Numbers
The cinder blocks were raw and grey. The floods came years ago, not long ago, fresh enough that anyone older than fourteen could tell you about life before if one cared to ask. No one did. Things weren’t the same as they were; the beautiful theatres and hotels were buried, deteriorated, and those that still stood could not be used. They made a lovely sight, though, a marvelous spectacle to those from out of town: old bricks and windows piercing the petrichor of the day with eerie, eroding terracotta and shimmering glass, rising from the water in decrepit majesty. Most of the windows were broken. Everyone suspected, though no one knew, that these places were where the poor congregated in squat—while the streets had been infected with tattered clothes and vagabonds, the waterways encouraged those unwanted to prowl elsewhere. Even in the upper city, where the water splashed against steep slopes where the cobblestones emerged again, few nuisances were ever seen in public. Not since the floods. They were better off squatting downtown.
❧
Someone had to hold the blocks. It was a job that no employed individual wanted, but those who lacked purpose or direction in their lives were quite well suited for it. Everyone agreed on this.
Neiman Boggins was among this everyone. At the same time, if you were to ask Neiman his opinion on this, his response would probably be, “What?” because, fortunately, Neiman had other things to think about and very rarely remembered this position in his city.
It wasn’t quite his city—it was the mayor’s city, he supposed, but everybody in the city liked him better than the mayor anyway, so he had a defensible claim to its population. He had met the mayor once or twice, but the mayor was frankly as irrelevant to him as the shadows that held the blocks. The mayor was also boring.
“Very good. It was quite good,” the mayor said to him at their first meeting, and he shook Neiman’s hand with a severe, sickly enthusiasm.
“Thank you,” Neiman said, which warranted a “You’re welcome” from the mayor, which contributed nothing to the conversation.
The mayor rubbed his hands firmly together like a hamster preparing to wash its face. “This is quite nice.” He gestured to the lovely cinder stage.
“I know,” Neiman responded. He waited for the mayor to clean his face with his paws, but the mayor didn’t, because he wasn’t a hamster but rather a very boring man, so he instead continued wringing his fingers together while he smiled airily at Neiman. Finally, his beady rodent eyes blinked a few times as he drudged up something more to say.
“I am very happy with what you’re doing for this city. Very happy.”
Neiman nodded instead of saying “thank you” because he didn’t want to be welcomed again.
The floor below them trembled. They had been standing in the same place for too long. “Oh—!” the mayor remarked, surprised. Neiman stepped once to the left, and the mayor followed him. “That’s—” The mayor giggled. “That’s very interesting.”
It was actually about as interesting as the mayor himself. The word the mayor should’ve used was “unfortunate”; this is what it was to Neiman, who had to coordinate around it. The cinderblocks were heavy enough on their own, but with people standing atop them, the underfoot quickly lost strength. Actors had to move fairly quickly onstage to mediate this problem, but this added to the distinct style of the floating playhouse—always alive, always buzzing. A static stage was dull. A stage of floating cinder, on the other hand, was not. Only, cinder couldn’t float on water, but it could on human hands. So this is what it balanced on.
“Very interesting,” Neiman agreed disagreeably.
“Very avant-garde,” the mayor mused thoughtfully. This was the most exciting word in his vocabulary, and he used it sparingly so it would be more impressive when he did choose to say it.
Neiman was not impressed. It was what everybody said about his theatre, and he was getting bored of it.
“Thank you for being here, Mr. Mayor,” he said ungratefully.
“You’re very welcome, Mr. Boggins.” He wound his little varmint claws together once again in silence, as if he wanted to continue the conversation for some reason.
“Goodbye, Mr. Mayor,” Neiman suggested.
“Oh, goodbye,” the mayor said, and he stumbled over to where his boat waited on the other side of the stage. The patrons had all gone by now, and the cinder block seats drifted toward the half-sunken building where the props and set were stored. It had been deemed unsafe for human occupancy, so Neiman only used it to house and retrieve supplies and cinder, but he was almost certain that most of the cinders stayed there when they weren’t working. He didn’t dwell on this. It didn’t pertain to him.
❧
The top floor was the emptiest. This floor was untouched by Neiman Boggins, who primarily used the second and third, which were the bottom two after the first sunk in the floods. Though the top floor was the emptiest, it was not empty. The cinders did, indeed, squat on the fourth floor at night and during the winter season, when the water iced over and no one could wade through it to hold up cinder blocks. The fifth floor, however, was not one for squatting.
