Jay Callahan | Elite Beings, Ordinary Mail

The fluorescent tube above Q-14 buzzed in what Jay had decided, several years ago, was roughly B-flat. If he was going to spend eight hours a day underneath it, the least it could do was give him something to hum along to.

Two desks crowded the back wall of the mailroom, if crowded was the word for two desks in a room built to comfortably hold one and a half. Jay's chair squeaked on every third rotation, a sound he had made peace with the way one makes peace with a chronic cough. Alicia's chair, three feet away, made no such sound, because Alicia had informed maintenance that a squeaking chair was, and he quoted her exactly, "an OSHA violation against my nervous system," and received a replacement within the week. Jay had put in the same request eighteen months ago and received, in order, silence, a form to fill out a different form, and eventually a memo informing him the original request had been "archived."

"You're humming again," Alicia said, without looking up from whatever violence she was committing against her nails with an emery board that had, as far as Jay could tell, no professional business being in a workplace.

"I'm always humming."

"You're humming the sad one. The one where everyone's stuck." She examined a nail, found it wanting, and resumed filing. "It's very on brand for you, honestly."

"Thank you."

"That wasn't a compliment."

"I took it as one anyway. Keeps the day interesting." He nudged Gerald's dented wheel back into alignment with the toe of his shoe, a gesture so practiced it barely counted as motion anymore. "Did you ever call about the door latch?"

Alicia's look could have curdled the coffee three departments over. "I am not calling the building's four hundred year old work order system, Jay. Do you know what that computer does to a manicure? I would have to redo the whole set. In this economy."

"It's a phone call."

"It's a phone call to a machine from 1998 that screams if you press the wrong key." She capped the emery board with the finality of someone ending a diplomatic summit. "Also, I have somewhere to be. Upstairs. Networking." She said networking the way other people said sacred ritual. "Cover the desk."

"I always cover the desk."

"That's why you're so good at it." She was already at the door, stepping neatly over the phone book propping it open, a phone book Jay privately suspected predated the building itself. "Try not to sing anything too depressing while I'm gone. It affects productivity."

The door swung most of the way shut behind her, caught on the phone book, and settled into its usual half open slouch.

Jay exhaled, long and slow, and permitted himself precisely four seconds of blessed, Alicia shaped silence before reaching for the stub of pencil wedged behind his ear, an affectation he had picked up from an old film about a secretary he was fairly sure he had invented wholesale in his own head. The back of the nearest interoffice envelope made a serviceable canvas. Nobody ever expected art out of the mail, which was exactly the point.

He sketched Estela first, out of habit: HR's one true terror, the woman who could end an argument with a single raised eyebrow and had, more than once, ended Jay's entire day with a kind word instead. Then a pair of hands, sharp knuckled and gesturing mid sentence, because whoever kept drafting memos on behalf of Alvin Matthews, the werewolf running Operations two floors up, apparently thought every internal email deserved the enthusiasm of a man announcing a touchdown. He had gotten halfway through the shine on Alvin's absurd, gleaming, personally offensive grin when the humming crept up a register on its own, unsupervised, and he had to physically stop his own throat from finishing the line.

The pencil hovered. He set it down, picked it back up, and set it down again with more conviction, as though the second attempt might actually take.

Twelve floors up, gods and vampires and men who had never once in their long unnatural lives folded a single sock were presumably deciding something important. Down here, Gerald's wheel squeaked its own opinion on the matter, and Jay sat in the middle of it all, humming show tunes at a pile of unsorted mail like it had personally wronged him.

Hallway noise drifted through the half open door: an elevator somewhere, a printer jamming with the specific despair only office printers achieve, and, closer than he expected, footsteps.

He looked up, pencil still in hand, sketch still very much visible, throat still humming half a bar behind schedule.

