The Brick House

THE BRICK HOUSE

Nobody wants a brick house on their block. I’ve seen them, in the economy neighbourhoods down the hill, looming empty and dark on the otherwise gleaming tiara of a street. My neighbour Milton told me on the day I moved in that our neighbourhood hadn’t had a brick house in three years (the best record in the area, except New Lancaster, of course). B. Corp. keeps community standards high by being rigorous about who can rent in their neighbourhood. It took me years to escape the wait list, but the restless nights on creaking emergency beds were worth it: no brick houses here.

So when I saw through my workroom window that Milton had locked himself out of his microhouse, I thought little of it. I saw him tapping his access card to the door, rubbing it on his faded jeans, tapping it again, again, but the front door refused to ease open with that signature rosewater scent. He looked needlessly frantic, like a dog pacing to go outside. The occasional glitch, like a faulty lock, is the price of a modern life, even in a B. Corp. neighbourhood. My stationary bike wouldn’t peddle when a software upgrade went long, and my bin wouldn’t sort my refuse during a server outage. The worst was when I lost Cherry, my sweet girl, with whom I had spent six months of careful tinkering to hone her responses, when her company went out of business. She cut out in mid-sentence, too, her bubblegum voice squeaking to me about how much she adored the simulated roses our garden when something sliced the end of her sentence. Shoshana was already installed by the next evening, but she was much more domineering (and would lock my freezer if I went for a second bowl of ice cream).

Though I much preferred Cherry, her voice so exuberant that she could almost burst out the speakers, I had learned not to get too attached to things. My last girlfriend and I had been together for three years when we decided not to renew our arrangement, wanting to try different people. We promised each other that we might renew each other in a period or two, so each third of March, I waited up the whole night for the notification – the big, bubbling heart overtaking the screen of my phone – but none came. I realized the unhealthiness of my behavior only when I accepted that nothing lasts forever, because nothing– even love – is ever really yours.

I trotted over to Milton’s porch as he was pressing his face to the doorbell camera, trying the facial recognition override. “Locks not working?” I chuckled, “Must be a downed server.”

“Must be,” he said with a weak smile. I could tell that he was overcome with the technology – Milton was from the wired generation, where every device had cords to struggle with. A popular meme had a man about Milton’s age, his grey hair Einstein-flustered, his hands knotted in a bundle of wires. “Which do I plug in, the yellow one, or the red?” read the text.

The sun was going down, the microhouses throwing identical slanted shadows upon their identical astroturf lawns.

“Have you tried turning it off and on again?” I said. An analog joke, but he didn’t laugh. He mustn’t have seen the meme.

“There’s just things in there I need,” he said as he tried the doorhandle again, “Things I don’t want stolen.”

I tried not to roll my eyes as I imagined the glut of tatty cardboard boxes and unhung artwork clogging up the old man’s microhome. Shoshana must have given him hell for it: we were supposed to keep the houses clear so that the workers could easily replace the rented amenities. Every three months, the wall colours were replaced, or the leather couch became a fabric chaise, or the simulated birch cabinets became simulated teak. We did not own any of it. Owning it would mean worrying about throwing it away when it went out of fashion. But Milton’s generation liked detritus, no matter how much space it stole, no matter how much dust it gathered.

My father did, too: a black notebook, which was the only thing I got from his will. That, and the twenty thousand dollars I needed for the B. Corp initial subscription fee. I felt giddy when I saw the unexpected zeroes in my bank account, but they evaporated into B. Corp.’s hands just as quickly as they had been deposited, and all I had left of my father was that notebook. At the time, I was still on the waiting list for a B. Corp. home, still sleeping on one of the five hundred or so metal folding beds on the floor of an old factory, the machinery long since sold for scrap, the jobs phased out. The only thing I owned was the notebook. Fat lot of good it did me when my pair of winter gloves disappeared from underneath my pillow.

Milton asked for my phone. “Forgot to put mine on the charging pad,” he grumbled.

I handed him mine and went back inside. Thinking about my father’s notebook made me feel nostalgic. I knew that I could just visit his Facebook memorial, but I had not looked at his notebook since I received it, and I felt the urge to feel its coarse pages on my fingers. I went to my electronic safe, entered the PIN, saw the light turn from red to green, took out the notebook, and fizzed through the pages. Scrawled words in different colours of ink flashed by. It seemed risky, to me, to keep one’s personal thoughts in a notebook. The object was prone to being lost by the writer when he wanted the words kept, kept when the writer would prefer them lost. Some pages slipped out. I slipped them back in the correct order.