In the winter, it bustled. Most of the windows were still intact, so the little stuffy air that lingered in the building during the colder months rose to the top floor and made the temperature just a bit more bearable. The cinders congregated here.
It was Johnny Cinder’s idea in the first place. Johnny Cinder had been squatting downtown since before the floods, which wasn’t long, but it was longer than some of the others. Jobs had washed away with the buildings, and those who lost them were left treading hopelessly in the water until they found someone like Johnny to look out for them.
Cinder wasn’t his real name, but Johnny was. Johnny Something. He couldn’t remember what, and no one else knew. Being a Cinder wasn’t something to be proud of, but it wasn’t something to ignore, either. He was just Cinder, in the same way he was just Johnny.
He was Cinder because he was the first to think of it—to smuggle six of Neiman’s precious cinderblocks all the way upstairs, where Neiman wouldn’t go. After all, it was too far, and he suspected he would find Cinders there. He had nothing against Cinders, but he did not need to see them. This feeling was mutual.
The six sacred cinderblocks were scattered across one third of the room. The rest of the room was where the Cinders piled, lying on jackets or propped against bags or blankets. This is where they watched the shows.
Not Neiman’s shows. They could never watch Neiman’s shows. They could feel the cinder tremble in their hands and feel their palms crackle and skin snap with every movement of the feet above. They could taste the dirt and dust of cement and shoes. Sometimes they could even hear the lines, if they were tall enough and strong enough to keep their ears from filling with water. But they could never watch.
So every autumn, at dusk when shows were finished, Johnny gathered everyone to write and speak and stage, and when winter came, everyone gathered at the top floor and watched the performances. It was a festival of sorts: little sleep, but much art, fellowship, and camaraderie. The celebrations lasted for days.
It was free for all of the Cinders. It was their work. As the years went by, other squatters caught wind of the events, and the Cinders began to get guests in the winter. Uptown shows were too expensive. For squatters, the cost of a Cinder show was something to eat. All payments were split among all Cinders. Those who needed more than others got it. Johnny got very little.
When the trees shriveled and fell apart in autumn, so did the Cinders. It was dying season. Even before ice, the water was frigid, and exhaustion hit quickly. But this was inconsequential, because every time a Cinder died, a new one showed up. This was Neiman’s perspective.
Autumn got colder every year. Some of the Cinders didn’t mind. The bodies were something to stand on.
❧
Neiman Boggins had a nice office uptown. It was where planning and early rehearsals took place, which minimized the time everyone spent in the murk downtown. The murk was perfect for theatrics, but much less exciting without an audience.
It was the beginning of winter. Neiman riffled through a stack of papers on his desk. Payment was most easily settled in the off-season, though it was his least favorite part of his job. It was unexciting.
Taxes. Neiman hated taxes. They were a load of legal nonsense. They wasted too much of Neiman’s precious time, which otherwise could’ve been spent doing something more inspired.
Another thing Neiman hated was evasion. Funnily enough, actors love evasion. The identity of an actor hinges on his ability to evade reality, which is lovely onstage but much less lovely in rehearsals. Some of Neiman’s actors evaded responsibilities. Some evaded confrontation. Some evaded truth. Neiman hated it.
Together, however, these two words made something Neiman loved. Tax evasion. It was a beautiful phrase. Falsifying numbers made his blood sprint through his veins and his heart throb in delight. It wasn’t nearly as exciting as directing or producing, but it was the next best thing. It was the only thing he could look forward to when winter came and there was nothing to pawn across cinder blocks.
His blue-ink pen rounded down $559,684.71 to a clean $500,000. The $59,000 wouldn’t be missed. The mayor mostly counted in multiples of $100,000 anyway, so this way was better for everyone.
When he was on the fourth zero, an explosive rapping at the door startled him. He stopped. He was not accustomed to visitors during his tax evasion time.
The door handle rattled.
“Who is it?” Neiman called, laying his pen neatly over the number he had just written in case whoever it was cared profoundly about numbers.
From the other side of the door came a sound resembling a saw pulling its teeth across a stiff plank of wood: a grating, throaty voice that said with slow, lethal enunciation, “My name is Johnny Cinder.”
Neiman briskly added the fifth zero and replaced his pen. He said nothing.
“Let me in,” snarled Johnny Cinder.
