Under the Overpass

Elliot had worked the night shift on the bridge toll booth for five years now, and he had come to think of the city as a thing that breathed. It breathed in around eleven, when the last of the dinner crowds thinned out, and it breathed out around four, when the first delivery trucks came growling over the water. In between, it just sort of held its breath, and he sat in his little glass box and watched it do that.

He was thirty-one, single, and a former civil engineering student who had left two years in when his father got sick. He did the math on that sometimes, sitting there with the coin tray open and nothing but moths bumping the light. Five years of tolls. Something like a million cars. Every one of them going somewhere that was not the toll booth.

His ex, Denise, used to say the booth suited him because he liked watching without being part of things. She had said it during the breakup, so it was supposed to hurt. It had, a little, mostly because it was true.

The night the blackout came, it was a Tuesday in October, and the first thing Elliot noticed was that the bridge lights died all at once, like someone blowing out thirty candles at the same time. His booth kept running on backup power for about nine seconds, long enough for him to think, huh, that's not good, and then the screen went dark too and he was sitting in a glass box on a pitch black bridge with no cars coming either direction.

He sat there for a while. That was mostly what the job was, when you got down to it. Sitting.

Then his supervisor's voice came over the radio, garbled but understandable. Grid failure, whole downtown, go home, we'll call when the generators matter again. Elliot clocked it in the little paper notebook he kept for exactly this kind of thing, locked the coin box, and walked the half mile to his car in a darkness so complete it felt friendly, almost, like the city had finally decided to be honest about something.

His car started fine, which was more than he could say for the three traffic lights between the bridge lot and the twenty-four hour store on Halstead. He coasted through two of them and stopped at the third out of habit, because a woman was already standing in the intersection with a flashlight, directing cars by hand. She was good at it, too. Crisp little arcs with the beam, nobody honking.

The store had one working light inside, some emergency strip over the registers, and it was crowded in a quiet way. Everyone was buying the same things. Candles, batteries, bottled water, and, for reasons nobody could explain later, ice cream, because everyone had the same thought at once, which was that the freezers were dying anyway so someone might as well eat it.

Elliot grabbed a candle and a bag of ice and then stood in front of the freezer case having his own version of that thought.

"You're third in line for the last pint of the good stuff," a voice said behind him.

He turned. The woman from the intersection was there, flashlight hanging from her belt loop like a tool she used all the time, holding a basket with two candles and a bottle of wine in it.

"Good stuff how?" he said.

"Vanilla bean, actual specks in it, not flavoring. It matters." She was maybe twenty-nine, dark hair pulled back, wearing the kind of shirt you wear to a nice job on the day the nice job stops mattering. "I'm Mara, by the way. I just got fired from a restaurant, so I have opinions about vanilla."

"Recently fired or currently?"

"Recently. Like, six hours ago. The hotel closed the dining room indefinitely because of the power, and the manager said the word indefinitely like it was a favor to me, and I told him what I thought of that, and he fired me, and now here I am buying melting ice cream with my last good mood."

"That's a full day," Elliot said.

"It's not even ten yet." She looked at his basket. "One candle? You're braver than me. I got two."

"I live alone. One candle is basically a system."

She laughed at that, a real laugh, short and surprised out of her. Then the line moved and they both shuffled forward, and the charged little silence that followed had a weight to it that Elliot noticed the way he noticed everything, from habit, from the booth.

The register situation was grim. The store was running one register on a battery and the guy running it was hand-writing prices on a legal pad. Mara paid for her stuff first and then, when Elliot got up there, the guy squinted at the wine in her basket and told her the register couldn't open bottles without power, no corkscrew sold after nine anyway.

"You're kidding," she said.

"Sorry. System's down."

"So I bought wine I can't open, in a blackout, and I'm going to sit in my apartment with two candles and a bottle with a cork in it like some kind of." She stopped, waved a hand. "Some kind of thing."

Elliot had a corkscrew in his car. He kept one in the glove box because of a road trip three years ago and had never taken it out, and the story of why was boring, and he told her so before he offered it.

"I have a corkscrew in my car," he said. "No reason you'd trust a stranger with that sentence, but there it is."

She looked at him the way people look at toll booth operators, sizing up whether this is worth the delay. Then she held up her phone. "Okay, trade. I put your number in my phone under Corkscrew Man, we walk to your car together in full view of this entire store full of witnesses, I open my wine, and if you turn out to be a murderer the ice cream was for nothing."

"That's fair," he said. "I'm Elliot, for the phone."

"Elliot," she said, typing. "Like the bird."

"There's no bird called an Elliot!"

"There should be. Big, dumb, pleasant, sits around all day."

"I sit in a booth and take tolls, actually. Bridge."

Her face did a small thing at that, a recalculation. "You're the guy from the booth? The one that's been dark all night?"

"I'm the guy who watched a woman direct traffic with a flashlight and then took a candle and ice cream to go." They pushed through the door into the dark street. The store's last light made a rectangle behind them and then the door shut and it was just her flashlight and the stars, which were out in force for the first time in years, downtown, because every sign in the city was dead.

The walk to his car was four blocks and took twenty minutes because Mara kept stopping to look up.

"You know what's stupid," she said at one point, flashlight aimed at the sky. "I spent five years inside that hotel, under artificial light, and this is the first time in a decade I've seen actual stars over an actual city."

"What did you do at the hotel?"

"Sommelier. The wine part is real, that's my actual certification. But the design of the dining room, I had my thoughts. Strong ones. Strong enough that I got fired for saying them out loud six hours before the whole grid quit on me." She kicked a bottle cap into the gutter. "Timing is either everything or it's nothing, I can't decide."

They reached his car, a gray sedan with a crack in the windshield from a gravel truck last spring. He popped the glove box and there it was, the corkscrew, next to an expired insurance card and a tire gauge.

