paramedic, not even his name, but, boy, what a saint! A lesser person would have been well within their rights to skip the gentle words to get on with a more forceful type of persuasion, but here this guy was treating Andrew with kindness and patience, as if he was the one who had just had his heart explode, and not Mel. A real saint -- though he did eventually have to use the jaws of life on poor Andrew.
On the train ride home, his head dolefully resting in the crook of the elbow he had perched on the grimy window sill, Andrew was sure that this was what rock bottom looked like. And, if it weren’t, if things were about to get worse, well…
Best not to think about that.
It was another thirteen stops until he got home. That was an awful long time to think about what had gone wrong, and not just with the interview either. In fact, if you didn’t count the untimely death at the end, the interview had gone splendidly well. Sure, he maybe could have done a little bit better with the small talk and maybe it was foolish to wear that brown tie, but Mel had liked him! There were insinuations of, not just a regular salary, but a corner office and health benefits!
The only thing that had gone wrong was that Mel had stubbornly refused his doctor’s advice to exercise a little more and to skip one or two donuts a week. Surely, Andrew couldn’t blame himself for Mel’s penchant for crullers.
Not when Andrew had so many other things weighing on him.
Eleven stops left to go. It was just past one in the afternoon. Come the evening commute, the train would be packed with office workers fleeing from the city and their desks alike, back to the suburbs and their homes. Andrew used to be among that shiftless, restless crowd. Only eight months had passed, though it might as well have been an eternity. He used to rue Penn Station and each evening’s mad dash for a seat. More often than not, he wound up not with a seat but with a few spare inches to stand-in.
What he wouldn’t give now to be one of those unhappy rubes, permanently frowning and prematurely scoliotic, shuttling back and forth between the Manhattan and Short Hills, Madison, Denville, Fanwood. What he wouldn't give to have a reason to suffer that mindless hustle.
Instead, there he was, deflated and defeated, alone but for a small smattering of tourists and the eldely, the only people who ever took those afternoon trains back from the city during the middle of the week.
Summit. Eight stops left.
Without a doubt, things had started going downhill the day he lost his job. Had he been paying better attention, he might have noticed that things had actually started going astray long before that particular, terrible day. Then again, had he been paying better attention, he would have been better at his job, and had he been better at his job, he might have been able to do something to avert disaster.
Funny how things work like that.
He had worked in the Financial District, not far from the cacophony of Wall Street. His company’s office building was amongst the city’s newest, brightest and biggest, meant to project the daring spirit of Pyramid Building & Loan. Since it did not have the same cachet as some of its tonier, engrained competitors -- the banks built by robber barons who made their fortune selling whale oil tinned with child labor-- it was incumbent upon Pyramid Building & Loan to always be the loudest, always be the brashest. And, since we’re talking about New York, this required being very loud and very brash.
The office had kegs in lieu of water coolers. The walls were adorned with counter-culture murals done by trust-fund kids who never made it past the first semester of art school. There were no board meetings, no closed doors, and no bathroom stalls, part of a steadfast and very uncomfortable stance against the status quo.
Pyramid’s CEO was no less iconoclastic. Vitali Dynko was unparalleled in looks, personality, and ambition. Whereas other men might be made of skin and bones, Vitali was built with leather and stone. His arms were crisscrossed by tattoos of the symbols of the Chinese zodiac. His head was bald but he donned a thick set of prematurely gray mutton chops. He peppered every conversation with bits of Russian, Dutch, and Klingon. He had no formal education, but spoke fondly of the time he spent in the service of a Corsican cheesemonger.
And yet, Pyramid succeeded not despite its leader’s foibles but because of them. Wall Street likes nothing more than a weirdo with a big mouth and bold promises. Vitali was that weirdo.
From his perch in the accounting department, Andrew had a front-row seat to the company’s meteoric rise, from hardscrabble start-up running on little more than adrenaline, couch money, and false hope to one of the country’s biggest mortgage lenders. Soon, they would overtake those fuddy-duddy, backward old banks for deposits, too. Some astronomical percentage of every house was tied up in a Pyramid product in one way or another: either in the money to buy it, build it, make it better or knock it down. Andrew was no genius, but he could make no sense of it. Heck, no one could, not even then geniuses. Each quarter, the company grew and grew, smashing expectations and records along the way. With each rise in Pyramid’s fortunes, the company’s largesse grew in turn.
