The woman with the dark hair moves up and down the staircase, peeking into doorways as if she has lost something. I don’t want to pass her, but there’s not really a choice. I keep to the opposite wall with my head down, as people do when they go by beggars. But I can’t get far enough away. She presses in on me even from the landing above, with her skittish, erratic ticks cutting me off. When we’re close she takes my sleeve in her tiny white fist. She looks up at me with plastic eyes.

     “Have you found my name?” she asks me. “I misplaced it. It’s gone.”

     “I haven’t. I’m sorry.”

     I try to pull away, but her grip and her surreal femininity keep me in place. It’s as if Dali and Kahlo conspired to make a woman, all warm and dark and insistent, barely sketched-in with their coals. “I woke up without it,” she says. “I thought I had it on the nightstand, like always. But it wasn’t there. You’re sure you haven’t seen it?”

     I look down at this pencil-and-ink woman, thinking that if she turned ninety degrees she’d disappear from my sight. I feel sorry for her, the way I probably wouldn’t for a man. She’s pretty.

     “Yes, I’m sure.”

     “Would you help me look for it? I’m afraid it’s gotten away.”

     She pulls her lips back so they’re all thin. I’ve never seen someone so worried.

     “I don’t know how much help I could be. I’m not much good at names, you see.”

     It’s true. My parents named me John Johnson. Never has a name left such a bland taste on the tongue.

     I tell her this. I tell her my name’s too boring, that I’ve no eye for names. We both look at the dripping rust-stains on the walls for a moment. Her fist relaxes.

     “But if your name is so boring, that makes it automatically a point of interest.”

     “Um. I suppose.”

     “So you must have an eye. Will you help? It won’t take long, I promise!”

     Her lack of definition still bothers me, but I can’t deny that nagging sense of chivalry.

     “All right. Let’s see what we find.”

     She gives me a tight hug, though her arms feel like paper. I don’t hug back.

     “What kind of name is it? That might help us.”

     The drawn woman lets go. She creases her brow. “It’s a silky name. Not tinny or woody.”

     “French, maybe? Or Russian?”

     The woman shrugs so we continue up the staircase holding onto the rails with their flaking green paint as if they mattered. I have my eyes on the floor but she – well, it’s hard to tell where her eyes are. They’re kind of everywhere, sunken back like cave-dwellers. Her hair swings in a pit-and-pendulum way with her steps, long and straight, limp and dead. I wonder if she is dead, and just hasn’t realized it yet.

     That would certainly make her less attractive.

     We look. We don’t find anything, and all the doors lead to dead-end closets like the kind you keep skeletons in so that’s no help either. We don’t see anyone else, to some relief on my part. I’m wishing I hadn’t come on this little Odyssey as the drawn woman clicks her tongue and talks to herself. But we do come to a real door—one with a clouded-over window and so rusty on its hinges that it can’t even close all the way. There’s a bit of a draft whipping around it from the other side. I feel it on my face as I look through.

     I push it open. My companion sucks in a breath, as if she’d stubbed her toe.

     “There’s no names there. Only bad stuff,” she says, covering her mouth with a cupped hand.

     “Someone on this floor might have seen it. Maybe there’s a lost-and-found.”

     It’s a big building, I’m sure—like one of those Empire State-jobs. But through the door there’s only a short hallway and a little room with a help window at the far end. The fat stuffy man who waits to provide that help sits behind thick plexiglass, like a clerk at a Bronx post office or a seedy liquor store.

     He looks about as busy as a postal clerk, too.

     “Yes?” he asks.

     “We need assistance,” I answer, half-turning to include my new friend. Acquaintance. That woman-girl person. The clerk raises his eyebrows and I realize she hasn’t accompanied me. This is embarrassing, but I decide to forge ahead. “Some help,” I repeat.

     “That’s what I do. Help. People,” the toad-man says, licking his wide toad chops.

     I point to where the drawn woman lingers in the doorway. She has turned her two dimensions mostly away from us, and so is hard to see. “My acquaintance thinks she lost her name on the staircase out there. I was wondering if someone might have handed it in? Or if perhaps you had seen it?”

     “She’s not your acquaintance.”

     “Pardon me?”

     Toad taps his name tag for emphasis. I can’t read it through the smears on the window. “Unless she gave you one of these, you’re not really acquainted with her, are you?”

     I disagree with this, but it seems best not to be contrary. “Well, not technically, I guess. But I’m sure she’ll remedy that when she finds her name. If you can help us.”

     The clerk smiles. “I’m afraid no one’s given me any spare names found in the building. No surprise there. Names is power. If someone found a good one, most likely they’d keep it.”

     “I see.”

     “Keep looking, though – maybe it’ll turn up. Maybe you can bargain for it.”

     I thank the man and return to the stairwell. The pen-and-ink woman gives me a shamed look.

     “I’m sorry. I don’t think I ever felt afraid like this.”

     “You don’t have to apologize.”

     “Did you find anything?”

     “Just someone unwilling to assist,” I answer.

