Cigarette butts line the baseboards of my apartment. I have stacked them three and four high, lacquered into place with glue, gum, spit. My nicotine boundary is important. I crawl along in the dark and smell my stale ash-paper ramparts to remember when I burnt each dart. Penitents and Disputees flicker up my nostrils along invisible threads of wasting-away tar and ash, auspices burning my sinuses. There is forethought in the memories they bring. Often, there are screams.
Smiley chose this domicile on my behalf because of its unique qualities. An ancient association of thieves whose names were forcibly forgotten crafted their disguises and trickeries in secret in a nondescript storehouse on this site. That was centuries ago, of course, but the taste of their stealth is sharp on my new tongue: basalt and cream. It is a shroud for my presence. The Others must not know the Arbiter is here. My neighbors profit from the hidden-in-plain-sight warding as well. Their rents have never increased, and they receive no junk mail. It can be hard to have Chinese delivered, but at least it is peaceful.
***
The Arbiter’s presence brings a coppery unease to the financial district. It tastes, faintly, through the grille in Their cowl, the way a boxing ring smells between rounds. Knots of traders and couriers avert their eyes from the Arbiter’s path, and They ignore the Others in kind. They enter an office building and hail an elevator. No one joins Them in the car. They press 73.
They ride up, basking in the glow of “Margaritaville,” covered by Kenny G. On the eighteenth, thirty-third, and sixtieth floors, the elevator doors open to reveal business persons ready to travel up, but when they see the Arbiter’s dark stillness, they step back and wait for the next elevator. Their hearts falter, pores seep musky, fearful sweat, and they thank their gods that the Arbiter is not getting off onto their floor.
The Arbiter steps out on the seventy-third floor into a silent reception chamber. Two somber groups of Others face Them, opaque financiers. Two individuals step forward, one from each side, a man and a woman. The Disputees. Wordlessly, they lead the Arbiter to a conference room overlooking the city. The man leans for the head of the table, a bare millisecond of ostentation, but cedes it to the Arbiter. He and the woman take seats on either side of Them.
***
My apartment is a corner unit on the second of eight floors in the rear of a taupe building in an area that is not rightly called a neighborhood. It is a meaningful position, according to Smiley. The north wall overlooks a service passage filled with dumpsters and rusted-in bicycle racks. It is quiet and smells ripe.
The west wall abuts another unit, which is occupied by an Ageless by the name of…I have forgotten. They never learned the name I use, either. They have lived there since the building was erected and will see it to its logical end. I think they are a nurse, but they have no scruples or social life to speak of, at least none that I can smell. Still, their fragrance is calming, neroli and violet.
My south wall holds my door, facing the stairs. Road dust, grease spatter, woolen fuzzles, and rubber scuffs cover the outer wall about the entry. The leavings of passersby camouflage the sigils of protection etched around the portal. I once watched from the open door as dozens of tenants walked by without so much as a glance.
The east wall faces the street, a quiet one, known traditionally among the city’s cyclists as part of a shortcut around a particularly dangerous automotive interchange that the aldermen have been promising to reevaluate for fifty years. The Others love to lie, which is really what keeps me in business. I hear their rumors in the click of gears and swift, grunted greetings below my dark curtains. Messages wash up on my walls like flotsam from the river of rubber and flesh.
***
On the table before the Arbiter is a sheaf of papers, the contract in question. They consume it carefully, passing it page by page through a slit in Their mask, taking time to savor each writhing line of bitter legalese. The room is still, a dry plain before a thunderstorm, and the papers crackle in the Arbiter’s gloved hands. As the document is transformed, They reach into Their gaping left sleeve, producing a half-empty pack of Lucky Strikes and a lighter. Removing a single cigarette, They stand it filter down on the table, candle-like, and light it. The smoke is slow and purplish, ripplingly acrid, and the coal is dim. The Arbiter extends a fist to each Disputee, fourth fingers naked and outstretched to link with the shivering Disputees. They speak softly through a modulator that gives Their voice the quality of sand pouring over piano strings.
“We have reviewed the contract. Arbitration shall now commence. Please focus your vision on the ceremonial smoke. Try to relax.”
