Story Draft - 'Purification'

Story turned in as first draft for my short-story writing class. Note: this turned out to be the first draft of an opening chapter in what feels like a much longer story, so apologies that the ‘end’ feels more like a beginning. I can't write short stories--I like using ten pages where two would suffice.

Purification

The Public Storage facility on Tierra del Fuego Avenue is unobtrusively wedged into a blank space between an office park and a delivery company, backing up against a freeway that never seems free enough, given the constant confusion of cars trying to merge on and off the too-short ramp. Driving up to it that first afternoon, I vaguely thought that I should return to the yellow pages and look for another option—there seemed to be dozens of similar facilities in the area, so surely I could choose one that didn’t seem so…derelict? The ‘office’ was located in a temporary trailer outside the fence; behind the fence was what appeared to be a foundation for a new office, but the rebar was rusted and weeds were growing up through the cracks in the concrete. My judgmental side, perhaps genetically endowed by my puritanical ancestors, railed against the idea of doing business with any company too lazy to finish its own office building, and urged me to put the key back in the ignition and drive away before I got lured into the same devilry that led to such obvious sloth. Four years of a liberal education had taught me to ignore my Puritan roots, however, and the ghosts of my forefathers settled back into a grumbling, uneasy acquiescence.

The truth is, I’ve always cheered for the underdog—this often leads to disappointment (even though I was sure Ghana would win the World Cup, or that my grandfather could prevail against old age, cancer, and a bad heart), but it is rarely dissatisfying and never boring. And any business that could stubbornly cling to its own shabbiness amongst the flash and glamour of Silicon Valley seemed like my kind of place. Perhaps my Puritans and I could agree on that point—if they hated the physical appearance of the storage facility, they surely detested the nonchalance with which I threw my money away on flatscreen TVs, fancy clothes, and four-dollar mochas. Supporting an honest-to-goodness small business, regardless of its physical appearance, was probably preferable to buying overpriced goods from a soulless national chain.

So, it should come as no surprise that I walked up the dirty metal steps to the trailer with only a small qualm about my surroundings. Turning the handle on the battered door, I stepped into an office that seemed to have been frozen in the early 1990s. You might not think this would be so noticeable, but it was. I, being as voraciously acquisitive as the rest of my socioeconomic class, typically surrounded myself with shiny, pretty things; if I had bought filing cabinets and cheap folding table-desks in the early 1990s, and then resisted the keeping-up-with-the-joneses urge to upgrade them, they would undoubtedly have looked like this. Of course, I wouldn’t be caught dead in that type of office. My desk is a charming dark wood with a glass top, and it certainly doesn’t fold up for easy storage, nor does it have plastic trim peeling away from its sides. I don’t have filing cabinets, but if I did, they wouldn’t look like they had been tossed and stomped on by an angry giantess wearing size-35 stilettos.

Anyway, I digress. My greed and pride, much lamented by my conscience, was why I was there; my cute, posh one-bedroom could no longer contain the detritus accumulated by a confirmed packrat. I may be able to silence my inner Puritans when I’m contemplating buying a pair of Versace sunglasses (they’re just jealous that they couldn’t harvest their fields behind the UV protection and glittering rhinestones of my dark wraparounds), but I secretly agree with their fear of waste. What if I need that snorkel someday, or the pile of half-used notebooks, or a giant pillow shaped like a catfish? So what if I don’t swim, I write on a laptop, and my tastes have progressed beyond dorm-room-chic—this was all ‘good stuff’, and I couldn’t divest myself of it. I could, however, store it someplace, and this was a convenient place—close to my office, and cheap enough that even the Puritans couldn’t berate me for it.

I looked at the clerk, but the man I viewed as my would-be savior from a life of clutter was ignoring me behind the grimy Formica counter. I willed him to look up at me. He didn’t. I tried my usual tactic, and oh-so-subtly jingled my car keys; the bottle opener and the carabiner rattled against each other, but he still ignored me. Finally, realizing that my passive-aggressive tenacity wouldn’t help me here, I stepped directly up to the counter and said, ‘Excuse me?’

It was like a bomb had gone off under his nose. He leapt back, eyes darting wildly, clutching the book he had been reading in one hand and a large, gun-like stapler in the other. I put my hands up half-jokingly, offering a tentative smile even as I moved slowly towards the door. Not that I thought he would kill me with a stapler, but stranger things have happened—and stranger things do tend to happen to me. That day of all days, I wasn’t in the mood for whatever fun-and-games the fates had in store for me, so I wanted to head them off at the pass.