Mara took it, held it up, and looked at him across the roof of the car. Somewhere down the block a generator kicked on and off, coughing.

"Okay, honest question," she said. "Do you drink wine in parking lots with strangers, or do you have somewhere to be?"

"I have a candle and one scoop's worth of ice cream waiting at my place," he said. "That's it. That's the plan. It's not a good plan."

"It's a terrible plan." She turned the bottle over in her hands, considering. "I have an apartment six blocks that way with two candles and zero corkscrews. Also not a good plan."

"So the plans could be combined is what you're saying."

"I'm saying," Mara said, pointing the flashlight at him, brief, like a decision, "that the wine needs to be drunk before it gets warm, and I would rather not drink it alone in the dark listening to my landlord's generator. If that's a no, say no now and I'll go find a rock or something."

"It's not a no," Elliot said. "But I'm driving to your block and then we're walking, because nothing about this city is drivable right now."

"Deal." She got in the passenger side and buckled the belt, and the little click of it sounded loud in the quiet. "Fair warning, Corkscrew Man. I've had a six hour day and a firing, so if I talk too much about oak barrels, stop me."

"Noted," he said, and pulled out, slow, into a city with no lights on anywhere, which from inside a moving car looked less like a blackout and more like the whole place had finally gone to sleep at once, all of it, at the same time, for the first night in a hundred years.

The power came back two days later, on a Thursday, and the city went back to pretending nothing had happened. Elliot went back to the booth. Mara went back to whatever it was a fired sommelier did with her afternoons. They texted twice. Once about the wine, which she said had been good and he said had been good, and once about whether the ice cream had survived, which it had not, because his freezer was a glorified butter warmer on the best of days.

Then, on a Sunday night, the laundromat on Delancey.

It was eleven at night and the place smelled like detergent and quarters. Elliot had a load of work shirts going and a paperback he wasn't reading, and the door chimed, and there she was, carrying a trash bag full of clothes like it was a duffel bag, which he would learn later was exactly what it was.

"No," she said, when she saw him.

"Hi to you too."

"You cannot be here. Nobody does their laundry at eleven on a Sunday. You're following me."

"I live four blocks from here. This is my laundromat. I would ask what you're doing in my laundromat, but I can see the answer is a trash bag."

Mara looked at the trash bag, then at him, and seemed to decide it wasn't worth the lie. "I got locked out. My landlord is in Phoenix. The twenty-four hour laundromat is the only warm place with chairs, so congratulations, your laundromat is also my hotel tonight."

"That's rough."

"It's fine." She fed quarters into the machine like it had insulted her. "I have a spare key. It's in my apartment. Which is locked. Which is the problem."

"Also the wine situation," Elliot said. "Your corkscrews were in there."

"My corkscrews were in there." She sat down across from him, one plastic chair apart, the way strangers sit. Then she looked at the chair between them like it was in the way and didn't move. "So. Corkscrew Man. How was the ice cream?"

"Melted. We ate it with spoons anyway. It was mostly cream and regret."

"That tracks."

They sat through the wash cycle in a comfortable sort of quiet. He read four pages and understood none of them. She did the crossword on the back of a receipt with a golf pencil from the counter. When the dryers started she said, out of nowhere, "I applied for a job today."

"Yeah?"

"A wine bar. Lower case, no hotel, no dining room designed by a man who puts chandeliers over the raw bar." She made a face. "It pays half what I made. It's probably the right call and I hate it."

"Because of the money or the pride?"

"Pride, mostly. Money a little. That's a real question, isn't it. Most people ask how the search is going."

"I take tolls," Elliot said. "I know what it's like when somebody asks how your day is and the answer is the same every day."

The dryer buzzed. She folded her clothes on the counter, all of it, a person's whole wardrobe in eight minutes, and he watched her do it and thought about how the blackout already felt like something that had happened to other people.

"Okay," she said, stuffing the bag. "This was weird and nice. Walk me home, if you want. I know you will, you're the type."

"What type is that?"

"The type that walked me home the first time with a flashlight."

He walked her the six blocks. It had started to rain somewhere in the middle of the second block, a soft steady rain, no wind, the kind the city mostly ignores. They ignored it too, for a while, and then somewhere around the third block she started talking and didn't stop, the way people do in the rain when nobody can see their face clearly.

"I was engaged," she said. "Two years ago. Eleven months before the wedding he decided he wanted to be married to somebody easier, so he left, and the venue kept the deposit, which is the single most expensive thing I have ever thrown away. Anyway. That's why the apartment, that's why the wine, that's why I am fun at parties."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be sorry, it's fine. Your turn. Why do you take tolls at night?"

"Because the day booth has people in it." He said it before he could pick a better sentence. "My ex left last year. Took most of the furniture and, I don't know, the version of the apartment with her in it. Nights are quiet. You count cars and the hours go by and nobody asks you anything."

"That's the saddest reason for a job I've ever heard."

"It's a good job. It's just also a hiding place."

Mara stopped walking then, in the rain, and looked at him. "Huh," she said. "Yeah. Okay. Mine's a wine cellar. Nobody bothers you in a wine cellar."

"I know. I've been in one. With you, technically."

They were laughing about that, a little, when the rain got serious. It came down all at once like a bucket, and the nearest door was a bookshop, dark inside, shut for the night but not locked, and Mara tried the handle on instinct and it opened and they fell into it laughing and dripping.

"Are we allowed in here?" Elliot asked.

"The door was open. That's basically an invitation. If the owner shows up I'll explain we're taking shelter and buy a book to apologize."

The shop was narrow and tall and smelled like paper and dust. Emergency lights over the exits, nothing else. Mara ran her finger along a shelf in the dark, reading spines by feel, and Elliot stood in the aisle dripping