Alice Rue Evades the Truth

One

Alice has often wished that her job would be more exciting, but performing chest compressions on the love of her life, all alone in the cavernous lobby that serves as her office, isn’t exactly what she had in mind. She fumbles with her phone, trying to pull it out of her pocket while still thumping on his chest. She remembers something about doing CPR to the rhythm of the song “Stayin’ Alive,” so she chants it to herself as she pumps with one hand, frantically dialing with the other.

She’s supposed to breathe into his mouth at some point, but she can’t remember when. Is it every ten pumps? Every fifty? How many breaths does she do? One? Three? F***, why is this so complicated? Why can she remember the jingle from that 1999 carpet cleaning commercial and not how to do CPR?

“Jesus Christ, come on!” The phone rings and rings, like she’s trying to reach a pharmacist during their lunch hour instead of 911 in the middle of the night. “Come on!” she yells between chants. “F***ing answer!”

The man below her is still, except for the violence she’s enacting on his rib cage. He could almost be sleeping, if she hadn’t just watched him wobble and wordlessly fall to the ground, smacking his head with a horrifyingly wet thud.

She braces herself to go in for a breath after this next round. “Stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive, god I hope you don’t have mouth herpes, stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive.”

She tilts his head back, pinches his nose because she’s pretty sure she’s seen that in a movie, and starts to breathe into his mouth. Of course, that’s exactly when the phone connects.

“Nine-one-one, what’s your emergency?”

She rips her mouth away from his, stuttering out the address of the enormous office building where she works, managing to say something about collapsed and not moving and unsure about the breath-to-push ratio, possibly something irrelevant and idiotic like I love him please don’t let him die.

“Stay calm, ma’am,” the dispatcher says, and Alice wants to roll her eyes. Stay calm? She’s calm! She’s extremely f***ing calm! She’s doing unsupervised CPR on the man she’s supposed to marry, singing a f***ing John Travolta song at him, breathing her extremely calm air into his extremely pretty mouth like a f***ing professional!

The next few minutes are a blur of pumping his chest, hoping she’s not cracking any ribs, and somehow having the brain space to wonder if shoving her stale, middle-of-the-night breath into his throat counts as their first kiss. Finally she hears the blissful sound of sirens approaching.

“It’s okay,” she grunts down at him. “They’re here. You’re gonna be fine.”

He, still unconscious, doesn’t answer.

The EMTs come running in, wheeling a gurney between them. It all looks familiar to Alice after watching twelve seasons of Grey’s Anatomy, and she feels like she’s on the other side of a TV screen as they shove her aside and take over, calling out things to each other that she has no hope of understanding.

They snap questions at her—how many minutes has it been, did he hit his head, any symptoms before the collapse—most of which she can’t really answer.

“What’s his name?” asks the main dude, whose name tag reads corey j.

Thank god, something she knows. Sending up a silent prayer of thanks to herself for the relatively creepy way she always watches the monitor as he taps his ID on the security turnstile, she confidently says, “Nolan Altman, fourteenth floor.”

Corey J. the EMT looks over at her, confused. “What?”

Oops. Shit. “Nolan Altman,” she says. Corey J. probably doesn’t need to know what floor Nolan works on, or the fact that there begins and ends just about everything Alice knows about him.

They finally finish whatever they’re doing and load him up onto the gurney. “You coming?” Corey J. asks, looking back at her as they push the gurney toward the exit.

“Oh, I—” There’s nothing Alice wants to do less than go in an ambulance, or to the hospital. Sorry, Nolan, she thinks. It’s not personal, but honestly, hell no. “No,” she says. “I’ll go, um . . . later.”

“Okay,” he says, but he gives her an odd look as he shoves the stretcher out the glass front doors.

Once the ambulance pulls away, the lobby is silent, like it usually is at four in the morning, but now it’s weird. The paramedics didn’t leave any stuff behind, and it’s not like Nolan was bleeding or anything, so it looks like nothing happened. It’s eerie.

It takes a few moments for Alice to move her body, to lurch back to her place behind the desk, but everything feels wrong. She barely notices her computer, the mouse that only sometimes works, the water bottle she faithfully hauls back and forth each day. She can feel the ghost of Nolan’s warm chest under her hands, not rising or falling but horribly, horribly still. She sees the dazzling red and blue lights behind her eyelids when she blinks, hears the squeak of the paramedics’ rubber shoes on the marble floor. In the empty quiet in front of her, the memory plays in a gruesome loop: Nolan opening his mouth in surprise and then falling to the ground, the heavy smack of his head on the shiny black floor reverberating in surround sound in Alice’s mind.

She has to get out of here, away from the artificial heat and echoing silence of this gaping void masquerading as a lobby, but her overnight shift at the reception desk doesn’t end for another three hours, and the building is never supposed to be left unattended. What will the entitled rich men who worship at the altar of capitalism do if they walk into their office and aren’t greeted by an exhausted-looking woman paid to be nice to them? Drop dead probably.

Well, okay, bad example.

But she saved someone’s life—not just a someone, but the someone—and she’s feeling relatively traumatized. “F*** it,” she mutters to herself. She grabs her purse and walks quickly out of the lobby, the click of her low heels the only sound in the world as the door locks silently behind her.

It’s freezing out, somewhere between drizzling and misting, wet enough to leave a film of water on her sweater and her eyelashes. Alice and the small trees along the curb shiver in the gentle breeze, both illuminated only by the faint light spilling out of the lobby’s windows. In the darkness Alice almost trips over one of those goddamned ubiquitous scooters that some asshole left in the middle of the sidewalk, but even almost face-planting on the wet ground doesn’t get her heart pounding as quickly as when she was in the lobby, kneeling over a prone body.

It takes almost half an hour, but her panic does start to recede. Nolan is officially in the hands of the experts. She did everything she could. She thumped on him in her best approximation of CPR, and she got help. Her own heartbeat slows from a gallop to a jouncy trot, and she can feel something hard unclenching at the bottom of her gut as she looks up at the low, dark clouds obscuring the night sky. For those ten minutes or however long it was, the world had narrowed to just her and Nolan Altman, but now, in the clarity of the frigid air, Alice can see the truth of what happened: A man she had a massive crush on but never technically met passed out in front of her, and she got him help. She did a good job, and now it’s done.

She really needs to go back to work.

A few minutes later she slinks back into her spot behind the desk. She’s probably going to be fired for leaving during her shift—her boss watches the security camera footage like it’s Monday Night Football, and will surely notice her absence. Now that she’s less panicked, she feels pretty stupid for leaving, but she’s not a time traveler so there’s nothing she can really do about it. She shivers as she shakes the rain off her hair, breathes a few times into her hands to warm them up, and then jiggles the mouse to wake up her computer.

She goes through her minimal tasks purely by rote—printing out visitor badges for the day, staring at the events calendar, confirming the time the carpet guys will show up to the fifth floor. The early birds start trickling in around six, the pace slowly picking up over the next hour like usual, although the big rush of people won’t hit until after her shift ends at seven. The building houses over thirty different businesses, mostly law and financial firms, which all demand twenty-four-hour access and never use it. Except for Nolan Altman, of course, who shows up between midnight and one in the morning at least once a week.

He’s been the only bright spot in her long, lonely nights for the two years she’s had this job. Beautiful and serious, with sharp features, pale skin, and jet-black hair, always well dressed, striding into the lobby like it’s not the middle of the night. He usually gives her a quick smile, and Alice isn’t counting or anything but he’s said hi four times, hey three times, and how’s it going twice. So. A love story for the ages, she’s pretty sure.

She really hopes he lives.