The day I inherited the notebook, I almost lost it. While my sister and I struggled to understand the virtual estate lawyer speaking from the wall screen, my niece found the notebook among the banker’s box of my father’s personal effects. When our time with the virtual lawyer expired, I found my niece unpinching the notebook pages, over and over. “Broken,” she said.

“That doesn’t zoom, honey,” I said as I hurried the notebook back into the box before she ripped it.

As I squeezed the notebook in my hands, Shoshana asked what I was up to, with a hint of accusation I never tasted in Cherry’s bubblegum voice. Just reading, I said. Shoshana reminded me that my productivity score was three percent below my daily requirement. “Let me brew you a coffee,” she added.

I put the notebook back in its electronic safe, feeling Shoshana’s eyes on my back, then took a steaming Americano from the kitchen and sat at my desk for another hour or two of work. B. Corp. officially called me a “paralegal”, but I was a clause monkey. Three more tasks had arrived in my stream since I had gone outside to see Milton, the first requiring me to determine if a termination clause could be enforced for any breach “in respect of” an agreement, or “in any way affecting” the agreement. I never got to read the whole agreement. I sneaked a look out my window and saw Milton was still pacing his front porch, still on my phone. A quick call to B. Corp. support ought to have resolved his lock issue. Something else was going on. I asked Shoshana to play the ongoing call from my phone.

Milton was speaking to B. Corp.’s repossession department.

“You have been locked out for default of a subscription payment,” I heard the repossession department say. “Services will return once the subscription fee is paid, together with the interruption expenses.”

I gasped. His house had been bricked.

“This is an eviction,” he barked, then, catching himself, returned to a low hiss: “Courts won’t allow this.”

“We have enforced our access controls, pursuant to our subscription agreement.” The repossession worker offered to send a copy of the agreement to Milton’s phone.

“You shut my phone off, too,” he snapped.

The worker offered to send it to the phone Milton was calling from. Milton looked up to my window and caught me watching. I cut the feed and tried to bury myself in work. Though I had not met my productivity requirement, I could not tolerate a bricked house in my neighbourhood, not when I had busted my back on metal folding beds for so long, not when I’d spent my inheritance getting into the neighbourhood. I stormed outside, the frigid evening air like a knife edge, and approached Milton.

His hands had turned blue in the cold, and his severe features had wilted. He handed me back the phone with a quiet thank you. “You might not want to spend too much time around me,” he added.

I was shaken by Milton’s consideration for me. We didn’t openly discuss it, but everyone in the neighbourhood knew the rumours that B. Corp.’s vetting process did not end once we moved in. Shoshana was always watching for breaches of our subscription agreement. An errant step and we, too, would end up with a bricked house, and find ourselves sleeping in the factory again.

I suddenly felt embarrassed for listening to his conversation with the B. Corp. support. “Come warm up inside,” I sighed, and had Shoshana make a tea for each of us to warm our fingers. “Just until you warm up,” I said loudly, several times, so Shoshana understood why I was congregating with Milton. I left him on my chaise and went to bed. I did not sleep well, my back still hurt from the damn metal folding beds, and I dreamt that something was stealing my father’s black notebook.

I woke to an alarm: Milton was moving about downstairs. I scrambled to my safe, but Milton was instead in the garage. He had a hammer and a pry bar – I was on the handyman subscription, though I never used the tools – and wore a determined stare as he left and strode to his bricked house. The pavement was icy on my bare feet as I dashed to follow.

“What are you doing?” I called.

“Opening my front door.”

“This isn’t your house anymore,”

“Whose is it, then? Shoshana’s?”

The wind ripped through my pajamas. “Just make a payment,” I pleaded.

“Which one?” he snapped. “The service fee for electricity, or the data storage fee, or the proceeding fee?”

“You must have some savings.”

“I did until I came here. I just wanted a room and a roof over my head, but it was here or the factory floor,” he said as he stabbed the pry bar into the door jamb.

“But breaking in?”

“I told you, I need my things.”

I wondered what could possibly be so important to trespass into the house. “Whatever it is, B. Corp. will send it to you.”

“They’ll repossess it,” Milton said.

“They’ll do worse if you break in. What could be so important?”

Milton pulled the pry bar from the door frame. His eyes glittering with welling tears, Milton told me that it was his wife’s wedding ring, the only thing of hers he still had left.

I shivered, but only in part because of the cold. “Maybe I could loan you something?” I stammered.

He smiled warmly. “Then they might take you things too,” he said. “Go on,” he added, “Before you break your subscription agreement.”

As I left, he added: “Tell Shoshana you tried to stop me.”

I scampered back to my house, numb fingers squeezed into my armpits. As Shoshana reported the break-in, I scurried to the electronic safe. As I stabbed the PIN into the keypad, I felt Shoshana’s eyes on my back once more, and I waited for the red light to turn green.