The man and woman stare fixedly at the smoldering cigarette and the Arbiter begins to hum, a low drone that rises and falls with the tendrils of smoke. They can feel the fingers relaxing in Their grip, can sense the connection growing through a maze of dermal cells, infinitesimal crystals of potassium, ammonia, and lactic acid. The woman’s head slowly droops down to rest on the table. The man leans back in his chair and a line of saliva streaks down his chin. The Arbiter sinks into Themself, pulling the Disputees down with Them. Arbitration begins.
***
Layout was high on Smiley’s house-hunting list. When you enter my apartment, you are faced with a narrow foyer. There is a closet to the left, and the portal to my living space opens on the right behind the swing of the door, hiding it from the hall. I keep the closet door closed and an old jacket hanging on the knob as if it is too full of dustier, older, lesser-used garments to be of any interest. A bookshelf is to the right of the closet, holding empty photo frames, piles of the Others’ mail, and a bowl for keys I find in the street or in pockets. No one living has seen it but it is a homey entry.
I have blocked up the cased opening to the rest of my domicile with moldering timbers pried from pallets at the docks, wood from Malaysia, and the Yukon and Darfur. Between the timbers, I have stuffed shopping bags and scraps of fabric I found on roadsides, bound with gobs and strips of tape gathered from facade painters’ worksites and missing dog posters, and the sticky bits of discarded parcel boxes from online retail outlets. The Others waste such valuable things.
In the middle of the frame is my crooked door. I stapled opaque strips of moldy shower curtains to the lintel alongside frayed electrical wires cast from the windows of highrises under renovation, tangles of fishing line beside strands from a dozen bead curtains tossed out of college dormitories. Smiley left me rough schematics for the wall, blue marker scribbled on the foyer floor. It was a loving message.
“REFuse = refuge
seal here top 2 bttm
layers!!!!!!!”
When I first took up residence here, Smiley’s messages were the only things I had. The one in the foyer is covered up by my portal but the second one I keep safe in my office, stapled to a wall. It is a flattened takeout container with grease stains and scrawls of that same blue marker. It found it in the master bathroom, which is much larger now than it once was. I can recite the note from memory.
“secured domicile U R welcome
Work rough, stay clean and wet, and build a Maintenance
privacy from Others is KEY”
I remember the admonishments every day and follow them closely, even when the hum of the city chews its way into my frontal lobe. Smiley seeded my refuge with a cash offer, a blue marker, and a handful of spells. It was an apartment set apart. Set apart from the Others. Then I arrived and made it my shrine, following the instructions. I kept to myself, I kept neat and moist, I built a process for Maintenance.
***
Through a shadowy morass of mingled memories and Otherly neuroses, the Arbiter swoops along aether webs of intention and choice, smelling hot ammoniac guilt and magnesium fears. They recall the contract, desiccated in their gut, each toothsome jot and decadent tittle of services rendered and accounts payable, delicate streams of transactional power dissolving into the periphery. They hear a crackle in the datastream, a froggy squelch echoing back, but from where? From whom? Nerves reach out, tasting, listening in on two memories, filtering, collating between fancy and schema until They find it, tonguing a phrase from the soup of wet dreams and quarterly projections. They broadcast it in a loop to the enmeshed minds at the tips of Their pinkies.
“…and void should either party (defined as any executive of Dextron or Teliosale privy to the aforementioned) break confidentiality as defined in Section…”
Such a small thing. The Arbiter scoops the corresponding memory from its wet nerves and kneads it into the repeating phrase, a vision of the man to Their right slurring conspiratorially to a more-than-a-waitress in the murky glow of an underground club. The braided memory and contractual verbiage swirl into a rapidly gyrating psychic density that throws off quarks of vinegar and camphor. The Arbiter flicks this verdict right up the ulnar nerve of the guilty man.
***
When I return from my work at dawn, dusk, noon, or midnight, I drag my quivering self up the stairs and through my door. The bolt is never set because I am the key. I wave my hands and the spells allow me passage. The door opens on its own and in I go, shedding the layers of my disguise, limbs shaking. The pants, shirt, wig, sweater, mask, and underthings get folded and put in the foyer closet along with all my other urban-middle-class-bookish-divorced-accountant things. I always brace the closet door so they cannot get out.