Instead of a chocolate fountain at their holiday party, they had a chocolate waterfall. Every meeting room had its own set of Swedish-trained masseurs.
Yet, they never got around to installing doors for the bathroom stalls.
Of course, given that he was in accounting, given that it was, in part, his job to keep an eye on the books, Andrew should have known something was up with those books. He wasn’t a Vice President or anything -- in fact, Pyramid had no such titles, viewing them as antiquated relics of the post-capitalist oligarchy. Still, he oversaw a team of competent men and women all of whom had access to the sorts of numbers that should have looked strange to people trained in the art of finding strange things in numbers. Truth be told, there were nights when he couldn’t sleep, wondering about the origin of certain line items and the strange disappearances of others. And he had, on occasion, not only looked the other way, but actually closed his eyes and pretended not to see damning evidence of what most assuredly was fraud.
Oh, but the wine from the vending machines was of such a good vintage!
And they sprayed fantastic parfum throughout the building!
And he was paid a not-so paltry wage, though most of his compensation came in the form of shares in the still private company that would only have any value after a lengthy vesting period, assuming the company eventually went public.
Plus there were the masseurs!
Andrew might have been content to continue like that forever. Back then, he lived in Millburn, meaning it was just six stops until he got to the city -- plus an almost pleasant trip on the A Train to the office. Plus, he was building a house in Maplewood -- financed of course with a loan through Pyramid -- that would shave an additional few minutes off of his travel time.
For the time being, he had a comfortable condo, a lovely girlfriend, and a job that only required him to lack all his scruples. It was the American dream.
Like all dreams, though, his came to an end. And like the kind of cramp you get in the bottom of your foot first thing in the morning, the end of this dream hurt.
It began with a group of very angry pensioners in Ontario wondering where all the money they had been plowing into Pyramid had gone. And then there were the wiretaps that made it seem like Vitali had been using funds from new investors to pay the big returns he had promised older ones. And then there was the paper trail showing that a great deal of Pyramid’s cash had, in the course of changing hands all over the world, had gone missing somewhere around the Cayman Islands.
For his part, just before the authorities arrived at the Pyramid Building & Loan offices to kindly ask for an explanation for all these abnormalities, Vitali gave an impassioned, prerecorded plea from what looked like a very spacious yacht, explaining that this had all been a misunderstanding, that things would be clarified, and that, under no circumstances, should anyone stop investing in Pyramid Building & Loan.
Later that morning, Vitali made a second video: he was forfeiting his passport and taking up citizenship in a small breakaway dacha recognized only by two otherwise unrecognized states, one of which is famous for its oil refineries; the other for its patricide. Suffice to say, for all the money Pyramid had spent on their office and its perks, Vitali had prudently made sure to squirrel away enough in his personal accounts to live off of very comfortably, so long as he could survive on polka and borscht.
In lieu of a severance package, Andrew was given two cardboard boxes and fifteen minutes to clear out his cubicle. Eager to erase the memory of Pyramid’s malfeasance, the building was swiftly being repurposed into a coliving and coworking space where adults would be dared to never grow up.
Andrew was forced off the premises after fourteen minutes. He left with two boxes filled with detritus and mixed feelings.
Even after they sold all of Pyramid’s assets, the government failed to recover even a smidgen, a tad, or a speck of what was owed. This included the money that those Ontario pensioners had invested, but also money from otherwise clever tech funds, those rival big banks and, lo and behold, Andrew Cavaletto.
Not only was his stock worthless but his mortgage was too. Everything he had put in disappeared, like the eggs of sturgeon down a fugitive founder’s throat. Of course, he wasn’t alone in suddenly finding himself unable to foot his housing bill; when Pyramid went belly up, it took plenty of others with it. It was, after all, a very fatted belly. The government, gracefully, stepped in to help those big creditors who suddenly found their fortunes fading. As for people in Peoria, families in Flagstaff or couples in Kenosha? They suddenly had a Pyramid-sized crater in their bank accounts.
