The room felt polar, isolated. After midnight, the second-floor office of the Jonathan Stamp Memorial Trust always stood deathly quiet. The cafe next door had closed, the workday world emptied into the suburbs of New York. Tommy glanced over his shoulder at the clock, figuring half an hour before he could call it quits. He thought about checking the downstairs door lock, but remembered he’d already checked it twice this evening.

"Nine-hundred and seventy-four."

Tommy pinned another package and placed it onto the pile. He took a sip of his mocha, trying to warm himself against the chill, thinking about the one thousand packages he had to complete before he left the office. Last week it had been newsletters, two thousand of them to copy, assemble and staple. The week before, Tommy had stuffed over fifteen hundred envelopes.

"Nine hundred and eighty."

As he placed another package on the pile, his arm froze in mid-air. He heard a noise, barely audible, coming up through the floorboards: a low moan, almost sexual. He stopped to listen, the hairs on his neck keenly aware now of the breeze that drifted up the stairs and whipped irregularly around his chair.

The sound stopped.

He shrugged nervously, and continued his work.

"Nine hundred and eighty-three."

He pinned another package and placed it onto the pile. The headlights of a passing car lit the ceiling momentarily, then flickered out, like a lighthouse beacon searching for lonely, single men.

"Typical," thought Tommy. "Left all alone to finish this crap work that no-one else wants to do." He glanced around the room, almost expecting to see ghostly office workers, making faxes and tapping at keyboards, Jan answering phones, Stuart making coffee, Kevin, his boss, in the corner office.

Kevin's assessment of the building hadn't helped Tommy’s nervousness. "It's been like this ever since The Pit closed," Kevin had said, several months ago. "Everyone says this building is haunted by the ghosts of its ex-patrons, all those men who died, but if you ask me… I think it's just bad renovations, finally rotting and subsiding."

Tommy had seen the insides of The Pit, an old gay sex club that had occupied the bricked-up space below the office, before it had been closed in the late eighties. Brad, Tommy’s old boss, and Kevin's predecessor, had taken him down there two years ago, when Tommy had first joined the organization. He remembered the smell of the place, damp and almost salty, as if the walls sweated memories of their sordid past. With just a dim flashlight to guide them, Brad had shown him the old Jacuzzi, filled now with only a fetid layer of brown scum. Walking down a dark corridor, its walls punched with anonymous decayed holes, Brad had led him into what was once a bondage room, where Tommy could still see the metal rings cemented into the wall.

"Three men died in here," Brad had whispered, almost reverentially. "Snorted so much coke and poppers that they passed out, handcuffed to the wall. Apparently something in the drugs they took made them hemorrhage during the night. Nobody knew they were still there until the next morning, when they found them in a pool of their own congealed blood."

The story had made Tommy’s stomach turn, and when a rat crawled across his shoe in the dark, he’d run from the room in fright.

Tommy had heard other rumors too. The most famous: the one about the lecherous old owner of the venue who’d killed his teenage boyfriend, and buried his thin white body under the cement floor. According to legend, in the late seventies and early eighties when the place had filled to capacity, a low moaning sound could be heard in unison with the patrons’ own moans of pleasure. Most laughed at the rumor, but on nights like this, when Tommy was alone, working late, he wondered if there was any truth to it.

 "Nine hundred and eighty-nine."

Tommy completed another package.

“Selfish assholes,” Tommy grunted, as he thought about his colleagues leaving him alone to prepare for tomorrow. He wished Brad was still running the organization instead of Kevin. Then again, Brad had become weird toward the end of his working life. Initially friendly towards Tommy and incessantly chatty, working for the Trust had somehow taken its toll on the man, and Tommy had noticed a definite personality change in him at the end. In his final week Brad had become sullen, making spiteful remarks for no real reason.

Tommy remembered the day they’d prepared for a charity event together. Brad had assigned him to handing out leaflets in the foyer, covered with shocking images of syringes and blood.

“This is out-dated,” Tommy had said, examining the leaflet. “It’s scare tactics. No one will buy it. No one dies of AIDS any more, everyone knows that.”

Brad had wheeled around, a look of hate in his eye. “Really,” he’d said. “Is that right?”

“Yeah,” Tommy had continued. “Not here, anyway. In Africa maybe, but not here. Now there’s combination therapy, it’s a thing of the past. Guys are even bare-backing again.”

“And how would you know anything about it?” Brad had almost shouted. “You must be all of twenty-five. How long have you been working for us? Six months? Since when did you become a fucking expert?”

Tommy had been speechless, startled at the outburst.

“People die,” Brad said. “Just like I’ll die, and just like you’ll die, diseased, in pain, and alone.”

Three weeks later, Brad had hung himself in the same room that Tommy now occupied, as if trying to fulfill his own prophecy. The memory made Tommy shiver, and he pulled his jacket close around his shoulders.

"Nine hundred and ninety-five."

He completed another package.

“Just get this done and go home,” he told himself, trying not to listen to the sound of the wind.

