The rain came out of nowhere, thick, heavy, hard. Globules of icy pudding making miniature puddles of their own on impact that quickly molded out and together to form great lakes of foaming seascape even two miles inland. Everywhere people ducked for shelter, under billboards, marquees, buss stops crammed like sardine cans bursting from the seams, storefronts effectively closed, clogged arteries leading to cardiac arrest for morning sales, non-English speaking immigrant owners unsure of how to convey this inconvenience fighting their way through hydrophobic mobs with broad broom strokes, heaving and hurling, frustration-induced thrombolytic shoves yet more and more pedestrians coagulating together, thicker and thicker despite all efforts to the contrary. Traffic came to a near halt, wiper blades not designed to handle so much accumulation, visibility reduced to zero in seconds, horns blaring, sound waves muted in the deluge as well as the cracking of fenders, curb walkers torn down like novice surfers in the great white-capped waves of those drivers too impatient to slow.

Inside the lobby it was a different world, dry and cool, the nearly-white-tiled floor shimmering, un-scuffed from lack of sufficient foot traffic, not uncommon for this early hour, great pillars holding up the vaulted ceiling, the world and its Atlas, everything a muted not-quite-white, juxtaposed in rhythmically placed alcoves by fat shoots of fern fronds that playfully tickled at any who walked within their reach, the light brilliantly bright, the artificial “natural light” mixing, on sunnier mornings with the streams of the real thing blooming through the revolving doors. Today this light, the inner mime and the outer model, weren’t harmonizing at all. Everything in here had an antiseptic glow and through the door near-noon had turned to night in the sudden onslaught of the storm, severing any connection they may have once had, becoming two separate plains of existence, the land of the living and that of the dead.

Corrin Malbray wasn’t quite sure which one was which. Cozily nestled behind the plate-glass barricade of her Teller’s booth it was all “out there,” leaving her in some undesignated third realm, Limbo maybe, but closer to one than the other, the effect of which left her dreamy and slightly detached, processing transactions with peripheral motor-responses, each “customer” a shadow-fog cut-out despite the seraphic illumination, her own words spoken backwards through a cone, distant and distorted. If this hadn’t been the case, if she hadn’t been so lost and disconnected, floating up and down the tiers of the Mount, maybe it would have gone differently or never happened at all. Like so many things that November morning it could be blamed on the rain, which ended up ruining so much more than business and had it not come down so hard, so mercilessly, then she might have been paying closer attention to her “customers,” would’ve seen the tell-tale signs as the man, who in a single afternoon affected her life more than any and all of the people she’d known in her thirty-nine years, faded up to her window, the air around him static, molecules in unnatural states of agitation, playing with the brass clasp of a tarnished billfold with surgical fingers, cobalt blue eyes ominous and calculating.

She addressed him from the same “other place” as everyone before, missing the way those eyes carefully took her in, down to the most minute detail, number of pores, pock marks from pubescent acne outbreaks, those stray strands of burnt-blond hair, the soft hollow purple rims below her hazel eyes, the loose-knit mauve-wool sweater built for someone bigger, giving her a balloon appearance, the indentation on the ring finger of her left hand where a wedding band had long held reign but no longer, the chewed cuticles of her unpainted nails, feeling her hopelessness. He listened to her speak from her “other where” intently, picking up the nearly-indistinguishable disturbances in the air around her mouth with each puffy breath of freshly shaped syllable, those tiny nuances of despair, of loss, not only of hope but of all things, someone left a shell, limping through the minutes and hours of each too-long day, thinking only of that loss, consumed and it was there, all of it on the perfect portrait her lips painted, carefully carving each word, sculpting and completely oblivious. There was a scent billowing out through the money-tray hole at the bottom of the protective glass barrier, wafting up and filling him: old cigarettes, vodka, anti-depressants in cute octagonal powder-blue capsules, sugar-coated and easy to swallow, granola. She didn’t wear perfume, her clothes hinting at a lesser known brand of detergent, something cheap in an economy bottle, her shampoo and soap the same, dollar-store surrogate. All of it morphing into her life, the whole story, there on the wind of expelled carbon dioxide for all to smell and ignore, just another Teller at the bank, not even that pretty and therefore forgettable, so tragic.

He understood how deep her tragedy ran (had been in here at this time every day for the past week, taking her in, learning all about her and she hadn’t once noticed him, no recognition, no sign of having caught on to the checks he was cashing, checks from him to him, cyclical) an underground river of unhappy endings manifesting in unparalleled detachment. It was okay. He had a plan. It had all been told. The rain worked in his favor. Of course it would. As she took the small rectangle of paper, which he’d folded after filling it out, as if it mattered if it appeared to’ve been stuffed into the billfold, he reached down, grabbing up the long, black umbrella the ancient woman at the next window had leaned against the wooden partition, passing it from thieving left hand to innocent right. No one saw a thing. He shifted his position, analyzing the patters his shadow tattooed in front of him.

“And here’s your receipt…” Corrin was transmitting.

“Have lunch with me.”

These words, so alien in this mathematical world of clicking digits and decimal places, of set routines and auto-responses, managed to break through the fog, Corrin looking up for the first time, not sure what she expected, not surprised to see the man’s face lost in black-void shadow, back-lit with all that antiseptic Heaven-cloud, reaching fern fronds playing at the edges of his silhouette like groping, skeletal hands, yet nothing malevolent in this vision, any possible threat lost in a great vale of mystery, the medium communicating with the soul of the lost but which one was which? An electrical pulse fired in her cortex, thoughts postmarked/delivered instantaneously into action, lungs contracting, expelling more of that wonderful CO2, the soft vibrations as it grazed over her vocal chords, giving it sound, lips moving, the un-acknowledged hands of the new world Michelangelo.

“Excuse me?”

He let a smile play across his mask because no one could see.

“Have lunch with me.”

There was something, not about his words, but in the way he said them, something she couldn’t put a finger on that set a flutter going in her heart, the valves their flapping faster as blood flow increased. She knew her answer was going to be “yes,” knew it but couldn’t understand why, only that it wasn’t a question at all, that somehow she’d known this moment was coming, these words waiting to be asked, the mono-syllable answer already written in a future history. None of this came to her, only quiet whispers in the back of her mind, half-truths in the half-light of her neo-fog universe, but inarguable as the inevitable rising and setting of the sun.