Six stops. The sky was clearing up outside, though, somehow, it felt no less dreary. Andrew had, for once, the forethought to notice the clouds in the sky before he’d left that morning and had come to the City with an umbrella in tow. Obeying the cosmic rule that dictates that whenever one is prepared for rain, it shall never come, the sky stayed dark and ominous but altogether dry.
Enough of this umbrella talk. There’s time for more of that later. For now, it’s time to talk about how Andrew became the most hated man in Millburn.
Andrew’s path to pariahdom is a little hazy. He barely knew any of his neighbors and had an altogether forgettable face: a little longish, the color of dough made with refined white flour, a passable chin. When he went out, it was mostly in Morristown, where Erin lived, and not in Millburn.
However, like flies to a carcass, bad news travels fast and whether it was the work of a nosy neighbor or an enterprising internet troll, soon the whole town seemed to know that Andrew not just worked at Pyramid, but may have missed a golden opportunity to do something about all the hijinks that occurred there. No one suspected him of being involved; he was much too poor to be a white-collar criminal. His crime was guilt by association, and though it may not come with a mandatory sentence, the punishment doled for an offense like that is often much harsher.
Rationally speaking, no one could have blamed Andrew and Andrew alone for all that transpired. Common sense would show that many others sidestepped their professional and civic duties. A logical appraisal would show that the events that transpired weren’t the results of one man’s failing but part of a larger social reckoning, the effect of years of prioritizing profit over all else.
Not one person in Millburn seemed interested in rationale, logic or common sense. They were too busy pelting Andrew with rotten eggs. And spray painting very mean things on the sidewalk in front of his townhouse. And writing letters to the editor of the local newspaper containing even meaner things. And there were the billboards. And the skywriters….
All of which made finding a new job even more difficult, especially at a time when firms weren’t too keen on hiring the guy who was about as well regarded as the captain of the Titanic. Upon receiving his resume, most places didn’t entertain the thought of interviewing him. The kindest word used to describe Andrew around that time was ‘unhirable’.
Having grown tired of harassment on the street and at home and finding fewer and fewer occasions to go into the City for interviews, Andrew broke his lease on the apartment in Millburn and moved further into the suburbs, to Bellwether, where his parents offered him his childhood bedroom for lease at a nominal rent, so long as he was willing to, emotionally speaking, die a little bit.
Only after that, while living under the same roof as his parents, with the same posters on his bedroom walls that he had when he was twelve, did Andrew’s girlfriend of three years break up with him.
Two more stops left. By this point in the journey, he was last left in the car. They say misery loves company, and yet there he sat, all alone.
Bellwether wasn’t separated from Manhattan so much by miles as it was by mindset. It was as if all the life of the City gradually leached away, stop by stop. By the time the train made it this far down the tracks, there wasn’t much life left to go around.
“Edinburgh? What’s in Edinburgh?”
He had to ask her to say it again. It wasn’t because the place was too loud; one of the things they liked most about Hooray Tandoori was that it was always very nearly silent because it was always very nearly empty. How it had managed to survive had always puzzled them.
The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.
No, he needed her to repeat herself because he couldn’t believe his ears. Here she was saying she was going to move to Edinburgh when he didn’t know it from El Paso.
Erin laughed until she realized that, no, no he wasn’t kidding.
“Andrew, I told you. The university. I was applying for a job there. You must remember. I did those interviews over Zoom during the pandemic. Anyway, I got it. I know, gosh, I know how crazy things have been for you for the past few months. I get it. I don’t blame you. But I told you about this back in -- April? It must have been April when I first applied.”
Of course she had told him, and it wasn’t even that he had forgotten being told. It was only that he thought that, when she had said she was applying for a job at Albion Imperial College, it was something she sort of loosely planned to do one day. More like, ‘I’m going to take up gardening’, and less like, ‘I’m going to take a job in Scotland that will almost assuredly mean that we have to break up.’
