Songs of Love & Death

She was at a sidewalk table, chin resting on her hand, staring at the traffic moving along the tree-lined street, because staring somewhere else wasn’t any less productive than staring at a blank page. She caught movement. It might have been the flickering of a set of leaves at the top of one of the trees, but it wasn’t. It was a person on the roof across the way. Jeans, dark T-shirt, and a mask.

He seemed to realize that she saw him. He stood and ran, disappearing to the back of the roof.

She stood, jostling the table and tipping over her coffee, which streamed to the edge and dripped to the sidewalk. Grabbing her notebook and satchel, she ran across the street, dodging cars like a creature in a video game. At the first alley she came to, she ran to the back of the building to look, but of course he wasn’t there. Just trash that hadn’t made it into the Dumpsters and puddles from the last rain filling cracks in the asphalt. The back doors of various businesses, shut and blank.

Maybe if she waited here until after dark, she’d get caught by muggers, and the masked man would come to rescue her. She didn’t want to leave, she didn’t want to pretend that he was a ghost, that it hadn’t happened, that she could move on.

“Hello?” she called. Her voice rattled in the empty space and no one answered.

DORIAN WAS WORKING late again and asked her to bring dinner—Thai takeout—to his office.

“He’s a crazy superhuman vigilante. You know what they’re like,” he said when she told him the story.

She felt the need to defend the superhero. While not offending Dorian. “You’re both working so hard to catch these guys, maybe you should work together. Pool your resources. Collaborate.” That was a theater word. She should have used another.

He gave her a look, appalled and amused at once. A “yeah, right” and “don’t be ridiculous.”

That night, back at her own apartment, she tried to sleep, couldn’t. She collected her notebook and sat by the window. Still didn’t write a word, but sitting with a pen in hand at least made her feel productive. The moon was full; she could see every detail of the street, the apartment blocks, the row of shops and Laundromats with steel grates pulled over the doors; at night, all the colors washed out to various degrees of half-tone shading.

On the roof of a row of shops, a figure moved. Monochrome, like the rest of the scene. Black T-shirt. Charlotte couldn’t see his face.

He was watching her. He was. And her heart fluttered at the thought.

SHE HAD SEEN him at all hours. Mostly on rooftops. She couldn’t predict where he’d be, unless maybe she staged a convenience store robbery. But the odds of that ending badly were very, very high, so she didn’t.

Instead, she went to the top of a parking garage on the fringes of downtown with a set of binoculars and scanned the surrounding rooftops. She might have become a vigilante herself, searching for crime, because if she found crime, she’d find him. She didn’t see anything.

For another night, she sat at her bedroom window, wrapped in a blanket, waiting for a shadow to race across rooftops and strike a dramatic pose.

And she started writing. Just a few lines in her notebook.

Dorian took her to a charity banquet and introduced her to the mayor. She wore the red dress she’d worn on opening night, met the mayor, accepted compliments from the DA, and Dorian beamed. The evening was a strange echo of the first night they’d met, but different. She was different. An accessory instead of a novelty. She should have been thrilled—this was part of her dreams of a glamorous life, wasn’t it? But she was distracted. It all seemed shallow.

For real drama, some disaster would strike the banquet. Some villain or group of thieves—maybe the same gang that had robbed the jewelry store—would storm the hall, divest the women of their jeweled necklaces and the men of their gold cufflinks, along with wallets and platinum cards and stock portfolios. They would take Charlotte hostage. The red dress made her stand out.

Then he would arrive, an epic battle would ensue, there’d be flames and bullets, she’d be trapped behind a burning door and he would—

“What are you looking for?” Dorian asked her.

“Oh. What? Nothing. Nothing.” She’d been craning her neck, looking at the doors and windows for impending drama.

“You writers,” Dorian said, squeezing her hand.

SOME NIGHTS, SHE went to the theater to take in the atmosphere, but avoided Otto because he always asked about the next play. She watched the old play from the house once, but otherwise sat backstage, well out of the way, and made notes. She was like an observer on a rooftop.

The text messages from Dorian continued. “Sry. Work ran late. Will make it up to you. xoxo.”

So again, she took herself to dinner, to the same favorite café with the rooftop patio. It was raining, but she asked to sit on the patio anyway.

“But it’s raining,” the host said.

“I have an umbrella,” she said.