Seeing that I’m a small, rather non-threatening female seemed to calm him down a little, and he lowered the stapler warily. He didn’t apologize, though, which struck me as odd. If he were my age, I would have expected it—my generation doesn’t exactly excel at customer service. But he was older, perhaps my parents’ age; and for all their faults, all the sex-and-drugs-and-rock-n-roll of the ‘60s and ‘70s that made it possible for me to turn into a walking advertisement for the Seven Deadly Sins—for all of that, my elders at least tend to be more attenuated to the needs of the customer. Not this baby boomer, though. He was twitchy enough to indicate that he perhaps didn’t get away from the drug scene soon enough to save his central nervous system.

The silence lengthened, him staring at me and me dumbly glancing about the empty office as though I could find some back-up. Then I noticed the book in his hand, still held up like a shield. ‘You’re reading The Zombie Survival Guide?’ I said incredulously.

The Zombie Survival Guide is one of those faux-serious books that purport to teach you a skill, in this case how to survive the coming apocalyptic rise of the undead. I’d lost interest before finishing it, but perhaps I wasn’t the target audience; judging by where his finger was lodged between the pages (perhaps a chapter or two from the end), middle-aged recovering drug addicts were far more into zombies than I had thought.

I’d hoped that this conversational gambit would lure him into thawing, followed shortly thereafter by entering into an uncomplicated month-to-month lease of a 5’x15’ storage unit, but instead the tension ratcheted up a few more notches. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to intrude,’ I said with what I hoped was my most winning smile. ‘I just noticed because I’ve read part of it too, but I haven’t met anyone else who’s even heard of it, and I was surprised to see it here, of all places…’

I realized that I was starting to babble, and I trailed off. I was intrigued by his craziness, but I like to pretend that I’m not insane myself, and I had better things to do than pry a conversation out of a potentially-sociopathic clerk at a Public Storage site. ‘Well, since you’re busy, I’ll come back another time,’ I said with feigned enthusiasm, crossing my fingers against the lie as though I were still a child and as though this lie mattered. I’m not, and it didn’t, but the friendliness in my voice, however fake, seemed to snap him out of his crazy little world. Or, perhaps he still had enough of a sense of duty left to realize that he was letting a potential customer, with a potential monthly payment, walk out the door. He glanced at the clock, saw it was 5:30pm, realized that he couldn’t close up for another hour, and sighed.

‘No, no, please stay. I sincerely apologize for my behavior—it was inexcusable. How may I assist you?’

It was apparently my turn to be incredulous. His voice, while as rusty as the rebar in that unfinished building behind the fence, was cultured, well-modulated, and vaguely British. He sounded like he would be more at home in one of those tweed jackets with the leather patches on the elbows, rather than in an absurd purple-and-orange Public Storage polo.

‘Um…I wanted to rent a storage unit, but if this is a bad time…’ I said uncertainly. It made no sense, but I would have rather rented from a psychotic drug addict—cultured British gentlemen don’t work in menial California desk jobs, which led to a disquieting feeling that I was dealing with someone who shouldn’t be there.

He looked at the clock again, then smiled at me. Perhaps it was meant to be reassuring, but it seemed like he was just doing it because he should—or perhaps I’m reading into it with what I know now. ‘No, it is not a bad time; in fact, your timing is impeccable. What size of storage unit were you wishing to rent?’

‘5’x15’’, I said shortly.

‘Excellent. We have that exact size available. And would you be requiring a lock with that?’ he asked.

‘Well, I already have a padlock,’ I replied.

‘Is it combination?’ he asked, and I nodded. ‘I really recommend that you purchase a new lock. We are not plagued by robbers’—and here he gave a mirthless laugh—‘but combination locks are rather easy to bypass if someone has the time. We sell better locks for only $10.’

‘Fine,’ I said, not really caring, but easily conned (like most consumers) by promises of better/safer/more effective.

He handed me a clipboard with the requisite forms, and I filled in all my vital details. Apparently the British dude (I’d started calling him Mr. Thorne-Smythe in my head because it sounded appropriate, even though his nametag said Gavin) had a sense of humor—the last sheet in the application had silly questions, like blood type, favorite color, whether my car had a name, next of kin, etc. I left it all blank, and when I handed it back to him, he didn’t notice.

While he looked at a map of available storage units on the chalkboard by the filing cabinets, I idly examined the rest of the room. He’d tossed The Zombie Survival Guide on the counter when he’d unbent enough to talk to me, as though he wasn’t interested in it, but I noticed that he’d marked his place with a piece of string nonetheless. The stapler was there too, beside a wicked-looking silver letter-opener; why he’d picked up the stapler when he felt threatened, rather than the knife-like opener, I had no idea. Other than that, the office was pretty barren and the walls were undecorated, except for the standard ‘workplace rights’ posters and business licenses issued by the State of California. There was also a purple and orange placard with ‘This workplace has been accident-free for…days’ printed on it. The erasable area between ‘for’ and ‘days’ looked recently smudged, and someone (presumably my British dude) had written ‘0’ over it with what seemed like a defiant flourish. Hmm. No wonder he looked jumpy.

