On an unblemished day in early October, two squirrels perched on Jay Lyndberg’s fire escape. They were grayish-brown with short, thick coats. One appeared to be dead and hung limp over the top railing. The other performed a cleansing ritual on the dead one, methodically licked the body clean. It was a peaceful scene, with the intense blue of a fall sky as a backdrop and the breeze running through the leaves bobbing light all over their bodies. A thing of beauty, a pure thing, Jay Lyndberg thought. And then wondered if he’d have to remove the body later that night.
His wife called to interrupt his work. The telephone on his desk flashed to indicate an incoming call. He did not tolerate ringers, buzzers, alarms of any sort. He had muted most of the electronic devices in the apartment.
Jay did not hesitate to pick up the phone even though he knew it was his wife calling. She often accused him of ignoring her phone calls and she had known him long enough to not leave messages anymore. He talked into the corner of the room so as to not disturb the squirrels.
Lindsey wanted to know what her husband was making of his day. She had an office job that required regular duties, set hours and generated endless gossip of infidelities. Jay worked from home. After twenty years as a middle manager in investment banking, Jay was considered an efficiency expert. He had patented a formula that pinpointed the people in an organization who were dragging it down, the dead weight. Every few months, he was called in to clean house at one investment bank or another. He didn’t mind calculating reports at home, but dreaded the days he had to go into the office, meetings with bank employees, the final presentation to upper management. It wasn’t the bad news he had to deliver to these people, but the handshakes and the talking and smiling that made him feel as if his bones were filling with a heavy syrup, a syrup that boiled and thickened with each new person he had to meet. It took him hours of sleep to recover from that feeling. Still, there seemed to be an endless, tireless need for his services.
Jay found two sentences to tell his wife everything she needed to know. She did not press him further and as he had no interest in pressing her, they hung up with a familiar residue of dissatisfaction.
Two months ago, Jay had ended an affair. It was his first affair and during it, he was startled by how suddenly attractive his wife became to him. An otherwise dead marriage came to life, and he found himself clinging to Lindsey like he had never done before. But when the affair was over, the spell that it had cast over his marriage died with it and in its aftermath, his marriage sunk to its lowest depths.
The squirrel finished cleaning its companion’s head and back and worked its way to the rear legs and tail. It climbed on top of the dead squirrel, unconcerned about sinking its claws into its cheek or ear. That was the pleasure of working with something dead, Jay thought. He went to get his camera.
The affair had begun online and ended in her office a year later. He had finally given into what he had known all along. That she was too young, too well read, too well dressed, had too much future to be with somebody like Jay. He could feel her boundless interest in him waning and before it could completely die out, he left her. He liked to think he had done her a favor, saved her from a little less tragedy in life. Still, the flash of the phone, the notice of new email sped his heart a little at the chance it could be her and disappointment pitted inside him for a few moments when it never was.
Jay tiptoed back to the window, raised his camera to his eye and squinted into the viewfinder. The working squirrel stopped licking the hind legs of its partner and reared up, sniffed the air for danger. It held its tail loosely, without thought. Its back paws sunk into the other squirrel’s neck. Its paws quivered. It ran to one corner of the railing, then to the other to further assess the situation. It sensed it was being watched. Jay knew he had only to make the slightest movement and the squirrel would be off, leaving the dead body behind, never to return again. He lifted his finger from the shutter button, took the camera from his eye and waited.
The phone flashed, but he was too far from his desk to see who was calling, and too afraid of disturbing the squirrels to move. This was a predicament. His insides coiled in frustration. He cursed the fool who had decided to call at that moment. He watched the phone flash four more times and a minute later, the red light come on to indicate a message. Satisfied that danger had been averted, the squirrel resumed its work.