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The building had exactly one working microwave, located on the ground floor, and by five o'clock every evening this single fact turned the mailroom's breakroom into the closest thing the building had to neutral territory. Gods, mid-level managers, and whatever Ozzie technically counted as, they all ended up down here eventually, waiting their turn at a microwave that hummed with the same faint, aggrieved energy as everyone standing in front of it.

Jay had claimed his usual chair in the corner, mug in hand, mostly because it put a wall at his back and let him watch the room do what the room did best at the end of a long day. Complain.

"I had four people today," Ozzie said, to the room in general, dropping into a chair with the specific exhaustion of a man who had spent eight hours being a human, or possibly a spider shaped, tech support script. "Four. Grown adults. And every single one, I had to walk through turning the thing off, and then, key step, turning it back on again." He rubbed at his face. "I did not survive several formative years of my life just to spend the rest of it narrating a power button."

"Try HR." Estela didn't look up from the stack of forms she'd carried in like a shield. "I had someone request three weeks of vacation he has not, in any calendar sense, earned yet. He wanted me to simply believe him about the math."

"See, that's still better than mine." Alicia leaned against the counter with her arms crossed, radiating the specific grievance of someone who had rehearsed this complaint in the mirror. "I have been here longer than half the third floor, and somehow I am still filing mail, while people with half my instincts are getting titles." She looked, very deliberately, at Estela. "Some people's forms just move faster than others'."

"The forms move at the speed of the forms," Estela said, still not looking up.

The door opened with the particular reluctant creak that meant someone important was using it, and Elian Gamble stepped through like he'd been personally wronged by the hallway. He surveyed the room, the noise, the general lack of decorum, and set his cup down on the counter with the exaggerated care of a man defusing something.

"Must this happen every evening," he said, to no one and everyone, "directly outside the one machine that makes coffee correctly."

"They're just talking, El." Alvin came in a half step behind him, easy and unbothered in the way he was about most things that made Elian's jaw tighten. He clapped a hand on Elian's shoulder, the kind of gesture that would have gotten anyone else fired. "Long day for everybody. You remember long days."

"I remember them being quieter."

"You remember them being nonexistent. You barely slept last week."

Elian did not dignify that with a response, which, Jay had learned, was usually how Elian lost an argument.

Jay sipped his coffee and said nothing, because he had learned a long time ago that nobody in this room, gods included, actually wanted the honest answer to how was your day, and because his own would have required explaining things he had no intention of explaining to a breakroom at five o'clock on a Tuesday.

The complaints kept circling, familiar as the microwave's hum, and it took a full minute before Ozzie noticed the gap in the pattern.

"Hang on." He pointed his coffee mug at Jay like an accusation. "You've been sitting there the whole time and you haven't complained about a single thing."

The room, as a unit, turned to look at him.

The ceiling above apartment 3D had been dripping for four months, a slow brown stain spreading outward like a very patient bruise, feeding a bucket Yo-Han had set out back in month two and left there as the permanent solution. Third floor was the top floor, one flight below a roof access nobody used, which meant the apartment caught every degree of heat the radiators pushed upward and kept all of it, since the roof vent that should have relieved things was apparently optional in the building's original design. Jay had adjusted to both the drip and the heat months ago, counting the drip as white noise some nights and the heat as a reason to leave the window cracked year round.

His door sat open exactly as far as the chain allowed, four inches of carefully rationed air, the precise amount of door Jay felt like offering on a Tuesday.

Yo-Han reached two fingers through the gap, found the little brass slide by feel, and flicked it loose without breaking stride, same as every other time he'd tried this particular lock. He pushed the door open the rest of the way himself.

"There. Now we can talk like people."

"That chain cost twelve dollars."

"And it's cost you twelve dollars four separate times, since I open it in ten seconds flat every visit. Learn something from the pattern." Arms crossed, Yo-Han settled into the doorframe like the conversation might take a while. His voice, when it wasn't aimed at the boiler, still carried a trace of something built for arenas, currently spending itself on complaints about door hardware. "There is a whole city outside this hallway, Jay. Restaurants. Bars. Terrible street music, somehow still better than whatever you hum through these walls."