“And I’m happy for you--”
Her eyebrows peaked.
“You don’t sound happy, Andrew. Surprised. Disappointed. Hurt. Angry…”
This had all occurred less than a week ago: very much at the bottom of Andrew’s ever-deepening psychological trough. Never mind being a persona non grata; never mind the indignity of being back in his boyhood home-- there was still a Ken Griffey Jr. poster on his wall; no, the worst thing was the feeling that none of it was going to get any better. Down in the dumps, despondent, depressed, Andrew had wrestled with any number of labels. The only good, uplifting thing in his life had been Erin.
At a time when it felt like his life was dissolving away, she was the last thing in it that felt solid and real. She seemed to know when to listen -- when Andrew wanted only to be heard --, and when to offer advice -- when Andrew had otherwise run out of ideas. She hadn’t just buoyed his spirits; she might have been the one thing keeping him from capsizing altogether. The sort of thing the captain of the Titanic could have used.
The lights at Hooray Tandoori were dim. They always were. This only added to the idea that it was some kind of front for something. Regardless, the food was fantastic and they had made plenty of good memories there. Erin had long declared it the closest thing they’d find in New Jersey to Indian food as good as her mother’s. It was worth the trip to Edison. That was why they had chosen it for their anniversary dinner. Three years together; though surely, after news like hers, it would be their last.
He tried his best to manufacture a smile.
“Of course I’m happy for you,” he said. This wasn’t untrue; he was just more unhappy for himself. She chewed at a piece of naan without breaking her steady gaze. Her deep brown eyes did not waver. It was her eyes he had first noticed and, perhaps, fallen in love with. “But, and I know this is going to make what I just sound untrue and make me sound selfish in the process, but I can’t help but wonder what you getting a job on another continent means for us.”
Again she laughed and, again, she realized a little too late that he was being very serious.
“Andrew! Andrew, we’ve had fun, haven’t we? Three years of fun. That’s what we’re celebrating, aren’t we? You didn’t think this would go on forever, did you?”
Dr. Erin Trottier, Phd could probably count the number of times she hadn’t been the smartest person in the room, whether it was a hall closet sized room or a full auditorium. However, unlike most smart people, who sometimes seemed to use their intelligence solely to come up with ways to remind you of how dumb you are by comparison, Erin managed to stay modest. She did not like to mention the awards she had received, the journals that had published her or the number of times she’d been called on to explain very complicated topics of particle physics to cable news anchors and their live audiences. What she did enjoy was pickleball, work, and spending time with Andrew.
She picked at the skin of her knuckles. Just as she knew clawing at her hand would hurt, she had expected this all to sting for Andrew-- that seemed unavoidable. She had only hoped it wouldn’t hurt too bad. There was certainly a scale of harm. Where this would fall….sprained ankle…lower leg amputation….lobotomy…remained to be seen.
Unaware of Erin’s impromptu diagnosing, Andrew took a long sip from his glass of water, completely draining it in the process. Silently, he prayed that the server would notice and refill it so that he would have an excuse to not speak. Because, as it happened…
“Oh, dear. You did, didn’t you? You thought…?”
“I mean, maybe not forever, but..”
Another piece of naan freshly stuffed in her mouth, her voice came out muffled.
“Oh, Andrew. Andrew, Andrew, Andrew.”
“You said it yourself.” he pleaded,”We had three good years together. Was it crazy for me to think that, I don’t know, three could become four which would naturally lead to five and then six and then…. we might eventually get married?”
Even in that dim light, her eyes twinkled.
“Andrew. Marriage? Me? I couldn’t. Not again.I thought you knew that. Once was enough. And, if I were ever to consider it again, I don’t think that you--”
The words were very nearly all the way out of her mouth before she realized that this was not the thing to say and not the time to say it.
“I didn’t mean that Andrew. Really, I didn’t.”
“Of course not,” he cleared his throat. Hooray Tandoori was quickly becoming his least favorite restaurant. He would be leaving a very bad review after this dinner, that was for sure.