Beside my rippling portal of plastic are a rubbish bin and a vinyl tote on a woven mat. I half-filled the tote with dishwater, coffee grounds, and slime molds of three dozen varieties which I cultured in the kitchen. After barring the closet, I kneel and lather my skull with lukewarm driblets of the stuff, smelling the technicolor rot trickle down me. I vomit into the rubbish bin, once, twice, pulp and bile leaping from me. On rare occasions, there is a third heave, with blood. Always I feel myself melting. I sweat and shake and purge, and when I squelch through my stringy door, it accepts my scent, and I am solid once more.
A certain degree of tangibility is required for my work. I cannot be the Arbiter if I allow the atmosphere of the city to deliquesce my form into so much pink sludge on the curb. I must scour, marinate, rebuild. I must Maintain. The bath waits. My refuge gurgles and drips in my mind as I drag my slobbering self across the floor until the anticipation is blinding. I feel the door’s heat on my face and collapse through it in a gasp of steam and wet green light.
***
Three sets of eyes open together. The man screams and recoils from the Arbiter’s touch, falling from his chair into a pool of his own urine. The woman slowly raises her head from the table, her eyes fuzzy cisterns. The cigarette has burnt down nearly to the filter and gone out, a single filament of smoke whispering to the ceiling. The Arbiter gathers it up and stuffs it into Their robe, addresses the Disputees in Their mechanical buzz.
“Arbitration has been successful. Contract nullified in favor of Dextron, Incorporated, which shall control Teliosail and its constituents effective immediately. Guilt assigned to Jon Kellter, who is remanded to Arbiter custody.”
The woman nods absently, and the Arbiter stands, approaches Kellter, who continues to grovel in the puddling of his morning coffee and last night’s tequila. He is shivering, mumbling nothings to himself through strings of drool. The Arbiter grips his collar and hauls him upright, dragging him shambling out of the conference room to the elevator. The waiting throng of Others stifle gasps and groan as one body presses themselves against the walls away from the Arbiter’s metronome pace and dripping prey.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Kellter slurs, saliva pouring down his chin onto his necktie.
The Arbiter hails the elevator, going up. Kellter cranes his neck, frantic to find a merciful eye in the crowd of Others.
“Please, please help me,” he moans. His knees give out, and he pulls at the Arbiter’s robes. “Please, I’m sorry, please!”
The elevator comes, and the Arbiter drags Kellter into the mirrored car. The doors close, and They are gone. The office erupts into a new silence. Jon Kellter’s designated successor tells them all to take the rest of the day off and delivers a set of keys and secrets to the woman in the conference room, where a janitor is already erasing the final proof of Jon Kellter’s existence. The woman is playing with her hair and looking out over the city. She smells lavender.
***
In the gray days of my lonely apprenticeship, I could never seem to get myself clean. The master bath was simply not up to the task. It took a great deal of labor to break it in, but I am finally satisfied with it. For now.
My first priority was a larger tub, one I could really float in. Carrying such a thing home without drawing attention was out of the question, so I had to get creative with a dozen or so plastic totes, a heat gun, bulk epoxy, and scraps of pool liner. I sculpted a lagoon for myself, and when it was ready, I carved away the side of the tub to unite the two vessels. I spent a manic period patching a series of stubborn leaks, frantically shoring up the flaccid walls of the pool. The ceiling needed to go anyhow, so I ripped it down in chunks and used plaster and timbers to backfill between the lagoon and the walls. Still, the leaks persisted. Weeping in frustration, I slathered glue and snot and joint compound and grease into crevices and holes. The dribbles disappeared, but I found myself trapped.
The bits of ceiling had wedged the door shut, hardening under layers of slime, and the lights flickered in their damaged and dangling sockets. I lunged at the walls, hissing and beating with my fists until I forced my way out through a crumbling fissure of sheetrock and wires into the light of the hall. I lay shivering on the floor, splinters and dust molded into my bubbling and bruised flesh, born into a new caution. The Arbiter must think of the consequences.
***
In the elevator, the Arbiter keys the call button, and an operator picks up after two rings.
