The Corridors

1

I had been living and working full-time in The Corridors for twenty years and seven months when the dead body was discovered.

It was a summer morning, the last Monday in July, the 6am sun already mutating the clouds into tattered cords of red like ripped-apart musculature and twisting them across the sky. The weekend had, by The Corridors’ standards, proved to be uneventful, with only three noise complaints on Saturday night which I ignored completely and our sole robotic resident Dwayne 2000-XL7-B5 hammering on my front door on Sunday afternoon to ask if I could let him into his unit after he’d locked himself out for the third time that week. I had slept poorly the night before, unnerved perhaps by the fact that, at forty-two years old, my life was going nowhere and that some of the people—and one android—leasing studio apartments at The Corridors knew which dwelling was mine.

The Corridors consisted of twelve two-story stucco-encrusted buildings, each of which contained eight units per floor, and included a subterranean parking garage beneath every structure. In its hey-day, finding a free parking slot proved a challenge for guests and residents alike, but over the last seven years The Corridors had not once been at more than half-capacity. There was one road that flowed through the apartment complex and co-joined the parking areas, a strip of asphalt that seemed to attract every cigarette butt, spent condom, crushed can, cannabis pipe and fast food container ever manufactured and sent out into the world. On that morning, it was also filled with police cruisers.

I saw them from the tiny cracked window in my apartment—their red and blue beacon lights throwing flickering baubles across the concrete thoroughfare—threw on my maintenance tech uniform, made my way from my unit on the second floor of Building no. 12, descended the rusted iron stairs and passed through the parking garage. The bitumen slashes of the road led me to where the leasing office was located, nestled between Building nos. 5 and 6. Betsy and the other leasing agents, Gerald and Terri, were not to arrive for another three or four hours, and as I was the only on-site employee, it was my responsibility to investigate the police presence.

It was not the first time I had seen law enforcement at The Corridors. Due to its month-to-month lease agreements and low-rent, the complex was popular and sought-after by both struggling minimum wage individuals and the criminal element. Overdoses were not unheard of, we had two suicides, it was no secret that prostitution was taking place in many of the units, and DEA activity was common.

I walked by the cruiser parked in front of the leasing center, noticed four other police cars blocking access to Building no. 1, and encountered Jerry Semanski sitting cross-legged on the greenbelt between the office and the road. Jerry had been a resident since before my time at The Corridors, and I knew him to be timid and perhaps on the autism spectrum. He owned three rabbits, named Mister Rabbit, Missus Rabbit and, for some reason, Bartholomew the Second. Many of the late-night noise complaint calls were placed by him, as he lived in Building no. 9—a frequent party destination—and unlike the other reports of loud, past-curfew hullabaloo and hubbub ordinances being categorically disregarded, I tended to address those issued by Jerry.   

“Well,” Jerry said, as he saw me approach. “I mean, uh, hi.”

“Morning, Jerry,” I replied. “So, what is it this time? Bikini giving you a problem?” Bikini was, at age eighty-seven, thirteen years Jerry’s senior and forty-five mine. She harbored an intense prejudice against Jerry’s rabbits, and had called the authorities out several times to report him for possession of, as she titled his animals, “bastardized mothering feral kitty-cats.”

“No, not really, no,” he said.

“We can have her lease terminated, throw her ass out, you know? If she gives you any trouble.”

Jerry got to his feet and wiped his hands on the knees of his trousers. The paunch under his sweater—the sweater he wore regardless of the temperature, which that day was on track to be in the low 100s—trembled as he straightened. “No, no, she hasn’t called in a little bit of awhile. And, uh, I do not want to be a problem. I mean, I’m not looking for any kind of trouble, and neither are my little fur babies. You’ve met my rabbits, right, Chuck? Mister Rabbit and Missus—”

“Do you know what’s going on here?”

“Here?” Jerry said.

“Yes, here.” I pointed to the police cruiser nosed up against the curb in front of the leasing office and the four arranged in a chevron formation to cordon off the road where it swerved in front of Building no. 1, their overheads flashing. From where I stood beside Jerry I could see that the cars were empty. “Do you have any idea why the fuzz is here?”

“Oh, uh, I don’t know that,” he said. “I came to look at the lights. They told me to just sit here.” An expression of worry or concern about being caught disobeying the cops rippled across Jerry’s wrinkled face, and he sat back down. “So I’m just, uh, here where they said to be. And sitting.”

  I told Jerry to stay put and call the office if he had any problems. Aside from uttering “uh” once, he was unresponsive, and I witnessed his eyes veering past me as I stepped backward before rotating and heading in the direction of Building no. 1.