Jay snapped a picture, crept back to his desk. He loathed messages, returning phone calls. The time it took for the person to leave the message, for him to retrieve the message then to call the person back were wasted minutes. Unless the person had a very specific, one-way message, which in his experience people rarely did, it was always better to hang up and try again later. This was very clear to him, but a concept others failed to grasp. Still, he liked to include it as a recommendation in his final presentations. Nothing he was fool enough to devote an entire slide to, but worth mentioning if at least one person recognized its merits.
The message was from his daughter. Tara’s messages were succinct, informative, well structured with extra syllables used only for affection. Jay was proud that, though still in her twenties, she was careful not to let her speech break down into the ums, likes and sloppy language of her peers.
In her message, his daughter said she would not be visiting that weekend or any weekend that month. She said it would be hard to be there for the holidays even. She offered no excuse, as she did not like to lie. Lindsey would blame him, he knew, but it was Lindsey their daughter avoided most.
Jay got back to work, plugged more numbers into his fail-proof spreadsheet, scanned the columns for patterns, waiting for the data to merge into meaningful arrays. It all started making sense if he scanned long enough.
The squirrel continued to massage the dead body. Having completed one turn, it started over again from the hindquarters and worked towards the head. The ritual soothed Jay. He had never had anyone lick his hindquarters but he thought it must be a very pleasant thing.
A strong gust shook the branches of the elm in the courtyard, batted down the smoke from a smokestack. Three brown leaves floated to the ground in the breeze’s wake. The smoke righted itself. The wind had carried a few clouds into view, curly, thick layers of white.
The breeze did not bother the squirrels. They had experienced many an autumn breeze and knew they had nothing to fear. Jay wondered how the dead squirrel had come to expire on his fire escape, if perhaps the other one had dragged its body there. He knew it wasn’t quit possible given that he was four flights up, but he liked this possibility, that moving the squirrel to a quiet place could be part of their ritual, so he did not think hard enough on it as to discount the possibility.
If he had answered the call from his daughter, he may have been able to get her to commit to a weekend. But now that she had left the message, had gotten the words out firmly, he knew it was useless. Jay had lost any power of coercion over his daughter years ago or any women in his life for that matter. Even the affair had made him feel powerless and old at the bottom of himself. The ending of it was far too obvious for him from the very start. He knew exactly where he would be when it was all over. Endings were always very clear to him.
Lindsey had had affairs too. They were transparent to him, as well. How easy it was to see through people, he thought. Her first one had lasted only a few months, and the next one did not occur for a few years. He had only had that one affair, not to get back at his wife, but because it was the only one that had presented itself in all his years of marriage.
Jay typed up the last few pages of the presentation, the easy part. He input the names and positions to be made redundant, added their salaries and summed up the monthly and annual cost savings. He never felt bad for typing up the names. Even for the people he had shaken hands with, taken to lunch. There was something satisfying in it, rather, to wield such power. He did not blame himself for someone who could have worked harder to keep a job. His numbers did not lie.
The wind picked up and many clouds clustered together, hid the sun and cast the tree, the squirrels, the fire escape in shadow. Jay’s office grayed. The squirrels’ fur parted in the wind. Jay reached over and turned on the light. The wind picked up again and stirred the leaves. The squirrel leapt from the rail onto the deck of the fire escape. In the next moment, the dead squirrel popped up to its feet. It did a short dance back and forth across the railing then leapt after his friend. Seconds later, both squirrels were gone and large drops of rain splattered the fire escape.
Jay watched the drops spread and merge on the metal rails. The rain was coming down hard. The water gathered and swelled, hung in beads that fell under their own weight then gathered again. He had watched the squirrels on the fire escape, the quivering fur, the way the limp one stretched on the rail like a pelt. Could he have known the limp one was alive? Had he misjudged the situation? It seemed to him that there must have been a telling detail, a damp smell in the breeze, a muscle twitch that had given it all away. And when he thought on it again, he saw the limp body twitch and felt sure he had seen it all along. He pulled his books from the windowsill and closed the window. The rain was starting to seep in.
