The B Line from Vermont/Beverly runs twenty-eight minutes, give or take how long it decides to sit between stops. I know this because I make the trip forty-some weeks a year. I know which car to stand in so I exit near the stairs. I know which escalator at 7th Street is broken more often than not. The left one. I know what the car smells like in June versus October.
Monday morning, none of that was what I was thinking about.
What I was thinking about: a woman sitting on the edge of my bed at two in the morning. Red skin. Wings folded. A glass of water she hadn't drunk. Nine hundred years. She fed on people during sex. Something had happened that had never happened, and she hadn't told me what.
I had not slept badly. I'd sat on the couch for a while after she left and looked at the ceiling crack. Then I'd gone to bed and slept. The morning came in flat and gray through the bedroom blinds at six-thirty the way it always did. Coffee. Metro. Same Monday morning as every other Monday morning.
The weirdness was that it didn't feel weird. The extraordinary thing had happened. Monday was also happening. Both were true at the same time.
The train surfaced past Vermont. I watched the Wilshire Country Club go past in its scrubland kind of way, the grass sun-browned at the edges, a couple of golfers visible at the far end of one fairway in pastels. I got off at 7th Street, walked the two blocks past the breakfast cart on the corner that always had a line at this hour, took the elevator to six.
The IT corner of the sixth floor at eight-fifty on a Monday is the quietest part of the building. Finance's desks were filling on the far side of the partition. The yucca on my partition wall was where it had been on Friday and a leaf at the bottom had given up over the weekend and gone brown all the way through. Somebody had left a mug on the corner of my desk. Sandra from accounting, I knew the mug, World's Best Aunt, with the corner of a Post-it sticking out under it. *Outlook again.* I moved the mug. The Post-it had no other text.
Thirteen tickets in the queue.
One of them had been there since last Wednesday. The LDAP sync issue for the shared credential pool in the logistics division. The tickets above it had been cleared by Friday. I had looked at the LDAP ticket three times and each time put it below the fold. The problem was not that I couldn't diagnose it. The problem was that diagnosing it had told me something I did not have the access level to fix.
What I'd worked out the first time: an admin had pushed a configuration change eight weeks back without documentation, and now twice a week a batch of users on the logistics floor lost their credentials for an afternoon. Ten tickets a week. All different users. Same root cause. I'd sent a routing request two weeks ago to get it kicked up the chain. The chain hadn't moved.
I cleared the four new symptom tickets, added a note to the routing request, moved on.
The printer had an opinion at nine-twenty.
It communicated this opinion by stopping mid-job with an amber light and a screen message that read PAPER JAM: REMOVE JAM AND RELOAD PAPER. The message was technically accurate. What it left out was the rear-feed tension issue I'd been managing for six months with a thumb and a small adjustment that took thirty seconds and the parts-request ticket Facilities hadn't gotten around to. I walked over. The printer was the same printer it had been on Friday. Squat, cream-colored, with a small label on the front in Sharpie that someone had written months ago that said HAL and then crossed out HAL and written PETER. Rear panel off. The jam was a single sheet half through the rollers. I extracted it, corrected the tension, replaced the panel, pressed Resume. The printer processed the remaining nine pages and stopped on the tenth.
I went back to my desk and added a note to the parts-request ticket: *Rear tension issue recurring. Manual correction applied. Estimated recurrence: 3–5 business days.* Filed.
The printer would jam again. This was not a mystery. It was a forecast.
Marcus came across the partition at eleven.
He had two coffees in his hand. He set one down on my desk without asking. Marcus drank his black, and the coffee at the bar nobody maintains is barely-coffee, which he'd informed me of in detail the second week I worked here. He'd brought it anyway.
"Hey," he said.
"Hey."
He stayed standing. His tie was loosened the half-inch he loosened it after the nine-fifteen, his hair flat on one side from however he'd slept on it. He had the expression of someone deciding whether to say a thing.
"You're quiet," he said.
"I'm drinking your bad coffee."
"You're quiet in a way you weren't on Friday." A pause. "Different weekend?"
Friday I had called him about a PT session and a green shirt. Since Friday, things had happened I was not going to discuss at the IT corner of a finance-firm sixth floor on a Monday morning.
"Different weekend," I said.
He looked at me. The look held a quarter second longer than it needed to. He nodded. He didn't push. Marcus had always been good at knowing when to leave something alone.
"Tell me when it's a good thing," he said.
"Will do."
He went back to the glass partition. I drank his bad coffee. It was warm. That was the most you could say for it.
I went back to my desk. Half a granola bar. The mug of bad coffee Marcus had brought. The LDAP routing request. Eleven business days since first submission. Standard response time was three to five. That was the standard.
The chair was still destroying my L4. Three Facilities tickets. All open.
At three-fifteen the printer jammed again. Same rear feed, same amber light, same message. I didn't read the screen anymore. Rear panel, roller, the thumb adjustment, Resume, and it coughed up the same nine pages. I updated the parts-request note: *Second jam, same session. Recurrence interval: 5.9 hours. Previous estimate revised down.* Filed.
Metro home at 5:12. I got my corner spot without trying. The one where my back was to the doors and I could see the whole car. The B Line runs underground until it surfaces past Vermont, and then you get the last stretch of daylight before 7th Street. Monday-evening light through the windows in long sliding squares across the floor as the car moved.
The car at this hour had the usual Monday end-of-day mix. A woman across from me reading something on a tablet, the cover of the tablet folded back at an angle that meant she'd been on it the whole ride. Two guys in dust-coated construction clothes seated together with their eyes closed and their bodies leaning into each other at the shoulder where they'd dozed off. A kid with headphones doing homework on the seat-facing wall, an English worksheet on a clipboard on his knee, his pencil moving in the resigned rhythm of a kid who'd been at it since the school day ended. A woman in a delivery-service polo with her hat on her lap. Nobody extraordinary. Nobody whose weekend had stopped making sense. Just people commuting home.
I was also just commuting home.
The apartment was going to be the same. She hadn't left anything behind. The water glass was in the drying rack. I'd put it there this morning.
No number. She hadn't given me one. I hadn't asked, because at the time the more pressing question was whether she was going to explain the wings. She had. She'd told me the word, succubus, and the number, nine hundred years, and that something about me had broken a pattern that had held across all of them. She hadn't told me what.
I didn't know what to do with any of it. She'd held the water glass. She hadn't drunk it. She'd said *I didn't know it would end like that* and I still didn't know what she'd meant by *that.*
I thought about it for the twenty-eight minutes, then got off at Vermont/Beverly and walked home through the early evening Koreatown that was just starting to turn on its signage. The BBQ places with their red neon, the karaoke bar with its purple, the convenience store on the corner with the fluorescent that flickered for a half-second before settling, the cosmetics shop already closed but with its window lit. My building's lobby. Four flights. My door.
Same apartment as Friday.
The water glass was in the drying rack.
I left it there.