“How may I assist you?”
(“Please,” Kellter whispers.)
“This is the Arbiter. Roof access, please.”
There is a pause. The static is coconut milk sweet.
“Please press 75. The door to the stairs will be the second on your right after leaving the elevator. It will be unlocked. If you could ensure it is closed behind you, that would be lovely. May I assist you further?”
(“Help me,” Kellter croaks.)
“No. Thank you.”
“My pleasure. Thank you, and have a good day.”
The operator’s words are measured, calm, but his fear wafts through the speaker. Routineness does not imply comfort. Kellter sobs, quivering in the Arbiter’s grasp, but does not struggle. He will not run.
The elevator bell rings, and the dour pair steps out onto the seventy-fifth floor, a rough utility hall lined with derelict printers and broken office chairs. They turn right. Far down the corridor behind them, a door slams. Kellter flinches. The Arbiter walks on.
The door is open as promised, and the Arbiter shuts it behind Them. They lead Kellter up two flights of stairs and into the light of day. The air is cleaner a thousand feet above the city, wizened and plum colored. Winds dance amongst the Arbiter’s robes and slap Kellter’s befouled tie into his face. The Arbiter walks Kellter to the ledge. The city stretches to the horizon, fading into indistinct vapors at its edges. The street below beckons. Kellter spits out a question.
“Why won’t you say anything to me?”
***
I remodeled more carefully after my careless entrapment. I sanded and shaved away the ragged edges my rage had created, eroding scraps of ceiling and walls particle by particle. Dust began to fill the cracks, and I sprayed it down to keep it from choking me. Soon, things began to grow in the damp shadows of my bric-a-brac refuge, molds, and fungi, pink and black and ripe, and I lit upon an idea.
I began to carry home bags of soil from parks and from ditches, from graveyards and firing ranges, from all the places in the city where green life and creeping chemistry conspire together. I packed the rigid frame surrounding my pool with earth layer by layer, padding, packing, planting. Before long, I could walk through the room once again rather than clambering monkey-like in the darkness over dust-caked spars. Once I trimmed the bottom off the door and sealed it with windshield wipers woven with broom bristles, the bones of my sanctum were whole, a skeleton well-knit and ready to be dressed in flesh.
When I return home now, when I stumble and collapse into so much ooze, my refuge is warm and wet. Through trial and error, I have synchronized the drain and faucet so the lagoon is always full. At first, I would find the standing water tepid, losing heat and gaining a film of dust while I was out. That told me the sanctum was unsealed, so I made it hermetic. The walls gained layers as if fattening for winter, rubber sheets from nursing homes, patches of foil from fast food rubbish bins, plexiglass riot shields, and gobs of grout sealer. I found aquarium heaters and reptile lamps to provide warmth, plugged them into drop cords from construction sites, and sealed the connections with tape and rubber cement. Heat and wet stay now, my dearest friends, forever awaiting my return in the light of a dozen false suns.
***
The Arbiter takes a pause, Their first in decades. Sunlight wreathed in cloud presses down on the rooftop.
“What do you want Us to say to you?”
“I don’t know, maybe, ‘I’m sorry?'” Kellter sniffles.
The Arbiter turns to face Jon Kellter.
“We are not sorry.”
Kellter wipes his nose on his sleeve, elbow to wrist.
“Figures.”
“Does it?”
“Everyone says you’re cold bastards. Damn freezing up close.”
“The Others say this about Us?”
“Yeah.”
“What else do they say about Us?”
“They say you’re brutal, cannibals, heartless every one of you.”
“Every one of Us?”
“Mhm.”
“What do you mean by ‘everyone?'”
“What?”
The Arbiter does not repeat Their question. Kellter sits roughly on the wide ledge of the roof, glowering in silent confusion.
“You’re not the only Arbiter,” he says.
“What is this metaphor?”
“It’s not a metaphor. You are quite seriously not the only Arbiter.”
The smog at the edges of the city rings with distant thunder and the scent of peaches.
“You are wrong, Jon Kellter,” The Arbiter drones.
“No, I don’t think I am,” Kellter says, stronger now. “There are more of you.”