Brad hadn’t been the only one in the organization to undergo a personality change. Tommy had noticed a weary irritability creeping into Kevin lately, and he wondered whether it was just the stress of the job, or something more. He knew Kevin had been having problems with his partner, Dave. When Kevin had first taken on the supervisory position, he and Dave would often work together late at night, just as Tommy worked now, preparing mailings, assembling contact lists, designing brochures. But this had all come to an abrupt halt one night, when Kevin found Dave with another man, making out in the office. Kevin had become difficult to be around after that, and Dave never visited any more.

Tommy picked up another package.

“Fucking faggots,” he murmured, “they all deserve to die.”

He froze on the spot, holding his work in mid-air. The room stood deathly quiet.

“How can I have just said that?” he whispered to himself.

Shocked at his own words, he put down what he was doing and walked over to the window. Outside, the street was deserted, except for a single figure walking hurriedly away in the distance: a woman, her head covered with a gray shawl.

“How can I have said that?” he repeated. For a moment he thought he heard the same low moan again, under his feet.

He tapped his head with his forefinger, mocking himself.

“Crazy,” he sang, in a whisper. “Crazy for feeling so lonely…”

The sound of his own voice made him laugh quietly and he settled back in his chair

"Nine hundred and ninety-six."

He completed another package.

“The problem with you is…” he scolded himself, “you’ve got an overactive imagination. Now just get this done and go home, damn it.”

"Nine hundred and ninety-seven."

Tommy whistled for a while to break the silence. He wished he had a radio, or a television, anything to make some noise. His mind wandered back to the events of the day, coming in to work, buying coffee, answering the phone, arguing with Kevin.

That’s right, he’d argued with Kevin…

He remembered it vividly now, how the argument had depressed him.

“I hate gay men,” Kevin had declared, after receiving an angry, distressing call from a client.

“Come now, you don’t mean that,” Tommy had reassured him.

“I do mean it,” Kevin had snapped. “I hate the whole fucking lot of them, selfish assholes. All this work we do and when they call to get help from us, they’re just the prissiest bunch of grandstanders. I mean, who did that guy on the line think he was? I don’t know what the fuck we’re doing here sometimes.”

“Saving lives?” Tommy had mocked. “Preventing disease before it happens?”

“Oh yeah,” Kevin had snorted. “Who do you think the main sponsor for the Trust is? Who do you think pays your wages?”

“What?”

“They’re shutting us down,” Kevin had said, pushing the phone aside. “The drug company that makes all those HIV medications, the one that gives us ninety-five percent of our funding, they don’t see any need for us now. The epidemic’s over, they say. There’s no need for what we do.”

Tommy’s jaw dropped.

Kevin had sat in silence for a moment, allowing Tommy time to get used to the idea of unemployment. Then he continued slowly, as if talking to himself. “My great grandfather was a rat-catcher you know, back in Ireland, early last century. I remember him saying to me ‘don’t ever try to be perfect, to totally achieve your goal. We did it once, wiped out all the rats in our village. And then we were out of work for a whole year. My family nearly starved to death.’”

“I guess grandpa was right,” Kevin had concluded, reaching for his coat. “You gotta make sure you have enough rats in the system to keep it going.”

"Nine hundred and ninety-eight."

Tommy completed another package.

Another draft whipped around his chair. Tommy pulled his foot from the floor in panic, feeling a long rat’s tail slide across it. Then he laughed nervously as he looked down and saw an electrical cord trailed across the floor.

For a fleeting moment, he thought of his grandmother back in Idaho, her simple values. He wished he could somehow get back to that. Everything in New York was so convoluted. There were no easy divisions here, no single, unswerving, yellow brick road, just a grid of streets offering endless choices.

He looked over at the stairs leading down to the first floor and thought about the second flight that led farther down, into the disused club. Then he heard a sound again, like a whisper, but this time he couldn’t tell if it was coming from downstairs or from within his own head.

"Nine hundred and ninety-nine."

He tossed the package into the pile.

Tommy held the last package before him: a small object, flattish, about an inch and a half square. His fingers traced around a circular ridge, revealing its soft contents.

Tommy thought about how he and his co-workers would hand out the packages tomorrow at the street fair. The men he gave them to would accept them like candy and stash them idly in their pockets or throw them into a drawer by the bed. Each one would eventually be opened, used once and tossed away. The men who used them wouldn’t remember where they came from. Some would even make stupid comments about the Trust as they passed by the familiar white pavilion.

A low buzzing sound reverberated in Tommy’s ear momentarily, the same sound that he’d been hearing for weeks.

Tommy held the final package in one hand and the pin in the other. He pressed the pin firmly through the center and withdrew it, just like he had done nine hundred and ninety-nine times previously this evening. With the tip of his finger, Tommy gently smoothed over the tiny hole in the outside of the package, disguising the place where the pin had entered.

A draft from the stairs whipped around his chair once more, and again Tommy thought he heard a distant low moan, as he tossed package number one thousand onto the pile.

 

THE END