Beyond the police vehicles barricading the road, a line of cars had formed. I recognized Nate Mouser and his girlfriend Melodi behind the steering column of his powder blue Saturn, John-Paul Sunseri hunched over the console of his Nissan Versa with a travel mug of coffee in one delicate fist sending up ragged puffs of vapor, and Roxy Jensen—the curvy, witchy, 50-somehing black-haired divorcee who gave me a handjob the first time I replaced her busted toilet and had ignored me ever since—straddling her pale green Vespa. Several people from Building nos. 1 and 2 were clustered around the entrance to the parking garage, and I saw three officers standing amongst them, while a fourth brandished a banderole of barricade tape reading: POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS and wrapped it around the staircase leading to the second story landing.

John-Paul cranked down his window and said: “Is it Chuck?”—something he said anytime he saw me—as Nate began slamming on his horn and Roxy answered in kind, with her scooter’s own feeble bleat ricocheting through the lane. Another automobile, a lowered Dodge Aries with piss-yellow doors and tinted windows that I couldn’t see through to identify the occupants, slid out of the garage and came to a stop behind her.

“Morning,” I said, and drew close to John-Paul’s idling car. “Any clue what’s going on, J.P.?”

“I gotta get to work is what’s going on.” John-Paul took a long pull of his coffee and stared at the cruisers through a white coil of steam. “A-holes are screwing my shit up in a major way. Think you could get ‘em to move so I won’t be like extremely late?”

“Let me talk to them. I’ll see what I can do.”

John-Paul leaned in close, poking his emaciated face through the open window frame of his car door. He threw a glance over his shoulder, and sunlight wobbled across his cheeks and spilled into his mouth as he spoke.

“Also, there’s a dead guy back there,” he said. “Might want to ask them about that, too.”

2

His name was Israel Llamas. He was found on his back just beyond the entrance to the Building no. 1 parking garage by Dwayne 2000-XL7-B5, who had alerted the police using his onboard telephonic system and waited at the broken automatic front gate of The Corridors to direct them through the complex when they arrived.

“Bot discovered him,” Officer Roemer told me when I asked him what had happened. I had met Roemer a few years before when he responded to a break-in at the on-site laundromat, and during his investigation, ascertained that the coin-machine had been stolen. The trail of quarters leading from the laundry room to Unit No. 156 in Building no. 7 blew the case wide open, resulting in Mr. Carlos Schwartz—the occupant—being locked up and the coin-machine bolted to the linoleum floor. “The droid’s cooperating, but we don’t really have any reason to suspect he’s involved.”

“The Three Laws of Robotics,” I said.

“Huh?”

“Never mind. Can I see the driver’s license?”

“It’s an ID, technically,” said Roemer, and handed me the card, adding lamely: “Doesn’t look like he is authorized to operate an automobile, so make of that what you will.”

I studied the document, with the words: CALIFORNIA and IDENTIFICATION CARD along the vertex, and—to the left of his ID number and its expiration date, his name and address and date of birth—photographic proof of Israel Llamas’ existence. His skin was the color of wet sycamore bark, and black hair bristled from his scalp. There was a scrim of facial growth along his jaw and chin, with a brilliant white patch beside his right cheek, and his eyes were heavy-lidded and half-closed. Thick aggressive brows roamed across his forehead.

“Is he a resident?” asked Roemer. “The address doesn’t match this complex, but that don’t mean a thing.”

“I’ve seen him around, I think. He looks familiar. I’m pretty sure he lives in 204, or at least his people do. That’s on the second floor.” I gestured with my thumb to the building behind me, its windows filled with round pale faces and the staircase enveloped in stripes and bands of bright yellow tape. “This one.”

Roemer wiped a dribble of sweat from his neck and ran one hand through his blond crew cut. “Building one,” he confirmed. “Makes sense, seeing as how he ended up dying here. I’ll send someone up to notify his next of kin.”

“So what happened to him?” I asked.

"Haven't taken a statement from anybody, and there isn't witness one," Roemer said. “Bunch of junkies and burnouts, but I don’t need to tell you that, huh, Chuck?”

“Yeah, I suppose not,” I said.

  “If I had to guess, it looks to me like he took a header from the second story landing, and that occurred sometime in the last four to five hours. The guy just went on over the railing and ker-splat!”

“What, he lost his balance?”

“Drunk, most likely. There’s a smashed Tecate bottle right next to the cadaver. Probably belonged to him. Lucky thing that robot found him when it did.”

“Yeah, why is that?”

“Lying so close to the parking garage, there’s no telling what would be left of the corpse with people running him over in such a terrible rush to get to work this morning. Some folks have no respect for the deceased.”

“So it sounds like you’re telling me it was just an accident,” I said. “You don’t think that he might have been killed?”

Roemer chuckled coldly and said: “Let’s go take a gander at him, wanna?”

