Standing next to the large man, her eyes pointed up at his back.

Ding, sang the elevator car, descending.

The Big Man With the Little Giggle was not laughing. He was sweating. He was counting millions in his mind. He was close to home free. He was still ignoring the little brown-faced brat, whose name he did not know; whom he thought of only as the last delivery.

The elevator hummed, moving earthward at the pace of falling dust.

He glanced down to his sleeve and flicked a particularly offensive piece of lint from the charcoal gray fabric. Tapped his foot one time. Slid his eyes to the glowing buttons on the wall next to him. Nineteen floors and one block to go.

Nineteen floors and one block, and he was golden.

Ding.

He glanced at his Cartier. It was close.

The Little Girl With the Spider Tattoo on her forehead stood by his side and slightly behind him. Her deep-set eyes would meet his anytime he was forced to look at her. Which he tried not to do.

He was trying not to focus on it, he wasn’t big on kicking stupid shit around his head. She just kept getting weirder and weirder and he didn’t need this right now. It’s not that he liked this gig but…a person should act certain ways. It wasn’t natural, the way this kid had been looking at him and talking to him since the pickup. It was working on his nerves. It was throwing him off-stride, and he wasn’t used to that.

Fuck it. He was gonna be fucking God in under ten minutes.  Richer than any other poor fuck in this entire building, that’s for sure. Hell, he’d have  more money than the goddamn mayor by the end of the hour. The last  year’s work was gonna pay off, finally.

He looked down to his hands. The nails were trimmed to the skin, which was as bright and blank and crumb-less as hands that have been scrubbed with iron wool and bleached clean.

“Greed,” said the small voice behind him.

Ding. Eleventh floor.

He straightened up and shoved his hands back into his pockets. Lifted his head up and gazed through the glass wall of the elevator. He drew a deep breath and refocused on the good feeling.

Couldn’t find it.

Nothing comes for free. Deal. Deal. Almost there. Just a little walk across the street, and up to 11th. Home free, man. Home free!

That made him smile a little, finally.

He looked ahead to his reflection in the glass door. Opened his smile wider so he could inspect his teeth. Clean, good.

“Yeah. Deal with it,” he said to nobody.

He jammed the “L” button with his thumb. Hard. He held it in the wall until his nail turned white. He did not release it.

Ding, chirped the elevator, finally, as the car reached the lobby.

—

He was walking as fast as a grown man can drag a small girl along with him without arousing any suspicion, which was still pretty fast. She said nothing, just tried to keep up with his large strides, but fell to the curb and crumpled up clutching her knee.

“Okay, come on, let’s go.” he snapped as she crouched there, holding her knee, face wrinkling up.

It made him feel good to see her unblinking front shattered by pain and emotion. Good. She wasn’t so weird or scary. Just another creepy street rat. As anxious as he was about being so close to finished, he felt his lungs fill with a sigh of relief as he looked down at her tears.

Inside of 1226 11th street, they stood again in an elevator. This time there was no gold and red rug, no smell of fine scents and clean floors . In the tiny metal box of an elevator were the odors only of lysol, caked-on cigarette smoke, and hints of urine. A single, bluish bulb lit the interior of the small enclosure.

The Little Girl With the Spider Tattoo on Her Forehead stood silent next to him, her face again calm and smooth.

“So,” the Big Man With the Little Giggle said, still staring ahead at the crack between the two elevator doors. “This is it. This is where you’ll live now. You’ll…make…friends…” But he couldn’t finish the little ramble of bullshit he typically delivered at this point, and his voice faded out.

Truth is, what happened to her now didn’t concern him at all. He just needed to get the fuck out of this place for good, these walls painted with decades of paint, these tiny, dank passages in this old building. He needed sun, yeah. He needed a vacation. And he’d take one. Maybe Thailand or something. He’d heard good things. He deserved a little R&R after this last year.

“You got that laminated thing, right?” he said as the doors opened. Sub-basement level. “I gave it to you in the car. Right after I…picked you up?  You still got that?”

She said nothing. She followed him when he walked and stopped walking when he did. They were at an elbow in the basement passage, which was lined with dusty pipes snaking overhead, and shadows damply stuck to the walls. He stopped and finally looked down to her.

“Listen,  you’ll need that here.” Angrily. “ I’m helping you out. If you don’t have that, you’ll…you’ll start from the lowest rung. I’m tryin’ to help you.”

The Little Girl With the Spider Tattoo on Her Forehead lifted her eyes to meet his. The oily bulb in the corner of the passage glinted from her shadowed eyes.

“You didn’t pick me up, Big Man,” she said, softly. “That was someone else.”

He felt the hairs stand up all over his scalp and arms at the sound.

“What are you talkin’, about? What the hell is that supposed to mean?” he spat out, holding his voice steady.

“I’m talking about what you’ve done,” she hissed. “You picked up a little girl with a spider tattoo on her forehead.”

In the basement gloom, he squinted hard at the spidery design that looked almost…embossed on the skin between her eyes. He leaned closer to her.

“Yeah, so…isn’t it a spider? What the hell is it, then?” he grunted, only inches from her head.

“It’s not a tattoo,” she whispered, and darkness leapt up and flew into the big man’s shrieking face.

Mictli could never understand why it was that people didn’t seem to want to take the time to know one another. Sometimes he wondered if they heard each other at all, or if they were mostly terrified to listen, terrified to hear the stories that the world has been trying to tell itself since it began. Afraid of having to rebuild, to destroy, to question, to become something new. Or maybe the constant rush and mumble was a self-comforting behavior, like rocking yourself to sleep under your blanket on your knees.

Sometimes when he entered society, he felt as if he were moving on a different temporal plane, as if he couldn’t catch up with people. Probably why they had put him in all the advanced classes as a child. They mistook his utter inability to make sense of how one was supposed to do things with originality.

He needed time to look things over. Things change shape even when you notice them. The world talks back to you at all times. But you have to be listening for it, watching for it. Were people really so brilliant that they got everything about everything so very fast? To Mictli, it seemed that before he could make up his own mind about a moment, others had ruled on it. He learned to move with them, lift his eyebrows properly and then offer his own similar thoughts. He became very good at this. Sometimes he’d completely forget that he was playing along. Sometimes he mistook himself for the reflections cast by his earthly form. Sometimes he lost the boundary between his own aching arms and that of the silhouette of the televised conductor.

The man had stopped talking about Brown University, or the seismic sensors in the shed, and was plucking tines now with someone else. Mictli felt the sun fall on his cheek as he turned to walk back home. He felt the blue of morning roaring through his bones. Holding his paper bag close to his side, he stepped through the automatic door.

The air from outside washed over him with a faint pear scent that he could not place. The world is always a garden, too, he thought. He imagined his smile as a tiny hawk, soaring through the sky of his mind.