“It’s just, you know, I’ve always been focused on my career. And professorships like this don’t come up all that often.”
“But you already have a job.”
She rolled her eyes.
“You wouldn’t want me to settle for Frelinghuysen State College, would you? It isn’t exactly the center of the universe for, well, anything. You know, I think they’ve got more phone books in their library than actual books.”
He smiled, despite himself. Even in the worst of situations, she knew how to disarm him. And it was true. He wanted what she thought was the best for her. She was too smart, too clever, too Erin for New Jersey.
For him, too.
“No, I wouldn’t want you to settle. But I suppose I thought you would move on to NYU. Or Fordham. Or Seton Hall.”
She leaned in conspiratorially.
“Seton Hall, Andrew? I’m trying to improve my career, not destroy it.”
He wasn’t going to argue with her. He understood where she was coming from. He understood her well enough to know how much this meant to her. None of that made him feel any better, though.
“In one month, I’ll be 44. If I don’t do this now, Andrew, I might never have the opportunity again. I’ve got ten years on you. That’s a decade that you have to explore and learn and try new things. And…It’s not just that I want to do this-- I have to. I’m not going to pretend to be one of those woo woo crystal people -- that would certainly hurt my reputation with my new, very esteemed colleagues. But I almost feel like this is something I’m fated to do.”
How was it that, all at once, he could want her to stay, not go, not stay and not go? How was it that every permutation, every answer, seemed to point him back home, the sad little bedroom in Bellwether?
“Think about it this way. I enjoyed every day we spent together -- not for some far-off goal. Not because I thought we might one day get married. I wasn’t working towards anything. The time we spent together wasn’t my Frelinghuysen State College -- a stepping stone to something else. Something better.”
He managed to smile.
“I was your Albion Imperial”
The waiter came, at last, although it was too late to save Andrew and too late to save them, too.
“Bellwether Bellwether Bellwether. Bellwether is our last stop. Please make sure you’ve gathered all your belongings. Bellwether Station is our last and final stop.”
The conductor’s voice sounded shrill and hollow as it echoed up and down the empty train car, like an auctioneer at a funeral. Andrew sensed a slight lift in the conductor’s voice, a hint of joy or effervescence. Andrew wondered how she got off feeling any kind of joy or happiness, but then he remembered: she would only be in Bellwether for a few minutes. She got to leave, to go back to the City, to not even step foot in the hangdog town. From that perspective, Andrew would have expected confetti and streamers.
To put it lightly, Andrew felt very much like someone who had a hand in another man’s death.
He rose out of his seat and sighed. He looked again out the window and saw the shamelessly shabby Bellwether Station signs and sighed. And then he sighed again for good measure.
You get the idea.
Now seems like the right time to step away, for a moment, from Andrew. Don’t worry: we won’t be long. Plus, we’re only skipping more of the same from him: more moping, more slouching, more sighing. It really is a drag. But, if, perversely, you need the whole run down, he checked his pants pockets to make sure he had his phone and his wallet. He fished out his keys from his jacket. He picked up from under the seat the suitcase where he’d stowed away an unnecessary cabal of backup resumes. And at each step of the way, he punctuated every other moment with another sigh. In fact, with all that carrying-on and pocket checking, Andrew failed to notice that his umbrella was gone. He was far too occupied feeling sorry -- mostly for himself, though a little bit too for poor dead Mel Billingsley.
And now, a few words on Bellwether, Andrew’s home once and now home again. In a normal story, a town like Bellwether might get little more than a passing mention, a polite nod. This is not a normal story. Bellwether is not a normal town.
Bellwether was founded at the turn of one of those recent centuries, a time of great, unrivaled, unchecked kookiness. At the top of the pantheon of kooks, even kookier than the snake oil salesmen, the carnival barkers, the theosophists, and the osteopaths, was Elias Drinkwater, Bellwether’s town father.
Elias, a native of Torrington, Connecticut, was convinced that the end times were near. However, unlike other soothsayers who used numerology or divine inspiration to forecast the date of the apocalypse, Elias had a much less specific, much more hands-off approach. Preaching about the dangers of sin and the coming price to be paid by the sinners, the only way to quiet Elias for even a moment was to ask him when he thought things might wind up.
