Stairwell Beat

I was up on the roof of the old broadcast building with the sun cooking the back of my neck, welding a bracket onto the satellite dish mount, when I started thinking about Chloe again. My name is Dorian Stephens, I'm forty-four years old, and I've been a welder for most of my working life, so you'd think by now I'd know how to keep my mind on the bead. But eight months ago she left me for a man with more money, and the whole time I was working that bracket my head was somewhere else entirely.

The dish itself was aimed at a broadcast tower that hadn't sent a signal in years, which felt about right for the whole island of Pingelap, a place where everything seemed to be pointed at something that didn't work anymore. The dish needed that bracket repaired or the next storm would take the whole feed down, and the feed was the only thing keeping the crew connected to the outside world, so there I was, forty-four and sweating and thinking about a woman who was probably somewhere air conditioned.

Chloe and I dated for two years. She packed up on a Tuesday and said I was a good man with no ambition, which is the kind of thing that sticks to your ribs. And the man she left me for, the one with the boat or the condo or whatever it was, apparently had friends in the business I work in, because the rumor had come down the crew grapevine that her new fella was going to be on island this week, and that some of the local workers ran a beatboxing session at night in the old sound-treated stairwell on the ground floor of this same building.

So that was the plan, and I'm not proud of it, but there it was. Show up at the stairwell, run into the guy, let Chloe hear through the grapevine that I was doing fine and looking better, let her wonder. Two years together and the best idea I could come up with was making a woman jealous from four thousand miles away. The torch hissed and the bracket glowed and I told myself it wasn't about her, it was about doing something at night besides staring at the ceiling of my room.

I finished the weld and let the bracket cool, and that's when I heard a voice carrying up from the ground floor, a woman's voice, sharp and clear and getting sharper. It was aimed at somebody from the office, and even with the distance I could pick out the words room assignment over and over, like she was trying to explain something simple to somebody determined not to get it.

"Then tell me which room it is, because the paper says the stairwell and you're telling me the stairwell isn't a room."

I couldn't hear the answer but I could hear her talking over it, which takes a certain kind of confidence.

"It's not a typo, it's a schedule, and schedules are my whole job, so if the beatboxing session has moved, somebody moved it without telling me."

I sat up on the edge of the dish platform to watch, because there wasn't much else to watch. She was standing by the door of the building with a folder in one hand, arguing with Mr. Anson from the office, a thickset man who communicated mostly by shaking his head. She was small next to him but she wasn't backing up an inch. Red hair coming loose from a clip, a plain cotton dress with ink stains on the pocket, shoes that were wrong for the gravel and she knew it and didn't care.

I should say here who she turned out to be, though I didn't know it yet. Caroline Grantham, thirty-nine years old, the workforce retraining liaison officer sent out to Pingelap on assignment, the person responsible for the schedules and the paperwork and apparently for every mistake in both. I learned her name ten minutes later and her age that same night, and the age matters to me because I've got no patience for anyone who'd think a woman of thirty-nine needs handling.

* * *

She gave up on Anson, or rather she decided Anson was a lost cause, which was faster, and she came around the side of the building where the outside stairs went up to the roof, and she started climbing them. I went back to pretending to work, which is a skill all welders develop.

"Hello up there," she said, arriving at the top of the stairs with the folder still in her hand and her face flushed from the climb. "You're up on the dish. Is the dish still in use or is this another thing pointed at nothing?"

"It's in use," I said. "Feeds the crew quarters. I'm just fixing the mount."

"Well then, good. Somebody should be fixing things." She came over and stood looking out past the dish at the lagoon, fanning herself with the folder. "You haven't by any chance heard about a beatboxing session tonight, have you? Because I was told, in writing, that it would be held in the stairwell on the ground floor of this building, and now I'm told the stairwell is for storage and the session is somewhere I can't find on any map."

I laughed before I could stop myself, and she turned and gave me a look that said she was used to people laughing and didn't like it.

"Sorry," I said. "It's just that the rumor I heard says the stairwell too. The sound-treated one. And the rumor also says the session still happens there, storage or no storage."

