Gallery Hours After Dark

The gallery at night is the quietest place I have ever worked, and I used to work in a library, so that is saying something. It is not just quiet. It is the kind of quiet that sits on your chest a little. Ten thousand square feet of concrete floor and white walls and nothing making a sound except the air conditioner, which wheezes like an old man climbing stairs all summer long.

I am Rudy Flynn, I am 44 years old, and I have been the night guard here at the Ochoa Gallery for about six months now. Before that I was married for 18 years to a woman named Denise, and if you have never gone from a house with three TVs going and a dishwasher running and somebody always calling your name from another room, down to a warehouse with one lamp and a folding chair, well, I do not recommend the shock of it.

You would think I would hate it. I do not. Most nights I walk the perimeter with my flashlight off because the emergency lights give enough glow, and I look at the art, and I do not understand most of it, but that is fine. Nobody asks me to understand it. They ask me to lock the loading door at eleven and sign the sheet and not fall asleep. That I can do.

The thing that keeps the job from being boring is Tobias, the gallery assistant. He is 35, he works evenings, and he talks like a sports commentator who has had too much coffee. He leaves at nine every night, and not one minute later.

"Rudy, I'm telling you, the guy paid twelve thousand for that piece and it's literally a photo of a ceiling," he said tonight, shrugging into his jacket at the door. "Twelve thousand. I could photograph a ceiling."

"You should. Get rich," I said.

"Burton would fire me for selling my own work in his space. He'd find a way. The man holds a grudge like a bank holds a mortgage." He waved and was gone, and then it was just me and the wheeze and the dark.

Except tonight it was not just me, because at half past ten the side door buzzed and there was Burton Ochoa, 39 years old, owner of the building and the art and, technically, my boss, standing there holding a takeout bag and a manila folder.

"Evening, Flynn. You eaten?"

"Uh, it's ten thirty," I said, like that answered the question.

"So you haven't. Good. I got extra." He came in without waiting for me to decide anything, which is a thing Burton does. He does not barge exactly. He just moves forward and lets the room rearrange itself around him.

He set the bag on my folding table. It was from the Thai place two blocks over, and when I opened it the smell filled up the whole little office area, which has no business smelling that good. Noodles, spring rolls, the works.

"You didn't have to do that," I said.

"I was hungry, I overordered, and you look like a man living on vending machine food. I've seen your trash can, Rudy. It's all wrappers," he said it lightly, but he had clearly looked, and something about that made my ears go warm.

He put the manila folder on the table too. That was the part that made no sense. The folder did not need to be here. It was ten thirty at night and he runs this place from his phone most days, and yet here was a folder, and he sat down across from me like we had an appointment.

"I need to go over some invoices with you," he said.

"At ten thirty?"

"Security invoices. Consumables. You'd be amazed how much the flashlight batteries run me." He flipped the folder open and turned it so I could read it, and here is the thing I keep coming back to. His hand moved to point at a line on the page, and his fingers brushed my sleeve. Just brushed it, light, on the way to the paper. Then again a minute later when he turned the page. Two times. Maybe three, I lost count, because I was busy pretending the invoice about batteries was the most fascinating document ever produced by human civilization.

I did not say anything. I want that noted, that I did not say anything, because six months ago I would have made some joke and ruined it. Divorce teaches you to shut up a little. Well. It teaches you some things shut up cannot fix, but it does teach you to shut up.

"This number here," he said, tapping, "is double what we budgeted."

"Is it? Batteries got expensive."

"Rudy." He looked at me over the folder. "I'm making conversation. The batteries are fine. Eat your noodles before they go cold."

So I ate my noodles and he sat there and had a spring roll and did not open his own folder again, and it was a nice ten minutes in a way I could not have explained to Allan. Allan Bigsby is my shift supervisor, 47, been doing security since before I met him, and he is a good man, but he would look at this scene, me and Burton eating Thai at my little table at night, and he would say "Good rapport with the client, that's smart, keeps the job secure." That is the level Allan operates on. God love him.

After Burton left, I did the walk. Perimeter check, every door, the loading dock, the emergency exits, the little bathroom hallway. The AC wheezed. The city hummed through the big old warehouse windows, traffic somewhere, a siren way off. Downtown in summer never fully goes quiet, but the gallery keeps it at a distance, like it is all happening to somebody else.

That is when I stopped in front of the big one. There is a painting at the far end, past the movable partitions, maybe eight feet wide, all abstract, and I have never once been able to tell you what it is supposed to be. Swaths of color, orange and black and this big ugly bruised purple, and then a huge slab of blue across the middle of it, blue like deep water.

I stood there longer than I needed to. My flashlight was off. My round could wait two minutes, nobody was grading me, and if Allan ever found out I lingered on art he would put it in the shift notes with a little smiley face.

Denise loved blue. That is the thought that showed up, uninvited, the way those thoughts do. Our kitchen was blue. Her car was blue. The year she turned 40 she painted the bedroom this pale blue and I held the ladder and said I liked it and I did not, really, but that is marriage for you, you like things by committee. Eighteen years of blue. Then she was gone at 43, well, I was 43, she went off to live her life and I signed the papers on a Tuesday afternoon and drove home to a blue bedroom and sat in the truck in the driveway for an hour.

The painting's blue was nothing like hers. Hers was soft. This was the blue at the bottom of a lake. I liked it better, which felt like a small betrayal and also like progress, and I stood there deciding which one it was until the AC kicked into a higher gear and broke the spell.

I finished the round, signed the sheet, and sat back down at my table, and the folder was still there. He had left it. Security invoices, consumables, batteries. I flipped through it and every page was real, dated, stamped, boring. Nothing in it needed me. Nothing in it explained why a man who owns a gallery drives down here at ten thirty with noodles and paper.

I closed it and put it in the drawer with the logbook, and I thought, well, either he is lonely or I am, and one of us keeps bringing dinner, so maybe that answers itself.

Tomorrow is Thursday. He said, at the door, casual as anything, "I'll be back Thursday, got more paperwork," and I said okay, and we both stood there a second too long before he went out into the heat.

Thursday. Fine. I will be here. I am always here.

Thursday came and went with no Burton, which is the kind of thing that shouldn't sting but did. I sat there with my sandwich and watched the door all night like a dog waiting on the porch. Then Friday, 10:40, headlights in the loading area, and here he came in with another folder and no food this time.

"No dinner?" I asked, before I could stop myself.

"I ate. Figured I'd spare you the noodles two nights running." He set the folder on my table and didn't sit. He stood