Upright Beasts Read Free Page A

telling the whole school of our love. But she doesn’t move. She looks back at me with resignation,as if she is reminiscing about those lost, carefree recesses spent swinging together on the monkey bars.
    I turn back to the looming walls of the lounge.
    â€œIf he has nothing to say, so be it,” Bulger says. “Boys, open.”
    The ex-linebackers jam crowbars into the door of the black lounge. It takes four of them to finally swing it open with a loud crack. The inside is the blackest black I have ever seen. As the doors are pulled open, everything turns silent. I can no longer hear the heckling or shouts of my fellow students. My friends and enemies fade away behind me. The only thing before me is the darkness of the lounge.
    I’m on my knees in front of the doorway, holding my assignment out in my hand.

IF IT WERE ANYONE ELSE
    A bald man buddied up to me in the elevator, but he was no buddy of mine. He was much older than me, yet more or less exactly as tall, not counting my hair. He was holding a brown paper bag over his crotch.
    â€œDoes this go all the way to the roof?”
    I made a big show of putting my newspaper down and turning my head. “What the hell do I know about the roof? What would I do all the way up there?”
    We stood still as we moved up the building.
    â€œJust a friendly question.” He licked the bottom of his mustache with the tip of his tongue. “Hey, do you like candy beans?”
    There was no one else on the elevator, and then the doors opened and a woman in a green pantsuit stepped in. She looked at us and moved to the other corner.
    â€œWho doesn’t?” I hissed.
    The man opened his paper bag and dug around. He offered me an assortment in his palm. I took four of the red and six of the purple.
    I got out two-thirds of the way up. The building I worked in was very tall, more or less exactly as tall as the tallest building in that part of the city, not counting the antenna. I often forgot how tall the building was because I kept the office blinds half-closed. If I opened them, I would get unnerved by the eye-level workers looking back at me from the building across the street.
    My company occupied four floors of the building, but they weren’t consecutive. Between the lowest floor we owned and the third-highest floor we owned, there was a snack company. I had been working at my company for some time. I now worked on the top floor of the floors we owned, but I had worked on the lowest floor, and also the floor above the snack company. I had never worked on the floor that was two floors above the snack company and one floor below my current floor.
    The snack company often had sample bowls set up for new products they were testing. I liked to go down there and unwrap a few when I could get away for a bit.
    The older bald man was sitting in a red leather chair near the elevator. He turned and smiled up at me as I pressed the down button.
    â€œHow was the roof?” I said. “Did you find what you were looking for?”
    â€œOh, I couldn’t get all the way to the top. I got pretty close though. It was real nice, even not quite at the top. You could see the park and everything.” He was nodding agreeably.
    â€œDo you have business on this floor? Those red chairs are for people who have business on this floor.” We had four red leather chairs around a coffee table in the hallway. There was also a tall, thin plant that I was pretty sure was plastic.
    The man looked up at me with a cautious smile.
    I looked at him in his ugly, unbuttoned suit. The top of his head shone under the fluorescent light. My face must have shown my disgust.
    â€œOkay,” he said with an exaggerated frown. “I get it. You’ve got work to do. Maybe some other time.”
    I didn’t live in the city proper; I lived in one of the outer boroughs. You couldn’t see it from my office window, on accountof all the tall buildings. The buildings