“We love Michael Trey!” two beautiful young women shouted at one camera.
The city or the landlord cut off his water; Tommy Rimes turned it back on through the aquarium hose.
The iPhone sounded.
“Melanie?” Michael said, after seeing the screen and answering.
“They’ve closed down the street in front of your building,” she said.
“The police?”
“No, the protesters. They want the city to leave you alone. One group is raising money for your rent, and four lawyers are working for injunctions against the landlord. Other tenants are making complaints against health and safety infractions. A journalist asked President Obama about you, but he refused to comment and it’s been all over the news.”
“What has?” Michael asked his ex.
“Obama not saying anything.”
Michael tried to remember why he had decided to stay in his apartment. It was the storm. He was just too afraid because of the threat the news media made out of the storm. He was afraid, not heroic.
“Michael?” Melanie said.
“Uh-huh?”
“Max Strummer, who owns Opal Internet Services, wants you to do a daily podcast from your phone. He wants me to be the producer. Isn’t that great? You could make enough money to pay your rent and lawyers. He said that if you couldn’t think of anything to say that we could send you text files that you could just read.”
“I have to go, Mel,” Michael said.
“What about Mr. Strummer?”
“I’ll call you later,” Michael uttered, and then he touched the disconnect icon.
After turning off the sound on his phone Michael went to sit in his favorite chair. It was extra wide, with foam-rubber cushions covered in white cotton brocade. There was a lamp that he’d plugged in to the power strip hanging halfway down his wall from the ventilation grate hole. The light wasn’t strong enough to illuminate the whole room, just the area around his chair.
Reclining in the oasis of light, Michael tried to make sense of the storm and his street being closed down, and of the young women who loved a man they’d never met and Melanie who had changed from an ex-girlfriend to a maybe producer.
When no ideas came, he turned off the lamp, hoping that darkness would provide an answer. It didn’t. He was trying to recapture the moment when everything had made sense, when he took action without second-guessing his motives.
Feeling lost, he looked across the room and saw a blue luminescence. It was the phone trying to reach out to him.
Half an hour later he went to see who was calling. There had been a dozen calls. Most of the entries were unfamiliar, but one, instead of a number, was a name that he knew.
“Hello?”
“Mr. Balkan?”
“Mr. X?”
“No, no, this is Michael.”
“Oh.”
“Did you call me on city business?” Michael asked.
“They wanted me to call, but this is your nickel.”
“I’ve been looking at the Internet,” Michael said. “People all over the place want to protect me. They’re offering money and legal support. One guy named Strummer wants to hire me and my ex to do a podcast for him.”
“That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”
“No.”
“I thought you said that you wanted people to realize what they had in common.”
“But between them,” Michael said, “not through me.”
“I don’t get you.”
“Not like a natural disaster or some enemy,” the young bearded man replied. “I don’t want to be the discounted meal at the fast-food chain that you can buy in Anchorage or Dade County. I don’t want to be anything except an idea.”
“But you’re a man.”
“Thanks for that, Bob.”
“For what?”
“I needed to talk to somebody about these thoughts in my head. I couldn’t get them out if I didn’t have anybody to talk to. I know that you’re working for them, but right now they don’t know what to do. In that little window you helped me. You really did.”
“Helped you what?”
“I got to go, Bob.”
“Where can you go, Michael?”
“You always ask the best questions.”
The next morning Michael was standing in his kitchen eating from a can of pork and beans with a teaspoon when he noticed that the spigot had a slow drip. Michael wasn’t sure if it was the dripping or his talk with the city psychologist that made up his mind.
He tested the hot water and then called Melanie. She was surprised to hear from him and happy that he had decided to do his first podcast. He was careful, and she was too, not to talk about love.
At four in the afternoon Michael was ready. He had refused to allow Strummer to dictate what he said. He ignored the checklist of subjects his Internet listeners might want to hear about.
Michael had the bathtub draining when he started recording and had to close the bathroom door to keep out the noise.
“My name is Michael Trey,” he said into the receiver, with no notes or even a notion of what exactly he’d say. “I have lived in Manhattan for seven years, and I was scared about Hurricane Laura—so scared that I haven’t left my house since it broke. Because I wouldn’t go out, I lost my job and my girlfriend, and the landlord has been trying to evict me. I’m broke, and they keep turning my utilities on and off. I have hot water right now, and so I’m going to take my first real bath in weeks.
“My neighbor, Tommy Rimes, pushed a power strip and a little hose through the ventilation duct, and so I’ve been able to get by. I’ve seen videos of people down in the street supporting me. I like that, but it’s misguided. What they should do, I believe, is lock themselves into their own houses and turn off the world outside. I don’t know if this would be possible or if it would make any difference at all, but that’s all I’ve got.
“What I’m saying is that the president didn’t talk about me because there’s nothing to say. It is us that should be talking to him. It’s us that need to get the red lines out of the bottoms of our screens, because we’re in it together as far as we go. But maybe, maybe that’s impossible, because we do things primarily as mammals, not men and women.
“That’s really all I have to say. I know there are people out there that want a daily report from my musty apartment, but really all they have to do is listen to this, what I’m saying right now.