In that moment, something compelled Neiman to open the door. He convinced himself this feeling was curiosity, was excitement, but it was not. The feeling was dread.
Johnny stepped across the threshold. “Neiman Boggins,” he said, his voice thicker than before. It no longer sounded like wood. It sounded like cinder.
“I am,” Neiman agreed. “Have we met?”
“We have.” Johnny took another step forward; Neiman, purely by coincidence, took a step back.
“I work for you. I hold your cinder,” Johnny growled, “but I will not anymore.”
He meant it, but it was not true. Perhaps he believed himself when he said it. Perhaps he didn’t.
For a moment, there was silence. Neiman suddenly wished that everyone wrung their hands together in the rodent way that the mayor did. It was better than the stillness that ensued. “Alright,” Neiman said finally. He wasn’t entirely sure why Johnny took the time to travel uptown for this statement. Without the notice, Neiman would’ve assumed he died and scratched his name off the payroll anyway.
“None of us,” Johnny continued, “will hold your cinder anymore.”
While Johnny was no liar, this was also not true. Both Neiman and Johnny were aware of this. Johnny desperately wished it were true. He was tired of funerals—corpseless funerals. All the Cinders’ were. But all the Cinders had to work, and none of them had a chance of getting an uptown job. Uptown folks got uptown jobs, and downtown folks got downtown jobs, but the only downtown folks were squatters and the only downtown job was cinder. Everyone did what they needed to do.
“Alright,” Neiman said again. This affirmation meant nothing, just as Johnny’s statement meant nothing. Both knew this. Johnny wasn’t done.
“Do you know how many people die holding your cinder every year?”
“I don’t.”
“This year, seventy-three. This year.”
Neiman rounded seventy-three down to fifty, which was, visually speaking, a much nicer number. It was still a lot of people. “Horrible,” he insisted. “That’s awful.”
Johnny nodded. It was.
The next season, Neiman produced only tragedies. He felt it resonated with the implications of the cinderblock stage. He was right. It was the year everyone lost their minds.
❧
Johnny Cinder’s arms ached. His arms ached and shook and his lungs burned, and as another actor stepped onto his block with an enthused hop, Johnny decided his arms couldn’t take it anymore. Maybe they could’ve. Maybe he could’ve kept holding the cinder up if there was any point in it. Maybe if it was a Cinders show he would’ve cared to—though Cinders never did cinder shows. His hands were calloused with concrete, but his fingers stung anyway.
In this moment, Johnny Cinder divorced himself of his name. For one glorious, fleeting second, he was Johnny again, just Johnny.
❧
Offstage, the actor’s name was Hector, but onstage, he was Brutus. So it was Brutus who became trapped under the cinder stage once he plunged into the water, and it was Brutus who died. It was Brutus’s body lying atop the others at the bottom of the floods. It was not Hector.
If Johnny was no Cinder, then no one was. Tragically, the cinders took the conspirators with them as they drowned.
❧
This day was Neiman’s second meeting with the mayor, who maneuvered his boat over to Neiman’s after the show to offer his compliments. “Very good,” the mayor insisted as he forced Neiman to endure a firm and unpleasant handshake. “Wuite good.”
“Thank you,” Neiman said. He agreed. To date, there had been no show as profound nor as tragic as that day’s. The cinder was lost, but this was the price of a beautiful show.
“You’re welcome,” the mayor remarked. Neiman considered strangling him but instead exercised an impressive amount of self-restraint, which he demonstrated with a smile. This was not as difficult as he anticipated it to be; though he hated the mayor, he was, indeed, quite happy. The denouement had far exceeded his expectations.
❧
In the mid-summer, the city finally caught on to Neiman’s theatre, following the mayor’s approbation, and there was an influx of new attendees. The tourism that had since faded after the initial fall of the city rose again, and with it came investors.
They liked to leave little notes with their stacks of money, which Neiman, for a time, appreciated. This appreciation didn’t last. The same bland, rounded numbers were always accompanied by a variation of the same eloquently-penned posy: “A humble donation for a dying art.”
Eventually, he stopped accepting the offerings. There was nothing to them.
Nadia Jacobs is a junior at Emory University, where she studies Creative Writing and Russian Language and Culture. Her work has been published in Mangrove of UMiami, The Oxford Blue, and The Arden at Columbus State University. She enjoys recreational lying, and she has never been arrested.