     She kicks at the flaking mosaic of tiles on the floor. “Oh.” Then she sits on the stairs, moving as if she were in an animation flipbook or an old oscilloscope. There’s no fluidity in her; I look around for the strobe light to explain this but can’t find it.

     I touch her. “We’ve still a lot of staircase left. And no one climbs stairs anymore, right? Not in a building like this. Your name is still here, trust me.”

     “I’m such a fool, dangling it out there like that where anyone could get it. Who does that? Who treats their name as if their life didn’t depend on it? Because it does, John Johnson.”

     I shrug. I don’t really know about such things.

     When she’s ready to stop her flood of self-pity we keep looking. Our eyes watch the floor and the corners and I begin to sense that the stairwell itself is a painted thing, something off of a canvas or out of a creepy video game. She asks me to go slightly ahead because she’s afraid of people, but she needn’t worry. It’s a relict of a staircase in a relict of a building in a relict of a universe. There’s no people.

     It makes me feel old. It shouldn’t.

     At one point my shady companion panics. It starts out with hands running through her hair and a nailbiting sort of look. Before long the tears come: her eyeliner drips down her cheeks. I’ve always liked that kind of thing. If she looked more real, I’d find it sexy.

     “It’s not here! I was wrong!”

     I don’t answer her.

     “I must have left it elsewhere – the carnival! Someone melted it in their mouth like cotton candy! Gone!”

     She hits the wall. She hyperventilates. So I sit her down.

     “It’s not so bad. Even if that’s true, you can just get a new one. Call your parents.”

     “It doesn’t work that way and you know it.”

     In fact, I’m not really sure how it works. So I sit alongside her until she calms, when I say: “We still haven’t finished looking, you know. There’s a lot of stairs left. You can’t give up hope yet.”

     This seems to help her some. She starts to breathe normally.

     When we get up, I have a sort of premonition that this damned staircase will in fact never end. I’m sure she feels that way, too – like she’s trapped herself here forever. But that’s not true. I find myself impatient to get to the top, so I can get out of this Escher-space and move on to my own business. The woman takes my hand. I want her to be warm, but she’s not. She looks up at me with these eyes, they’re like holes in a photograph drawn with a ballpoint, blue or black around the edges. I feel her changing, getting more desperate.

     “Thank you for helping,” she says. Her legs are shaking now, making her white linens tremble like a limp cascade.

     I know I’m not really of any help but regardless I’m about to tell her “It’s my pleasure.” I’m interrupted by the sound of footsteps above. Clacky, high-heeled footsteps drawing nearer to us and nearer to the earth.

     The woman in my hand eyes the flights above, a rabbit on the lookout for a raven. Or else a raven for a rabbit—her hastily-sketched expression makes it hard to be sure, and her mussy eyeliner only makes the obscurity worse. She sniffs, but we keep walking up. On the next landing the high-heeled newcomer looks down at us from her own platform above. She’s surprised. She presses her business skirt and continues down, offering us a half-smile out of a well-trained sort of politeness.

     The drawn woman won’t let her pass. “Have you seen my name?”

     Distress lines the polite woman’s face. “I’m sorry?”

     “My name. I lost it here on the stairwell, I think. Did you see it, upstairs somewhere?”

     “No. No, I’m afraid I haven’t.” The woman sounds as if she’s indulging a kindergartener’s fantasy.

     My companion must not like the woman’s tone, or her body language, or something. She lifts up on her toes, eye-level with the woman above. I hadn’t realized how tall she is. “You’re sure? It’s a silky name.”

     “Yes… yes!” the woman stammers as she leans back for safety. “But—but if you told me what it looked like I could keep an eye out—”

     “Liar!”

     The accusation freezes in midair. The business woman withers under it like a weed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about! I’d like to help, but—”

     “Liar!” the ice-bullet comes again. With it, my ragged, rapidly sketched, stained-cheek companion puts her arms out and shoves. The well-dressed woman teeters on those high heels and falls back on the stairs. She looks familiar as she falls, I think, in that wide-open gaze of hers. I should stop her falling. I don’t.

     She gives a sharp cry. Her hands go up in defense but my companion swats them away and slaps her.

     “Where is it? Where did you take it?”

     “I don’t have it! I never did!”

     The look of this bothers me. I don’t know if it’s the confused rage or the raging confusion more.

     “You do have it! Where is it?” The dark woman rips the other’s jacket away. She tears through the pockets and comes up with nothing. She searches the woman’s hair. Her shirt. Nothing. She pulls open clothing, probes hidden areas, leaves the woman humiliated and sobbing where she lies. Nothing.

     I keep my hands in my pockets as I watch all this. The urge to intervene fades as I thumb their contents. I should feel guilty. I did at first. I should now more than ever. But I don’t. It’s a far better name than mine.

_________________________________________________________

     Mr. Hogg is currently a Ph.D. candidate and fencing instructor whose fiction has appeared in such venues as The Fairfield Review, Naked Snake, and the anthology "Touched By Wonder" from Meadowhawk Press.  Originally from a border town in Texas, he now lives and works in New York.

main