Israel’s body was under a black tarp, onlookers and responding officers encircling him like an atoll made of flesh. I could see blood leaking out from beneath the shroud, dark, flooding across the asphalt and carrying a flotsam of skull and brain matter into the gutters. A blue cable soaked in gore extended from where his head was hidden beneath the tarp, and to me it looked like a length of hose or an engorged vein swollen to twenty times its standard size.

“See this, Chuck?” Roemer kicked at a pile of wet glass with the toe of one boot, separating the label from the shattered fragments of the bottle. “Poor bastard. Enjoying a drink, chilling on the railing, and he topples over. This Israel was probably dead before he even realized what had happened.”

I wasn’t sure how to respond, so I kept quiet. More people from the outer buildings of The Corridors were appearing, creeping down the road with open mouths, some gathering in a tangle behind the two cruisers that remained, and the more daring coming right up to the parking area with lurid smiles. Jorge Unkeles, my neighbor in Building no. 12, removed a turn-of-the-century camcorder from his backpack and began filming.

“One of yours?” Roemer said.

“Unkeles!” I roared. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

Jorge lowered the video camera, blinked hard twice, rolled one eyelid down slowly in a wink, and said: “Come on, Chuck. Just act natural.”

 3

“You know, he might have been pushed. Did they make a query into that?”

I was sitting on the edge of my futon across from Dwayne 2000-XL7-B5. He had been waiting in the hallway outside my unit for what he calculated was an elapsed time of three hundred twenty two minutes and four seconds for me to take my lunch break. When I approached, he held up a brown paper bag which I would discover contained a bologna and cheddar sandwich on white bread with the crusts removed, a juice box with a picture of Kool-Aid Man battering through a brick wall on its surface, and a Ziploc bag filled with Laura Scudder’s Salt & Vinegar potato chips.

“I suppose it’s possible,” I replied, and bit into the sandwich he had made for me. “But I spoke with the cops, and according to what Israel’s family told them, he was hammered.”

By the time Betsy and the rest of the leasing agents showed up to the office, the dead body had been taken to the coroners, the crime scene hosed down—the parts of his anatomy that Israel left on the pavement disappearing into the storm drain—and when I clocked out for lunch, a tiny shrine of black votive candles and empty cans of Tecate impaled by coat-hangers that were fashioned into crucifixes had been erected in the planter beside the parking garage of Building no. 1.

“What is hammered?” Dwayne 2000-XL7-B5 asked me.

“It mean’s drunk. Intoxicated.”

“Oh, I see.”

“Take a load off,” I instructed him.

“I must inquire the reason for this request,” he said.

“It makes me nervous, you just standing there. Care for a beer?”

“I do not intend to cause you discomfort.” The android settled into the recliner beside the window, and the blinking circuitry on his breastplate clicked audibly as the blades of the ceiling fan pivoted overhead, cutting the room into shreds of paralyzed sunlight.

“How about that beer?”

“I was not designed to ingest liquids or equipped with digestive software,” he said. “That technology wasn’t on-line until the year 2032 models went into production, the B-722’s.” From the futon I watched the digital display of his smile rise and fall like audio spectrum indicators going from green to amber to red. “It would be wasted on me.”

“Understood.” I shoved the rest of the sandwich through the ring of my lips, took a sip of grape-flavored Kool-Aid, removed a chip from the plastic bag he’d sealed them in and inserted it into my mouth. “Thanks for lunch, anyway, but I should probably get back to—”

“They inquired whether I pushed him or not.”

Dwayne 2000-XL7-B5 took an artificial breath and fell silent. I noticed his visor pulsing as if trying to decipher my non-verbal reaction, or analyzing the data of my mastication as it slowed and stopped.

“You mean the police, right?” I said at last, and slid the Laura Scudder’s aside. “The cops asked you if you pushed Israel off the landing?”

“Yes, that is precisely what I mean.”

I asked reflexively: “Did you?” and regretted it immediately.

Deep within his metallic frame something clanked, gears and springs revolved, gauges shuddered in their housing and the barely-perceptible buzz of a muted alarm sent out its tocsin. The sharp reek of scorched motor oil filled the unit. 

“I did not touch the human,” Dwayne 2000-XL7-B5 said finally.

I was about to tell him I knew for certain he was innocent when the telephone jangled. I rose from the futon, wiped the chip-flavoring dust from my fingers, leaned into the kitchenette to answer it. Jerry’s voice came fluttering from the receiver:

“Uh, Chuck, hi, the office told me to call you about it.”

“What’s going on, Jerry?”

“Well, that Bikini woman is in the hallway, and she’s yelling that she’s going to turn my rabbits dead. It’s making a lot of noise and—”

I heard Dwayne 2000-XL7-B5 disconnect himself from the recliner, cross the room and exit through the front door of my unit, closing it behind him with a soft click.

Jerry continued: “It’s scaring them, it is, and also me, and, uh—”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll be right over.”