Sunspots

The building is not even finished, and it is already haunted. The Night Security knows this because he has a way with ghosts. He works the graveyard shift, eight to eight facing away from the sun. Tonight, he’s coming from a meeting in Santa Monica. Dusty coffee, and a circle of people with parallel sickness. He talks to them about wanting to feel less, the recent moments when it has been most tempting to relapse. A teenager ran over his foot in the Vons parking lot. He received a fine for missing his jury duty summons. Also, his mother has been dead for thirty-one days. When the meeting moderator thanks him for his share, he nods, and retreats into the comfortable din of silent, shifting bodies. 

The Night Security guards a not-yet building looming on Sunset. If all goes well there will be fifty apartments with gray flooring. A ghost for each unit. The Night Security dabbles in the field of spirits. He has remodeled what he used to call ‘sleep’ into two lives—one where he sits through the night with a soggy sandwich and one where he haunts. At 10:02 he’ll hear something, the creak of beams above him. Just planks and a narrow walkway for the day crew. His foot, which somehow remained intact beneath the heft of the vehicle, still aches when weighted. The Night Security fumbles with a crossword. 10 down, a vowel in the shape of the moon. 12:30, another perimeter sweep. He listens to a podcast about bridge collapses. He watches a video of a man going back for a small dog. The bridge ripples, the car heat-stricken. He skips an ad for GoPuff. 

The Night Security looks through his camera roll. It’s mostly screenshots of articles or Reddit threads, the occasional sunrise or accidental flash on a smudged hand. The archive of a daytime spent asleep. He pauses on a photo of a billboard in Santa Monica, wreathed by pink sky, taken on one of his meeting nights. An elderly couple embrace above a warning: STDs are Timeless. In the background, the same hazy California light of his childhood. A memory arises: one morning his mother, Aja, brought him to the pier. She was angry with him, he remembers, but she bought him a hot sandwich and a lemonade for herself. They sat out past the juvenile magicians, past the salespeople peddling license plates, and caricatures, and name tags in that state’s signature elbow shape, and they watched the sea. Aja wouldn’t look at him, but the sandwich was warm. There was a crease of dirt on her dress where she’d knelt it into the ground, bending to wipe his face. Tendrils of hair batted at her face, like kelp strewn salty and dry on beach rocks.

The company he works for has received several concerned messages from nearby residents. They’ve seen a light through the fence and wonder if someone might have broken in. The Night Security shares their gooseflesh, thinks of himself as more intruder than guard. Sometimes there’s a flirt of trouble; drunk twenty-somethings clanging against the fence, kids trying to wriggle through the weak spots and tag the fresh walls, men and women with shopping carts and heavy blankets. He speaks with one woman often, named Cake. She wears purple yoga pants. She tells him secrets, and he tells her to stay safe, stay warm. She tells him about shaving her legs in the LA river. She says, There’s something on the sun and they aren’t telling us. Through the fence, her face segments like the ligaments in palm fronds. She drinks a Celcius, spits with her front tooth. She says he makes her laugh. She shows him sketches of figures with long teeth and manga eyes. He doesn’t see how he can make her laugh when he says so little. She does all the talking; fast, fidgeting. She comes most nights, except Sundays and Thursdays. Once, he told her about the meeting he goes to. It made him feel strange, like he’d forged a signature. He had wanted her to think they were alike, somehow. 

When she leaves, he says, Stay up, stay up, meaning stay alert. She doesn’t scare him, but he feels exhausted after seeing her. He doesn’t know many women, but their certain style of movement has always unnerved him, carrying the threat that they might spring back like a sapling branch. 

The haunting accelerates not at 3:33 but at 4:14. Through the fence and tarp, the PETA billboard across the street flickers: A woman standing beside a cow, Your leather jacket was Someone. The Night Security feels a swell of exhaustion. He starts to become his second body. He determines its shape in the dark, a swath of hair like his and a pair of lungs and a worsening back. This other body contains all the things he will not get back from his life; the day he held his father’s meaty hand for the last time; the heat-dome headache of a well-earned hangover; the sickly green dawn on the day of Aja’s funeral, where he had seen the San Gabriel mountains and thought with uncommon delight, Those mountains look their age. 

When the living Night Security, the one with blood and a liver, shifts his eyes, the other body folds into sand, water in the desert. A foot is just a bag of tools left by the day crew. An alpine nose: a snagged hook. He tries the crossword again at 5:02. 14 across: Where is the seam between wake and sleep? He conjures the curtain of hair across Aja’s face, and he knows that she wasn’t looking at the sea, really, but past it, across it, to something he’d learn only after many years had lodged in his gut. She had been warm and flush from a gulp of morning gin. She had made life and did not know how to love what she had made. He could pride himself, at least, on having avoided retreading her mistake. He was a mule, with no great love but solitude.

Outside, the morning sends up a reminder. Pepsi skyscraper stamped against soft blue and pink. The Night Security watches the advance of day. It feels like dropping and then catching a glass. A day further into living. Not glad, but relieved to be awake. A relief to be alive. He looks not at the building, but at the space just beyond it, where the mass of night is now invisible. He thinks to himself that Cake was right, there seems to be a cloth draped over the naked bulb of the sun. He can’t believe he didn’t notice before, the refraction of pigment on the buildings, the gauze between himself and the splitting point of the horizon. He feels a jolt of something painful, a vein being tapped. Aja, dead now thirty-two days and asleep in a vase, would not know this sky. She would not know him either, but he’s gotten used to that. 

Underneath, the day proceeds. The Night Security locks the gate, favoring his good foot. He passes Cake on the way to his car. She’s asleep between the exterior wall of the building and her shopping cart, in a nest of hoodie and magazines. He steps around a few bottles, reaching for the edge of a dusty pink blanket to lift over her shoulder, but stops just before his fingers reach the fabric, frightened of startling her. Her face is tucked into the crook of her arm, and it reminds him of a video he watched at some point during the night: a team of researchers poured cement into an abandoned rabbit warren—they’d done heat scanning to confirm it was empty—but while excavating the network of complex tunnels, they found a tuft of fur protruding. Chipping away, they revealed a rabbit pup with a paw blocking the grit from its eyes. Bunny Pompeii. Cake exhales, and the Night Security releases the breath he didn’t realize he was holding. The light is coming up sharply now, glaring off the pristine new windows of the building.   

The Night Security is hungry enough for a whole rotisserie chicken, and he drives to Vons and picks one up, then sits in his car until the heat turns adolescent, 10:25. He’ll go on his phone, and he’ll prepare for the next life, where nothing happens but in the opposite direction. Then sleep, which is not so different than anything he does awake.