The sound of the dot-matrix printer producing my lease agreement interrupted these thoughts; I told you the office seemed like a throwback to earlier times. Who uses dot-matrix printers? I didn’t know they even sold the paper anymore. The man carefully tore the perforated edges off the contract and handed it to me.

‘I have given you K59—it is in a decent row, and it should suit your needs,’ he said, even though I hadn’t told him what my needs were. ‘The outer gate locks automatically, and can only be opened from 9:30am to 6:30pm. You will need this code to open the gate,’ he continued, handing me an orange card with ‘092617’ written on it. ‘I am sure I do not need to say this, since you look like the proper sort,’—this said with the ghost of a smile—‘but make sure you leave by 6:30pm. You would not want to spend the night inside.’

I nodded automatically; he was right about my rule-abiding tendencies, and I doubted that I would be so desperate to retrieve my snorkel that I would risk getting locked in anyway.

‘Also, you will need this,’ he said, handing me a blank piece of orange paper, roughly the size of a 5”x7” photograph. ‘Simply write your chosen name and place it in the holder by your storage room door.’

I must have looked startled at this apparent invasion of privacy, because he was quick to add, ‘You do not need to use your real name; in fact, I would encourage you to use anything but your real name.’ One of those ghost-smiles flickered across his face again. ‘I am sure that any name you choose will be satisfactory. Now, daylight is wasting, and you have less than an hour if you wish to see your storage unit before the gate locks.’

Gavin handed me a map, a barely-legible photocopy-of-a-photocopy, and circled K59 on it. He also handed me a standard-issue lock that didn’t look any better than my old lock, but I’d already paid for it, so I slipped it into my purse anyway. ‘Best of luck, my dear,’ he said. ‘And do let me know how you get on in there.’

‘Thanks,’ I said, clutching the sheaf of papers with one hand while I opened the door with the other. The sunlight, even late on a September afternoon, was bright and reassuring on my face.

Judging by the map, I could drive my car through the gate and directly to my unit, but I decided that foot reconnaissance was smarter; I would hate to end up with my car wedged into an innavigable part of the storage site just minutes after signing the lease. And, after the strange office and stranger conversation, the relatively fresh outside air was very appealing.

I punched ‘092617’ into the keypad of the main entrance, and the large metal gate slid slowly back. The gate was large enough that two cars or a brigade of infantry could pass through simultaneously, without scuffing side-view mirrors or meticulously polished dress shoes.

According to the map, which I now regard as a quaint artifact rather than a useful guide, the Public Storage site officially consists of seven rows, each with 20-30 storage units. At that time, the seven rows were half-embraced by a semi-circular ‘row’ of units that wrapped around from the edge of the unfinished building to the opposite side of the property, serving as a windbreak against the gusts kicked up by the semis and buses on the freeway beyond. Between the seven rows and the windbreak set, there were perhaps 400 units. Strangely, in an area where land is at such a premium, all of the units were ground level; there were no elevators to be seen, and certainly no fancy mechanical toys to stack crates of your belongings in a carefully-packed warehouse. The site was certainly old enough to have been built when all of this was still depressed farmland, before the geeks of the Valley had turned everything for miles around into a soulless, WiFi-enabled wasteland. You had to wonder about their profit margins, though. The owner must have had some reason for keeping it, even though you would think that s/he could have gotten more out of it by selling it to make room for more cookie-cutter offices.

As the gate closed behind me, I turned right and walked past three long rows of units, dead-ending where the semi-circular wall was farthest from the office. I turned left, following the path as it curved towards the freeway, tracking the descending numbers painted on all of the identical orange doors. K59 was part of the bulwark between the facility and the outside world. My door was the only one without a card in the holder beside it. I hadn’t bothered to read the other placards as I had walked, but I noticed the ones on either side of mine. K57’s was in some language I couldn’t recognize, let alone read. K61’s said, ‘Consulate of the Republic of Moldova. Vladimir Strǎşeni, Consular-General. Audience by Appointment Only.’ The ‘Republic of Moldova’ part took up most of the card, and the rest was smushed around it, as though it was vitally important to ‘Consular-General Strǎşeni’ that his name be recognized by potential visitors.

I laughed to myself. No wonder Gavin had suggested that I avoid using my own name; if K61 was any indication, no one else took this placard thing seriously either. I dug a pen out of my purse, freed it from the tangle of headphones that came with, and thought for a moment before scrawling ‘Charity Bowman, Puritan’ on my card and shoving it in the slot.

