The Hundred Other Rileys
by Adam Bertocci

(sample)

I can see myself, kind of, in the elevator doors. The reflection is a blur. That’s okay. I’m exhausted and I’m sure I look like shit.

“It’s fine,” I lie to Mike and Mitchell. (I’m on the phone with my bosses—I somehow have two. The subject is why I left my building—I somehow had to.) “It’s temporary. I’m just going up to my brother’s place. Be back on top of everything in, like, two minutes.”

Mike merely sighs, and Mitchell reminds me of an artificial deadline. Or maybe it’s the other way around. Their voices are almost the same.

“I’m on it,” is all I squeak out.

Then the grayish doors split open, and my image is gone.

Fourteenth floor. Really thirteenth. My brother’s apartment awaits, as does my brother. “My God, it’s like looking in a mirror,” he crows.

I give him half a smirk and half a frown. “No twin humor, please. Just tell me where to toss my stupid bag.”

Bryce bows grandly and ushers me into the open plan pad. “Your bed-slash-couch awaits,” he proclaims. “Like, one of those corner-y couches. If you sleep on an angle.”

“Well, I am a Bender.” (Bender’s our surname.) I cross the uncarpeted floor and deposit my possessions and my ass in a patch of summer sunlight on the couch-slash-bed. “Thanks, Bryce. I do mean it.”

“Hey, c’mon. We’re family.” He gestures around. “Mi apartment, su apartment.”

“Sacre bleu.” I’m withdrawing essentials—laptop, chargers. “Don’t worry, I won’t be here forever, she said, unpacking all her shit.”

“Riley, it’s cool.”

“I’m twenty-eight and living with my brother. ‘Cool’ is not the word I’d use.”

He blinks. “You win.”

“Thank you.” This is how we communicate, in rapid riffs and rat-a-tat responses. Our high school classmates called it Bender banter. “I mean, who invites themselves over to crash on the couch?”

“Uncle Ned. All the time.”

“Well, they promised it’s one little problem to fix in my bad, broken building.” Laptop on lap, then on. In fades my background: golden lights and electrifying colors, the Ferris wheel at Providence Isle beneath a candy-clouds blue sky. “I’m outta here as soon as they ascertain my upstairs neighbors’ bathtub isn’t gonna break through the floor and kill me.”

“Is it a structural problem or the water?” Bryce asks, philosophically scratching his beard. “Remember, once, we used to live together, then Mom’s water broke.”

It takes me a second. “Okay, points for effort.”

Bryce is older than me by seven minutes, but it feels like a decade. His apartment is a grown-up’s in a tech kind of way, which means wide open spaces and a sense of the imposing and sleek. A white couch, where my stuff sits. Cerulean walls. A bright red fridge and a faux marble counter at the far end; behind me, big windows and a view of our gentrifying city. It feels like an office, which makes sense—he works from home—and now I work from his.

“I suppose you’ll need the WiFi,” he says, as I fumble with apps. “‘Starship Enterbryce’, password: t0b0ldlyg0, all one word, the o’s are zeroes.”

I type. “You’re insufferable.”

“What’s yours?”

“Naomi picked it, doesn’t count.”

“Ah, yes. Naomi.” My brother smiles. (My roommate does inspire this reaction.) “Where’s she crashing, by the way?”

“Her parents’ place in the ‘burbs. Can’t help ya.”

“Well, she’s welcome here any time.”

“I’m sure she is.” I stretch. “Good news is, her dad’s a lawyer. He’ll make sure we’re treated fairly through this bullshit.”

“Speaking of parents…” He’s got his phone out. “Shall we send Mom and Dad a picture of our family togetherness?”

“We shall not. I’m sweaty and I got ten thousand e-mails.”

“Camera-shy. Suit yourself.” He disappears into his little office space, a dozen feet to my left, tucked away behind a wall.

My brother is a techie in a field I do not grasp, making things I cannot use; my own job is not to understand, it’s to keep track of who’s doing what in Google Sheets and send a lot of e-mails with exclamation points asking when other people who do things will do them. ‘Riley Bender – Innovation Associate’, my signature reads. But I don’t innovate. No worries if not. I do things like resolve some conflict of drivel between two separate spreadsheets and a text from an executive who won’t read anything else.

This is the occupation of innovation association in my organization. I’m one off, or more, from the actual work of my work. There are versions of me in every sprawling corporation—the hubs, the go-betweens, the copier-pasters and checkers of boxes, whose lot it is neither to know nor to do, but to merely assign, assess, go after, be whatever fills the gaps. We look. We circle back. We forward. We facilitate. Sometimes we liaise. We don’t strategize, that’s too serious. We sync. We send updates. We tell ourselves we don’t shuffle papers, it’s all in the digital realm. We thank in advance. No worries if not. We don’t really do what our companies do, but we get on the same page, no worries if not. We do nothing that matters, and we’re all so behind.

Yet somehow, I’m getting ahead. Not in life but in my inbox. No worries if not.

Riley Bender – Innovation Associate. Sabalinx, Inc.

Riley Bender – Twenty-Eight Years Old.

Riley Bender – Psychology Major, can’t tell you why she did that.

Riley Bender, probably too old now to think of herself as her major.

Riley Bender, whose résumé is retail and reception and still lists her senior summer internship at her hometown historic house museum.

Riley Bender: She went into adulthood with no expectations of magic, but somehow still thought there’d be more of the good parts, the fun stuff, and less of the series of tasks to repeat. She accepted the undignified chores of consumption and laundry and paying her bills but refused to discard the belief in a point to it all. She arrived in the working world right as technology was butchering its boundaries, untethering people from the office and tying them, instead, to their laptops and phones and for some even watches, as the drudgery and boring routine of nine to five gave way to the twenty-four/seven, with nothing off-limits again. And she steps outside herself, sometimes, and looks at her life, and sees the scrapes and contradictions as she works more to earn less, to live in a city that she cannot take the time to enjoy, and deep down, she’s terrified of losing the job she fucking hates, and so keeps at it, frenetic, feverish, unable or unwilling to see what happens if she fails to hold back the digital deluge of dross, the train of scutwork that resembles productivity but doesn’t produce, and adds up to less than the sum of its monotonous parts.

Sabalinx. Formerly Sabalink Systems.

The future is today, reads their site, beside a stock photo of a man at a computer. He’s punching the white space above.

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