“We judge all rights and wrongs, no one else.”
“All the rights and wrongs in Milwaukee maybe, but not in the Confederation, and certainly not the whole fucking world. You’d have died of lung cancer well before now with all them damn cigarettes.”
“We are confused. Do you and the Others truly believe in more than one Arbiter?”
“Uh, yeah?”
The Arbiter steps back and visibly deflates in Their robes.
“Sorry to burst your bubble. There’s just no way it’s only you,” Kellter says.
From the loosely pooled black wrappings of the Arbiter comes a rippling huffing noise, toneless wheezes and coughs that evolve into cacophonous laughter as the robes shiver with glee. The Arbiter’s voice modulator is like a pneumonic with a kazoo, Their gelatine ribcage splitting at the sides. They gather Themself, clapping a gloved hand to Kellter’s shoulder.
“Ah, Jon Kellter.” They squeeze the accountant’s shoulder with a grip like a vice. “Do you know how many Arbitrations We do each day? How many lives We break and bind while you wallow in your corner offices with your hidden bottles of bourbon, consulting interns, and spreadsheets? Do you know, Jon Kellter?”
Kellter falls to his knees under the splintering grip of the Arbiter. Thunderheads broil up mahogany and teal from every compass point. He cries out, wailing and gasping.
“No no no I don’t know I don’t know how many – I’m sorry I’m sorry please stop hurting me please – please just let me die-hi-hi-hi-hi!”
The Arbiter considers for a moment, then picks Kellter up by the left arm, raising him writhing into the sky.
“No, We don’t think We will.”
***
I slip into the lagoon, close my eyes, and sink to the bottom. Time is meaningless in this warmth, in this embrace. The waters are my lover. They penetrate my very cells and draw out the grime of the city. When I inevitably float back to the surface, I am spent feeling orange all over with the taste of cinnamon on my tongue. I crawl from the water and ease myself into the deep banks of moss I have cultivated about the pool. Garden time is key to my Maintenance.
The decoration of my sanctum proceeded naturally once I sealed, heated, and lit the space. As the sediments around the lagoon settled, I filled in the holes, handfuls of dirt from patio planters left for chaff, and cups of earth from forgotten playgrounds. Small lives sprang from each addition, plasmodia and amoeba and creeping kaleidoscopic molds. Fungi threw up their fibrous and flabby forms and collapsed once more to earth. Mites and spiders warred over the primordial microscape. Then a seed sprouted with a thunderous bang, and another and another. Stowaway weeds, phytolacca, lamiastrum, clematis, all colonized the fresh muck.
I brought cuttings and leaves and seeds and shoots. Some grew, some rotted, all filled my refuge. In the cloying heat, green things began to dance. Now when I lie dripping, solidifying in the verge that rings the pool, the shade of colocasia, pothos, and heracleum quiver in tendrils of steam above me. A brace of geckoes haunts my little glen and traverses my rippling dome of rubbish. Their company is pleasant. They have no dreams.
***
“What? I’m not going to die? Isn’t that what’s supposed to happen now?” Kellter asks.
“Yes. It is what you deserve, but We believe you merit something more. A promotion,” the Arbiter said.
“What do you mean?”
“You asked what the Arbiter says to the guilty, did you not? You called into question the logistics of Arbitration. If you are so curious, why don’t We teach you?”
“I thought you said I was wrong.”
“Ah, Jon Kellter. You were wrong, and you were right, but above all, you were inquisitive. Congratulations. It is a rare thing among the Others and deserves recognition.”
An umami wind springs up and Kellter regards the Arbiter through his whipping bangs.
“You mean you aren’t going to kill me?”
“We are not going to kill you.”
“I’m not going to be punished?”
“We didn’t say that,” the Arbiter murmurs.
***
When I have had enough of green, dripping heat, my Maintenance continues with a close inspection of my apartment, its wards, sigils, and tobacco fortifications, followed by a meal. If I am in a slump, I may only drink a packet of tasteless nutrient powder dissolved in warm water and retreat to my bed. Otherwise, I will take a jug of blended cold tea, boiled eggs, fermented vegetables, and some fossilized candy bar or leftover jelly beans to the living room and make myself busy with Extracurriculars.