“Oh, any day now,” he would say, before rolling back into his unorthodox and tenuous interpretations of the good books. And thus a nickname was born for Elias and those who followed him. Because, although Elias had an unconventional approach to religion and was a cantankerous kook, the Any Day Nowists grew like a summer callus in a tight pair of shoes. The only explanation history offers is that these were fairly boring times and that people were looking for something to do, no matter how unpleasant.
Their tenets were simple but absolute: the end of days, of course, were nigh, though on an as of yet undetermined date; showering or the use of any kind of soap or cleaning agent would curry no favor with the Lord; and onions, by contrast, were something of an express lane to heaven.
The people of Torrington amiably tolerated the Any Day Nowists for well over two decades. Sure, they were unconventional, and yes they could be standoffish, and of course, they had a unique effect on the townspeople’s olfactory systems, but by no means were folks going to stand by and listen to the casual besmirching of the Any Day Nowists. The youngsters of Torrington were known to come to blows with the youth of other towns if even one unkind word was said about the strange clique.
By and by, though, Torrington’s patience wore out. Perhaps it was that the town got tired of being lumped in with the weirdos in others’ estimation. Call it a case of too much pride to be tolerant. Maybe it was a feeling that the Any Day Nowists ought to assimilate and be just like everybody else was, the way God and the Founding Fathers had intended. Or maybe it was just that, at long last, they couldn’t take that peculiar smell of unwashed onion bodies any longer. Cooler heads tried to prevail, but when a series of letters, less and less kind with each mailing, went unanswered, the town made an ultimatum: either Elias and his Any Day Nowists clean up their act, literally, or leave.
Unwilling to violate their strange and sacred sacraments, the Any Day Nowists had no choice. They had to find a place where their proclivities would be more welcome, where they would be amongst other outcasts and castaways, where they might even go unnoticed on account of the wholesale oddity thereabouts.
It’s no wonder, then, that they chose New Jersey.
“This land,” it’s said that Elias pronounced on the day of the town’s founding, his hand atop a ceremonial shovel and his mouth dripping with onion juice,” though barren and, in fact, salted by its previous inhabitants, will one day be fertile and fecund. Whereas we have been forced to flee from our homes on account of our faith alone, we do declare this to be a utopia, a heaven on Earth. From this day forth it shall be a Bellwether, a sign of things to come.”
One man’s utopia is another man’s smelly, sickly, poorly plated, and sewerless swamp. By all accounts, Bellwether should have gone the way of any number of similar efforts: wreck and ruin within a few weeks, its inhabitants forced to crawl back to their hometowns with their tails between their legs and soap in their outstretched hands. Considering Elias was at the helm, things ought to have gone even worse.
Yet, the town flourished. Bellwether’s success, believe it or not, was a credit to the Any Day Nowists’ unique beliefs. It wasn’t the prohibition against showering or the doomsday prophecies. The growth of the place from a few bare-knuckle huts to a real, full-fledged village and then a bustling burgh coincided perfectly with America’s brief fascination with one thing; onions.
Time and history books have mostly forgotten the bygone era, the Bloomin’ Twenties, when onions became all the rage. No one quite remembers either who originally thought to, first, slice and dice them like a flower and then deep fry those pungent alliums. But by dint of their alluring shape and spectacular taste, nevermind their eventually disproven potent medical benefits, blooming onions became all the rage. At first, the fad was confined to the country’s elites: the Rockefellers, the Vanderbilts, and the Gettys were all proud Bloomers. It didn’t take long, though, for even common folk to begin to partake. And no matter whether those onions were being fried on the Miracle Mile or on Main Street, there was a good chance they came from Bellwether. It wasn’t a boomtown: it was a bloomtown.
At its peak, Bellwether had three theaters, two libraries, eleven brothels, and eight thousand three hundred ninety-six acres dedicated to the full-scale cultivation of the onion. Even during these halcyon days, though, the people stayed humble. Most of them stuck quite closely to the creed, the bedrock that the town was founded on, eschewing showering and subsisting on a diet of onions alone. They saw no reason to give up their ways, not when the world was set to end any day now.
