Rootless

            “I wanted you to be the first to know,” Rowan tentatively confided in me. He always said stuff like this after a few drinks, a tactic to drag an evening out. For twenty minutes or so, he had pushed me out of our colleagues’ hearing in order have a captive audience, eighteen more minutes than his due.

            “I gotta go. I’m sorry.”

            “Yeah, well, you may be sorrier soon.”

            I mumbled a few things as I put on my coat—auld lang syne kind of shite to appear gracious, because I didn’t really want to hurt Rowan, after all. He walked with me to the bar repeating that he wanted me to be… you know. I paid my tab and bid him honestly a good night, then left without looking back.

            He knew which tram I’d take, and had I thought of it, I would have walked a different route to catch another. Rowan’s lope toward me, then, was hardly a surprise. I couldn’t feign friendliness at this point, but managed to sound civil: “Rowan, I promise you it’s taken to heart.”

            “What is?” he panted, and blinked.

            The tram was about a block away. I wouldn’t have to supply any more conversation with the immediacy of the moment: checking the route number, dialing a ticket into my phone, wondering if Rowan would push me onto the rails, or if I’d push him. “Are you also headed this way?” I lamely asked.

            “I don’t need to, but…” He boarded behind me. The mew of the electric engine made any further explanation senseless for a little while. I slumped into a seat behind a young lover on the lap of another and ahead of a dozing old man. Rowan grabbed hold of two little nooses that swung from the rafters and let his head droop toward me, a vulture surveying its eyrie.

            “So now that I know,” I decided to say and let linger. Rowan pursed his lips as if he understood something in the incompletion of my thought. That let me purse my lips, too, buying me a few precious seconds of not having to deal with it.

            “Now that you know,” he nodded, “you gotta pretend that you don’t.”

            I nodded, turning away to look out the window, which mostly reflected my mug and all others within the lit tram. “I’m good at that,” I whispered.

            “What?” Rowan leaned further in.

            “I’m good at pretending.” My grin didn’t go over as I’d expected, and Rowan seemed to forget what he had said. Short-term memory served him well all his life, apparently. That, and a strange ability to lurk around while staying put. He made his way up in the company, starting as an intern, then a salaried page, ticking the right boxes to assist with the bookkeeping before getting certified as a full-fledged accountant. He knew every knothole and tenant of our tree—the corporate logo in fact, clustered with berries in dense leaves. A client could disappear in the thought of that tree, its branches as virtually unseen as the roots, which knuckled out just a touch before burrowing into the corporate name. I had a role in making that logo, researching markets and all.

            “You probably think I drink too much,” he offered after a silence. “Or that I shouldn’t be talking when I drink.”

            “C’mon, that’s half the planet,” I decoyed. “Probably more.”

            “Did the others clue in, do you think?”

            “Is that why you chased me down?”

            “I’m not chasing. Like you, I had enough.” The tram made a stop and a lady across from my seat exited, allowing Rowan to park his load. The tram jerked forward in rhythm to his next shot at twenty minutes: “I mean, I’ve really had enough. Take Miriam,” our divisional boss, “for instance. She’s got a finger in all these pies, and I don’t mean pie-charts, her endless supply of stupid pie-charts. If I have a handle on who’s shifted funds around and how, then she must have more of a grip, dammit. Take Rodney,” back there at the pub, “and his ‘charity work’, his handsy way of deciding who’s in or out for Night Without Stars, whatever the hell that’s s’posed to mean. Take Jerry,” our deputy CFO—but I really couldn’t take another such take. I decided to fake a heart attack.

            In retrospect, an epileptic seizure would have been better. The tram screeched to a halt—probably Rowan’s initiative, going nuts to get someone’s attention—and the driver came out to administer CPR, there and then, no questions asked. I managed to blubber, “I think I’ll be okay,” but why in the world would I be so, instantly? A seizure might have shown an over-active heart, a reverse CPR if the driver had training for that. Rowan, at any rate, looked at my body with horror. I was the last one to hear what he always wanted to say, pinkie-swear style, as if such expression mattered, here on the near-midnight tram after drinks-all-too-many, and colleagues a half-hour away. I repeated the obvious, now getting up: “I think that I’m really okay.”

            Rowan stayed rooted until, as I’d hoped, an ambulance sirenned up to the tram. He attempted some sentiment—“you’re in the right hands now”—and skittered away at the prospect that anyone would press him for context: who he was, or how I fell, or what were the circumstances of our evening. “I wanted you” rang in my inner ear as I gradually made it known to the paramedics that I just needed to stymie a stalker.

            “Do you know him?”

            I considered the question, but didn’t want to waste more of anyone’s time. “I can’t say that I really do,” as honest as the evening had been.

Daniel Martin Vold Lamken (2018)