Extracurriculars were pointedly encouraged by Smiley from day one. Before my tears and plasma had even crusted, Smiley shoved a pair of left-handed scissors into my wet grip and gestured vaguely to a pile of magazines, dime novels, and advertising flyers lying in the alley. I was left there, chained by my thoughts to a standpipe, alone save for the sliding mass of glossy imagery and flaking prose, alone for days. When Smiley returned from Their other errands, I had begun to see the patterns that They had wanted me to see and had curated them with cuts, creases, collations, mosaics of newsprint, and photo paper. My eyes were dry, and my fingers knicked into a burning crosshatch of hot paper bites, and if Smiley had not lost Their face, They would certainly have beamed.
The walls of my living room are papered with layers of disembodied faces, small and large, glossy and matte, bands of printed phrases in undulating spirals and stripes, rippling landscapes composed of hundreds of snapshots pasted to plastic sheets hanging from ceiling to floor. When a sheet becomes full of my ephemeral text I hang it on a rod in a carpet rack I lifted in pieces from a resale store. If I lack the energy to add to the current collage, I leaf through the stiffening hangings, admiring visions that span millions of memories and miles of newsprint.
The collages tell stories about my life. They tell about Arbitration, about my Maintenance, my home, my mind, my tastes and interests. Every day, they seem more remote. They tell of the things that I was told by Smiley, to whom I am eternally grateful. They say:
“Find the being to whom nothing happens, and you will find the Arbiter. The Arbiter happens to the world.”
“Find the being who no one knows, and you will find the Arbiter. The Arbiter knows everyone.”
“Find the being who cannot be remembered, and you will find the Arbiter. The Arbiter remembers you.”
***
“So I am going to die, but you’re not going to do it, right? Some kind of sick fairytale shit?” Kellter groans.
“Not quite. You won’t die for a long, long time. In a sense.” The Arbiter turns away from the guilty man and surveys the city.
“But I will still be punished?”
“Correct.”
“Then you’re going to torture me.”
“We are going to turn you into an Arbiter.”
Kellter squints out over the hum of the city, shakes his head and spits.
“Alright then, do it already,” he growls in defiance.
The Arbiter laughs Their harmonica laugh from deep within Their undulating thorax and murmurs to the breeze, lifting both hands to Their hood.
“You are unprepared for eternity.”
“What?” Kellter asks.
“Look at Us.”
***
If I am not in the mood for Extracurriculars, I will do what I call Not-Work. This involves planning, executing, and analyzing the findings of undercover excursions into the world of the Others. It was never part of the stated job description Smiley gave me, but They said it would help me with my formal duties nonetheless, so it must be worthwhile.
I fire up the mechanisms of my science in the kitchen and begin to melt and dissect and datify my samples of the city. I forge my disguises, I make my assumptions. I inscribe my notes into the walls with a razor blade, and when I run out of room, I paint over my glyphs, fertilizing the next layer of canvas with learnings.
I venture forth across the city on expeditions of discovery, of remembrance. I collect items necessary for Maintenance and Extracurriculars. I rub myself with petroleum jelly and dress in plastic wrap and bandages, toting an empty rucksack and a satchel of tools. I search for my name in the city that I once called home.
As I gather knowledge, I heed Smiley’s first directive, framed as an answer to my first and final question:
“You will learn. The Arbiter must die forever and ever.”
***
The Arbiter turns and flings back Their hood. Beneath the shadowy cowl and sleek mask, Kellter sees a featureless plain of skin, undulating in wormy bulges from underneath the dermis, twitching about forgotten musculatures. He whispers into the rushing wind of the oncoming storm.
“Where’s your face?”
“We drew so many minds into Our own that We could no longer tell Ourself from all the dreams We had saved and destroyed. We lost our visage one Arbitration at a time.”
“Why?”
“You will learn.” The Arbiter lurches forward.
Kellter scrambles backward away from the Arbiter, whose laugh rings through a skull that writhes in sores and lesions that flare and fade in time to the pulsing energy beneath. A gash like a grin cuts across the pale leather bulb, and Kellter rolls away, rolls to the right, and into thin air.