Terra Firma Circuits

Chapter One

Paper Traces

There was a white face in the window.

Eight windows up from ground level.

Frank looked away, down at the sandwich he was eating. He had been lucky today. It wasn’t every day that some rich, hollow man tossed away an untouched sandwich, perhaps displeased by the texture of the deli meat or deterred by a wilted lettuce leaf. Frank didn’t care whether the meat was dry or lettuce was soft or bread was day-old. It was food, and he was hungry.

But he found himself losing his appetite as looked up for the second time at the white face in the eighth-floor window of Alpha Tech headquarters. It was delicate, fragile, like tracing paper. Distinct even from this distance. The face of a frightened woman.

Her fear wasn’t normal fear, and Frank knew what fear was. He was a professional people-watcher. People were full of fear. Fear that the brown spots on their faces were too big, that the creases in their pants were too visible, that their taxes were overdue, that they were going into debt, that they weren’t appreciated or respected or loved enough. He often wondered what it would be like as a dog, being able to physically sense the fear vibrating off of people. Overwhelming, probably. The world had too much input as it was.

But the woman in the window had a different fear. Raw and gristly, the stuff that sinks into someone’s bones and bare existence. Frank was a professional people-watcher who sat in the alleys of San Provino and saw people crying, people hitting each other, and occassionally, people getting run over by cars. Surely a woman’s scared face was nothing out of the norm? But Frank stared, sandwich forgotten.

All he could see was the tracing-paper face. An outline of unspokens. Everything was silent. The cars growling by, taxis squealing, trucks clattering, bicycles ringing, pedestrians talking on the phone, street vendors hawking their goods, seagulls crying and wheeling above him—everything was voiceless now.

And then the face in the window was gone. Whipped away by some force in the same room, some unknown person that Frank could not see from eight floors below and an intersection away.

He leaned back against the cold brick wall behind him, and sat still for a while, listening to a nearby bakery advertising its fresh bread to passerby. He swatted away a mosquito.

The tracing paper face was burned into his mind.

Frank slowly returned to his sandwich, working through a tough piece of meat. Alpha Tech was a strange company. Even after spending thirty years on the streets of San Provino, he still couldn’t figure out any of Alpha Tech’s employees. And he’d gotten quite good at figuring people out. It was fun. Look for red eyes, a haunted stare, a ringless finger, and you had found a recent divorcee. Look for short stature, bubbly laughter, slightly nervous side-eyeing, and a fist closed securely, and you had found a kid who had just found someone else’s lost quarter. Look for telltale signs of restlessless, bags under the eyes, blanched skin, raised shoulders, coffee stain on the shirt, buttons misbuttoned by one, a slight forward lean, and you had yourself an office worker who was always rushing to make deadlines. There were plenty of these, the frantic white-collar workers who practically inhabited the reflective high-rise office complexes in the city. Just one of Frank’s countless people categories.

But Alpha Tech employees—especially the higher-ups—were unreadable. Sure, they had several traits in common: brisk walks and polished shoes, and clean shirts, silver watches, and fearless faces, and polite hahaha laughs with almost always three ha’s each time, the usual. And the mildly repulsed expressions in the rare moments they caught glance of him or some other people-watcher sitting in the alleys. Alpha Tech higher-ups were decidedly in the asshole category.

But the terrified woman was not an Alpha Tech higher-up. She was not an office worker. She was not a factory worker, not a lawyer, not a bartender. Not a healthcare professional, not a mother undergoing a midlife crisis, not a single-parent fighting to get a job.

He had no category for her. She was simply the tracing-paper face.

Frank tossed his sandwich wrapper aside and scratched at the large callus on his left big toe.

It had been a strange week. On Tuesday, Steve, a people-watcher of San Provino in the self-absorbed category, had been found dead at the corner of Ashburn Way. Between the pipe-covered, muddy backsides of the coffee shop and the electronics store. Freshly dead, the others said, still warm with a cloud of mosquitos just starting to lift away from him. Collapsed face-down on top of a couple of empty crates, head lolling off the edge, beer bottle cracked on the ground below his hanging hand with its emptied content staining the cement. No wounds.

Fucking drunkard, the other people-watchers had said.

Drunk himself to death.

Never knew what was good for him.

At least he died happy.

But Frank had hesitated. Steve hadn’t smelled like he had bathed in alcohol—the way he usually smelled. His vacant eyes hadn’t been bloodshot. His face had been incredibly pale, not beer-flushed.

Then the day after Steve’s mystery death, when Frank had watched from a nearby alley as the authorities finally stumbled upon the corpse, the unexpected happened again. He still remembered the authority men’s muted, rapid conversation, their voices an octave higher than usual.

“Over twenty hours since death, and no rigor mortis? Gross, but his blood should have coagulated by now and stiffened him up like a board.”

“And he has no bruises. Motionless blood should pool and cause bruises on his stomach, hands, and feet.”

“Some weird shit.”

They had quickly stuffed Steve and his tangled beard and faded, stained t-shirt and jeans into a bag, into a car, and away from the corner of Ashburn Way between the coffee shop and electronics store. All that remained, and still remained, were the cracked beer bottle and a mosquito crushed underneath it.

Then there had been silence. For the next few days, Frank had listened and watched for the small uproar that a mysterious death would cause in San Provino, but there were no newspaper reports or broadcasted updates, no passerby whispering about dead bodies. Frank had even unsuccessfully stopped a newspaper boy on his bicycle to ask to see the daily. This motionless quiet was not normal. He knew some furtive work had leapt up, rustled, silenced the world, and then slunk down. Some shuffling and hushing of people.

And today, four days later: the tracing-paper face in the eighth-floor window of Alpha Tech headquarters. Nothing was there now, just glassy darkness reflecting the clouds and seagulls and nearby high-rises.

Something stung. Instinctively, Frank slapped a hand on the back of his neck just below his straggly hair, pinned the mosquito between his thumb and index finger, lifted it away from his sun-dried skin. He wiped it against the wall behind him—the backside of the electronics store. A trail of black and little bit of his own blood.

He hated mosquitos.

The bane of the people-watchers.