When it came, the end times were not heralded by scowling demons or eight-legged rats. There was neither fire nor brimstone. Nothing out of the ordinary rained down from the sky. Instead, in docks and warehouses all across America, the end came by way of cheaper onions from places like Vidalia and Walla Walla. Of course, by then the Bloomin’ Twenties were over; the country had moved onto other fashionable trends, like talking pictures and women’s suffrage. This double whammy doomed Bellwether. Industry, and all the things it supported, collapsed. A great many people, devout Any Day Nowists for generations, left the town, disillusioned.
Bellwether never recovered. The whole world catapulted full-speed to the future whereas Bellwether stayed exactly where it had always been, only a little older, a little sadder, and a little deader with every passing day.
All of which brings us back to Andrew. The microwave was just about to beep, his Hot Pocket having properly gone from freezing cold to atomically hot in mere seconds, when it occurred to him that he had forgotten something. What that something was, he couldn’t remember. He cursed under his breath -- his mother was leading a guided meditation session with her group in the living room -- and did a quick mental inventory.
Wallet in my pocket. Phone on the counter. Keys? No, keys on the hook by the door, I can see those. The suitcase I had brought up to my room and left leaning on the Pokemon trash can. Jacket on the coat rack next to the umbrella stand --
“God damn it,” he said, this time not nearly as quietly as the last. He quickly apologized for the qis he had disturbed, though, by the looks on the faces staring back at him, his hurried mea culpa wouldn’t suffice. It didn’t help that the microwave dinged immediately after, almost definitely stymying the retirees’ chance at reaching nirvana. Chagrined, he retreated to his room with the Hot Pocket in hand but his sense of self in shambles.
He very nearly slammed the bedroom door behind him. That would have been all the proof that his regression from adulthood to infancy was complete. Returning to that bedroom, cursing under his breath, being jobless…and then! And then! Losing the umbrella.
It wasn’t about the umbrella of course. It meant nothing to him. Someone somewhere has an umbrella very precious to them, an heirloom umbrella, a relic from the old country passed down by a cherished ancestor, one who had a bad case of sciatica but the good foresight to gift their descendants a decent umbrella. This was not that kind of umbrella. It hadn’t cost more than ten dollars and, truth be told, wasn’t worth even half that much: it gave Andrew trouble when he tried to close it and one good gust of wind had threatened to turn it into a sharp and pointy paperweight. But losing it, at a time when the only thing he seemed good at was the art of losing, was an insult he couldn’t bear.
Half the sneers downstairs had nothing to do with missing out on enlightenment. He was only a little less infamous in Bellwether than he had been in Millburn and though being Dee Cavaletto’s son came with some benefits, she couldn’t spare him all their derision. Not when he had had a hand in wrecking their retirements or costing them that second mortgage or…
He lazily kicked at the briefcase and the aborted adulthood it represented. Cheap as it was, it flopped open disgorging its contents like a contestant at the end of a pie-eating contest. He had expected to see only his stack of resumes, rendered useless by his incompetence, but something peculiar caught his eye instead.
A business card.
It wasn’t his; he didn’t have one. What was he going to put on it -- disgraced accountant? Bringer of doom?
It wasn’t one he remembered getting in any of the interviews either. Solid black matte with a drawing of an unopened white umbrella in the middle, he couldn’t fathom where it could have come from.
An uneasy feeling swept over Andrew as he reached down to pick it up. Idly, he wondered if this was one of those hidden camera shows and if he had inadvertently signed a waiver permitting them to air this, the final throes of his miserable collapse, for all the world to see. One camera in the Super Mario Bros Clock above his bed, another hidden in the books on his nightstand. They’d have all his worst angles captured for all the world to see.
He flipped the card over -- white background, black text -- and mouthed the words in a whisper to himself:
Ruben Crespo
Dept. of Lost Umbrellas
222 W 23rd St, New York, NY 10011