A small tremor shook me, but I took this to be from one of the semis on the freeway. Then, the door to the Moldovan consulate opened from the inside, swinging gently outward. A faint aroma of wine breathed out and was immediately overwhelmed by the more noxious odors of the warp-speed traffic on the freeway beyond. The ephemeral scent was followed by a cheerfully morose man in his early thirties; he held up slightly better to the outdoor air, although his skin was so pale that sun may have been a foreign concept for him. He squinted at me from beneath shaggy eyebrows, one arm held up against his forehead to block the glare of the setting sun. What really surprised me, though, was that he was actually wearing what appeared to be a national costume of some sort—presumably Moldovan, given the stereotypically-Eastern-European embroidered vest/belt combo over the flowing tunic and pants.

The man didn’t appear to notice my shock, and the silence lengthened expectantly. However, I decided I wasn’t in the mood to have another conversation with a lunatic; I really just wanted to see my storage unit and then escape. So, I muttered a ‘Hi’ in his general direction before turning towards my door.

‘Wait,’ he said suddenly.

‘For what?’ I asked, annoyed. ‘For the sun to go down? For everyone here to stop acting crazy?’

He laughed a little at that; at least his chuckle sounded more genuine than Gavin’s ‘No, you’d be waiting awhile for that to happen. I just wanted to ask what name you’d chosen.’

His accent and mannerisms seemed incongruously American, given his outfit. In answer to his question, I pointed to my card. He laughed again (as I said, he looked cheerfully morose), and shook his head. ‘Welcome to the club, then, Charity Bowman. Or should I call you Goody Bowman?’

‘Charity’s fine, but it’s not my…’ I started, but he cut me off. ‘Vladimir isn’t either, but it’s all that matters here. At least you didn’t choose ‘Chastity’,’ he said with a wink.

I scowled at his impertinence and turned away again. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, not sounding sorry at all. ‘But seriously, if you have questions, let me know. I haven’t figured out much yet, but stop by if you, like, need anything.’

‘Do I need an appointment?’ I said a bit snidely, getting in a dig about his placard. I thought he turned a bit red at that; for an insult it wasn’t very good, but it was apparently effective. He just shook his head, said, ‘Good luck, Charity,’ and went back into his unit.

There was no lock on the outer latch, so I pulled the catch back and opened my door. My first thought was that Gavin must have made a mistake; while the space was mostly empty, there was still a bit of stuff inside. I was already turning to rectify the error when I started to wonder why none of the stuff in the storage space was boxed up. Most people store their belongings in boxes or crates, but this was different—almost like someone had been living there. Someone with a taste for 17^th-century decorating principles, apparently. What appeared to be a pile of bedding was carefully stacked in one corner, and several plain dresses hung from hooks on the wall. There was a rough-hewn table with a couple of benches, simple plates and pewter goblets, a few candles, and strange cooking implements hanging from the ceiling beams. That was another odd thing—how many storage units have ceiling beams? Probably the same number as have wooden floors, or a fireplace in the back, but this particular unit had all three. It also seemed bigger than it should have been; it certainly wasn’t 5’x15’, more like 10’x15’, although I didn’t understand where the extra five feet of width came from, given that the space between my door and the units next to me had only been three feet or so.

There was a part of me that felt like this was perfect, right down to the little details like the bread-toasting implement in the fireplace that looked exactly like the one that LeVar Burton used in the Reading Rainbow episode when he went to colonial Williamsburg. But the practical part of me was already rejecting what I was seeing, trying to explain the strange coincidence that would lead me into a, dare I say, Puritanical room within a shabby storage facility? I wanted to hear Gavin explain it to me, to say that it was a mistake, that a local museum used this storage unit to practice setting up displays (the items were certainly of museum quality), never mind that the door was unlocked or that California museums aren’t exactly known for their collections of 17^th-century Americana.

I stumbled back outside, missing the slight ledge that was presumably designed to keep water from coming into the unit but that currently only served to trip me up. Vladimir Strǎşeni, Consular-General of the Republic of Moldova, was waiting outside. “You look like you could use a drink,” he said sympathetically. “If there’s one thing that I’m thankful for, it’s that one of Moldova’s only industries is wine-making. Care to join me?”

I thought about it briefly, then nodded. My curiosity, troublesome at the best of times and downright dangerous at the worst, had been aroused. Knowing what I know now, I wonder if I could have stopped myself, convinced myself to leave and ignore what I had just seen—but I doubt it. I had no idea that my life would change irrevocably, but given my natural talent for getting into absurd situations, it was perhaps inevitable. Vladimir held the door to the consulate open for me like the gentleman I later learned he wasn’t, and I entered. Life didn’t make sense again for a very long time.