"I like my walls."

"Your walls can't buy you a drink." Yo-Han pressed a hand to his chest, mock wounded. "I had a voice that made stadiums scream my name. Now I spend my nights negotiating with a chain lock and a twenty four year old who refuses to leave his room. Very funny, this life."

Down the hall the elevator groaned open, and Jean Rene Felix stepped out with a paper bag under one arm, folded flat and taped at the top, no give left in the seams. He gave Yo-Han a short nod, the kind two people trade when they've run this exact scene before, and held the bag out toward Jay.

"Fifth Street route tonight." He set it into Jay's hands. "Music box. Hinge's bad, rest of it's fine." He watched Jay work the hinge with one finger, unhurried, the same patience he brought to everything he carried over. "Wanted you to get first look before it went into the scrap pile."

Jay worked the pin loose, feeling where it had slipped from its seat. Somewhere in the back of his mind, a thought surfaced and stuck: a building housing a demon, a changeling, and a zombie under one roof was, by rights, owed a bar joke. The universe had had years to write one and apparently spent them all on the ceiling instead.

"See." Yo-Han gestured between the two of them, delighted with his own setup. "You'll fix a stranger's broken music box at nine at night, but you won't put on shoes and walk four blocks for yourself."

"The music box is easier."

"Everything is easier than living. That's not the same as it being the better use of your evening." Yo-Han said it light, though something moved underneath it that wasn't light at all, there and gone before Jay got a proper look.

Jean Rene's radio crackled at his hip, dispatch cutting through static about a call two blocks over. He was already turning toward the elevator.

"That's mine." A hand up, half wave, half salute. "Bring it back if the hinge beats you. I've got a spare pin in the truck somewhere."

The elevator doors closed behind him, and the hallway went quiet except for the drip, still keeping its own time in the bucket.

The apartment had exactly two plants, both stubborn survivors of Jay's total inability to keep anything decorative alive on purpose. One was a pothos he had won in an office white elephant exchange three years ago, and it had spent the time since trying to escape its pot and colonize the windowsill. The other was a cactus Estela had handed him after a particularly bad week, along with the instruction "this one is difficult to kill, which I thought might suit you," and the cactus had taken the compliment personally enough to actually thrive.

"You're leaning again," Jay told the pothos, nudging its longest vine back toward the glass. "We talked about this. You've got the whole window. Share."

The pothos declined to respond, and Jay decided to count that as agreement.

He was cleaning, which was itself unusual enough that the cactus seemed to be judging him for it. Not deep cleaning, nothing that would require explaining where he'd learned to do it properly, just the frantic surface kind: shoving mail into a drawer that already had too much mail in it, sliding the shoebox of sketches under the couch where it lived most of the time anyway, moving a half finished drawing off the coffee table, then giving it a long look and putting it back, because hiding everything felt worse than hiding nothing.

"This is fine," he said, to the room in general, since the room was the only audience he ever practiced speeches for. "People have people over. This is a completely normal thing that normal people do, constantly, statistically."

The room's silence counted, by default, as full agreement.

He picked the pencil stub up from where it had rolled under a stack of coding notes and turned it over twice between his fingers, the small habitual motion that meant he was deciding whether to put a thing away or keep using it. The apartment had hosted a landlord with his own key and a neighbor with a broken music box, both of them people built for hallways and doorframes who stopped exactly there. The couch had held exactly one person his whole time living here, always the same one. The second mug in the cabinet, bought on a whim two years back and empty ever since, currently did a passable job as a second planter.

He set the pencil down on the coffee table, deliberately, like a decision.

"Okay," he said, mostly to himself and a little to the cactus, who had weathered worse conversations than this one and seemed entirely unbothered. "Okay."

A knock landed on the door.