"Then somebody is lying to me, or everybody is lying to me, which around here seems to be the default setting." She flipped the folder shut. "I'm Caroline Grantham, by the way, the retraining liaison. I've been on island four days and I've been sent to three wrong rooms and one wrong island office, so my standards for directions are low but my standards for people aren't."

"Dorian Stephens. Welder." I wiped my hands on a rag out of habit, though there was nothing on them. "And I can walk you to the stairwell later if you want, when it's actually in use. That's if you want the company of somebody who knows where at least one room on this island is."

She looked at me properly then, the way a person looks when they're deciding something, and she said, "That would be good, actually. What time?"

"Nine, ten at night. The locals run it after their shifts. You'll need to knock loud, the sound treatment keeps everything in."

"Well. Nine or ten." She smiled for the first time, quick and sideways. "That's a wide window, Mr. Stephens."

"I'm not a schedule man," I said. "That's your department."

And she laughed, a real one, and then went down the stairs with the folder swinging, and I stood there by a fixed bracket on a dish aimed at a dead tower feeling like I'd just gotten away with something.

The thing I hadn't counted on, and wouldn't count on until later, was that I'd spent weeks planning to run into a rumor at that stairwell, and instead I was going to be thinking about a woman with ink stains on her dress pocket for the rest of the night, which was not the plan at all.

The stairwell turned out to be exactly where the rumor said it would be, which surprised me, because on Pingelap a rumor is usually wrong about everything except the rum itself. I knocked loud like I'd told her to, and a local worker named Joakim opened the door, looked at me, looked at the woman standing behind me in her wrong shoes, and waved us both in without a word. The sound treatment was real, and it was what got me every time, layer after layer of old padding and board on the walls going all the way up the stairwell, so that the whole tall shaft of it acted like an instrument and the beatboxing came off the concrete in layers. We sat on the second landing, me and Caroline, and I made a point of leaving a full step of space between us, because I was there for a reason I hadn't told her about and I didn't want to be the kind of man who invites a woman to a thing and then crowds her at it.

The session was good, better than I expected if I'm honest with myself, three of the local guys trading beats back and forth while a fourth kept a low bass line going with his hands cupped over his mouth, and the sound of it rolled up past us and echoed off the top of the shaft and came back down changed. Caroline sat with her folder on her knees, closed, and she watched the way I watch a weld, total attention, and every so often she'd nod at something nobody else could hear.

"You're tense," she said about twenty minutes in, leaning over so I could hear her under the bass. "You've been tense since we walked in. You keep checking the door."

"I'm not checking the door."

"You've checked the door six times. I count things, it's my whole job. Schedules, headcounts, doors."

So I told her a piece of it, not all of it, just the piece that made the checking make sense. "There's a man supposed to be here this week. Business acquaintance of a sort. I wanted to run into him, that's the long and short of it."

"And he's not here."

"He's not here."

"Four days I've been lied to about rooms, and now you've been lied to about a man." She shook her head at the folder like it was responsible. "This island owes both of us an apology."

I laughed at that, a real one, and some of the tension went out of my shoulders, and she noticed, because she notices things, and she went back to listening with that little nod, and I stopped checking the door around eleven when it became plain that nobody was coming who cared about my reasons. Chloe had left me eight months back, on a Tuesday, packed up in an afternoon after two years, and she'd told me I was a good man with no ambition right before she did it, and the man she left me for had friends in my business and money I'd never see, and I had built a whole plan out of standing in a stairwell looking like I was thriving. Sitting there with a woman who counted doors, the plan looked thin. The plan looked like what it was, which was a Tuesday I couldn't get over.

* * *

The session broke up past midnight, the guys packing their water bottles and joking on their way out, and Joakim locked the stairwell door behind us like the sound was something you could steal. Me and Caroline walked up the outside stairs instead of down, no plan to it, we just kept climbing, and ended up on the roof by the dish with the whole lagoon laid out silver under a half moon. The trade wind had dropped and the air was warm the way it gets at that hour, warm like a room, and the crew quarters down below had gone quiet except for one radio somewhere playing low.

"Your dish is pointed at a dead tower," she said, standing at the rail and looking up at it. "You know that, don't you. That tower hasn't sent anything in years."

"It fed the whole region once. Somebody aims at it anyway, on principle." I shrugged. "I weld what they put in