The Night Guard

I unlock the conservation lab at 10:47 PM. The lock is old and the key sticks, so I have to jiggle it twice, and the sound of my boots on the tile goes down the empty wing and comes back to me. Nobody else works this floor at night. That is the point. That is why I took the night shift eight months ago.

I unplug the overhead fluorescents first thing. The hum of those tubes is worse than the silence. So I work by the blue glow of my monitor, photographing a mounted snowy owl one frame at a time, and the lab turns into a blue cave with dead birds in it. Felix the fox on the counter. Two herons. A badger with a chipped ear that nobody has fixed since 1961. I talk to them sometimes. Not out loud. In my head.

My husband has been dead eighteen months. I do not think about it while I work, which is why I work. The camera shutter clicks and the owl's glass eye flashes and that is the whole night, night after night. It is fine. It is numb, and numb is a place I can live.

Then I hear boots on the marble stairs.

I freeze with my hand on the mouse. The stairwell door is two floors down and the sound carries, and every night for months Felix has done his 11:00 round and passed this floor without stopping. His boots hit the third floor landing. I wait for them to keep going.

They stop.

His flashlight beam comes through the glass wall of the lab and lands on my desk. It sits there. Four seconds. Five. The blue light of my monitor and the white circle of his flashlight, pointed at my chair, at my cold coffee, at the owl.

Then the beam moves on. His boots go up the stairs.

I let out my breath. My heart is doing something stupid. He has never stopped before. I tell myself he was checking that the lab was locked, that the light was off, that everything was normal. That is all it was.

I go back to the owl.

* * *

Twenty minutes later the boots come back down. And this time there are two sets of footsteps, and a woman's voice, and laughing.

"Okay, this place is creepy," the woman says. "In a good way. Is that a fox?"

"That's Felix the fox," I hear him say. "Yes, really. They named him before I got here, which was a coincidence nobody planned."

"Shut up. That's amazing."

The lab door opens. I am at my desk, in plain view if they look, and I have nowhere to go and no time to go there, so I do the only thing I can think of and drop behind the supply cabinet against the far wall. It is a steel cabinet the size of a refrigerator, full of solvent and foam and spare glass eyes. There is a gap of maybe eight inches between it and the wall. I fold myself into it, knees to my chest, and pull my cardigan over my mouth so my breathing goes quiet.

I am 28 years old and hiding in the dark of my own lab like a child. But I cannot stand up now. It is too late to stand up.

The door closes. Then I hear the lock turn.

"Was that door locked?" the woman asks.

"Yeah. I locked it." His voice is easy. "Nobody's supposed to be on this floor. Well. Almost nobody."

"Ooh, ominous. What are we doing here, Felix? You said you wanted to show me something and then you texted me a badger photo at 10 PM. A badger, Felix."

"That's not what I wanted to show you."

"Then what?"

There is a pause. Then his boots cross the floor toward the worktables, and I hear him sweep a stack of papers off the big steel table in the middle of the lab. Papers slap the floor. Something glass rolls.

"Felix. There's a camera three feet from your head."

"There's a camera twelve feet from my head and it doesn't work. None of the cameras in this wing work. Jason knows. Jason does not care."

"Who's Jason?"

"A man who has worked here twenty years and goes home at 10:15. It is 11:22."

I put my hand over my mouth. I know what is happening. I have known since his flashlight sat on my desk for five seconds, since the word almost, since he locked a door in a locked building.

She laughs again, but lower this time. "You're serious."

"I'm serious."

I peek around the edge of the cabinet. I should not. I do anyway.

He has both hands on her waist and he lifts her onto the table like she weighs nothing. She is small, maybe 25, dark hair, a skirt that was already short and is now up around her thighs as her legs open to make room for him. The blue light from my monitor reaches that far and turns them both a little blue, like everything else in this room. Taxidermy and people. Same light.

"This is insane," she says. "We're in a museum."

"It's a lab. Nobody curates a lab."

"There's a dead fox watching us."

"Felix the fox has seen worse."

She is still laughing but it keeps breaking off, and his mouth is at her neck, and her hands go up into his hair. I crouch in eight inches of dark with my back against steel and watch. My heart is so loud I am sure they can hear it. Sure of it. But nobody stops.

"Wait," she says, and he stops, actually stops, pulls his head back. "Why here? You have an apartment. I've seen the texts about your apartment."

There is a pause. Long enough that I count it.

"Because here is where I wanted you," he says.

"Oh," she says. "Well. Okay then."

His hands go up her thighs and push the skirt higher and she is not wearing anything under it, and she makes a small noise and says his name, and he says hers, Pamela, like he has been saving it.

I know Felix. I knew him four years ago in the museum studies program, and we dated for three months at 24, and it fizzled out the way grad school things fizzle, and I married someone else and he moved away, and then my husband died and I came back and took the night shift and found out Felix ran security in this building, and I have watched him do his rounds for eight months without saying one word to him. Eight months. And he has never once looked at my desk until tonight, and I am crouched behind a cabinet watching him with a stranger on a worktable, and some part of me understands, in a way I do not want to write down even in my own head, that this is not an accident.

The flashlight beam had found my desk and stopped.

His hands are on Pamela's hips now. Her head tips back. The badger with the chipped ear is six feet from her shoulder, and I am twelve feet from her knee, and the lab is quiet except for her breathing.

And then, without turning his head, without looking at the cabinet at all, Felix says:

"Comfortable?"

I stop breathing.

Pamela laughs. "Comfortable? I'm on a steel table in a museum lab, what do you think?"

"I mean here," Felix says. "In this room. Tonight. Comfortable being here?"

"You're weird," she says. "You're genuinely weird and I'm still here, so."

"Good answer."

He kisses her again and I finally let my lungs work. He meant the room. He meant the room. Unless he did not mean the room. I put that thought down and pick up watching instead, because watching is easier.

He turns her around and bends her over the table, unzips his pants, rolls on a condom, and takes her from behind. She braces her hands on the table edge and turns her face toward the dark window, and he stands behind her and pushes in slow, one long push, and she makes a sound I will hear for the rest of my life.

"Oh, fuck," she says. "Okay. Okay, wow!"

"Yeah?"

"Yeah, just, give me a second, you're." She does not finish. He gives her the second. Then he starts moving and the room fills up with it. The wet sound of each thrust, her breath punching out on every one, the faint squeak of his shoes on the floor. His hands grip her hips hard, thumbs pressed into the dimples above her ass, and I watch those hands the whole time. I do not know why. Maybe because hands are what I remember. Four years ago his hands were gentler and I was twenty-four and numb in a different way.

"You feel so good," he says to her. Low.