The Last Apartment of Lei Shen

The thunder god had spent three weeks in Billings without being able to fix a radiator.

He could split a mountain. He had once brought a dishonest official to his knees beneath a cloudless sky. The radiator in the apartment over the bus station gave three metallic knocks and remained indifferent.

Downstairs, Dale knocked on the ceiling with a broom handle.

“Leave it alone. Contractor’s coming in the morning.”

“It is refusing its function,” Lei Shen called back.

“So’s half the furniture. Put a sweater on.”

Lei Shen took his hammer from the table and put it in the cupboard. Dale had made him promise not to use it on anything connected to the building. The agreement had seemed insulting until he examined the scorch mark left by his attempt to encourage the kettle.

The apartment held a bed, a desk, and a photograph of the waiting room below when every chair was occupied. It was the last residential room in a building whose other upper spaces had become storage. Mrs. Alderman had offered it to him after finding him outside with a travel bag that contained a drum and no clothes suitable for the weather.

“You can help me clear things out,” she had said. “I need another person who can carry a chair.”

He had carried one. Then several. He had expected someone to ask how a man with wings folded beneath an ordinary coat came to be waiting outside a provincial bus station. Mrs. Alderman had been more interested in whether he could manage the stairs.

Now it was Friday, the little terminal’s final night of passenger service. The private operator was moving its departures to another place. Mrs. Alderman owned the building and had delayed deciding what would happen to it until everyone else had decided where they were going.

At five, she came upstairs carrying a green travel bag.

“I’m putting this here until my daughter arrives tomorrow. It’s got things I don’t want mixed in with the boxes.”

“Your daughter will take you away?”

“To visit. Don’t make it sound like an arrest.”

She set the bag beside the desk and checked the radiator with her palm. It knocked.

“Extra blanket’s in the cupboard. Keep the window shut tonight. They’re expecting the roads to be unpleasant.”

Lei Shen looked at the sky. It had the broad, low stillness that made human beings look up and disagree about how much time remained. He could hear a truck laboring on the road beyond the station, the thin bell above the front door, Dale explaining the new departure address for the sixth time in an hour.

He could also hear a passenger saying, “But I was promised.”

Before going downstairs, he drew the long curtain across the window to keep the draft from the desk. The green bag stood beside it. He thought about the cold, not about how much the curtain concealed.

The waiting room contained eight chairs, a drinks machine, and a clock that was always three minutes slow. Dale kept a sign beneath it saying the clock was wrong. People looked at the clock and ignored the sign.

A woman at the counter had a ticket for the evening bus. She had bought it before the operator changed the stop for the following week and wanted to know whether her daughter should collect her at the old location or the new one tomorrow.

Dale explained the difference. He did it patiently, then printed the arrival information in larger type and gave it to her.

“How often must you repeat yourself?” Lei Shen asked after she sat down.

“Until somebody who needs to hear it knows what I mean.”

Dale was a broad-shouldered man with a limp he disliked anyone noticing. He had managed the station long enough to recognize regular passengers by the coat they wore in bad weather. Tonight he was carrying his own possessions out of the office in an orange crate. His son Andre, one of the drivers, was expected to bring the final coach in before the terminal closed.

“Will he help you move?” Lei Shen asked.

“He’s working.”

“Afterward?”

Dale pushed the crate beneath the counter. “You ask a lot of questions for somebody who used to provide the answers.”

At six, Lou arrived for his temporary shift with a bag of sandwiches and a new pair of gloves. He was twenty-three and hoping the last week of work would help pay for the course he planned to begin after the holidays. Dale gave him a list of things that could be moved before the passengers left. It did not include the chairs anyone was using.

Lou offered Lei Shen half a sandwich. The god accepted it, surprised by the amount of mustard.

“You staying upstairs after they close?” Lou asked.

“Mrs. Alderman has not decided.”

“Nobody has decided what to do with me either. Makes us colleagues.”

He went to carry the drinks-machine supplies into a back storeroom. Lei Shen watched him pause to help the woman with the ticket lift her case onto a chair. It was a gesture so quick he could have mistaken it for part of the work.

The first snow reached the windows at seven.

Dale checked a message from dispatch. His face changed before he put the phone down. The final coach had been held outside the city because the road ahead was closed to traffic. The driver would wait for instructions. The operator was arranging alternatives where it could, but the evening departure from this terminal would not run as scheduled.

People stood before Dale began speaking. They had learned to recognize the face of a person who brought bad news.

He explained what he knew. He said what he did not know. He gave the passengers the operator’s contact information and offered to help those who needed to call somebody.

Lei Shen felt the room’s frustration gather like the charge before a strike. A woman had arranged a pickup that would now have to be changed. A man had no money for the extra night he had not planned. Two young people were arguing about whether they should have traveled yesterday.

“Somebody has failed,” the god said.

Dale turned toward him. “A road’s closed. That isn’t necessarily somebody failing.”

“A promise was made.”

“Weather didn’t sign it.”

Mrs. Alderman came down with a flask of tea and told Lou to bring out the chairs he had already put away. She would call the operator about letting people remain in the waiting room while other plans were made. Dale said he was doing that. She said two calls were sometimes better than one and went into the office.

Lei Shen stood beside the drinks machine with the sandwich wrapper in his hand. He had wanted an offense to identify. The room offered him need in several forms and no obvious target.

Lou asked whether he could take the wrapper. The god gave it to him.

At eight, Mrs. Alderman returned to the apartment for the green bag. She was gone long enough that Dale looked up from the telephone.

Then she appeared on the stairs.

“Has anyone moved my bag?”

Lou stopped beside the storeroom door. “Which one?”

“Green. I left it upstairs.”

“I’ve carried a lot of bags tonight.”

She looked at the storeroom. Dale looked at Lou. The young man put down the crate in his hands with exaggerated care.

“I didn’t take anything,” he said.

Lei Shen heard the denial. He also heard the suspicion it was answering. In the space between them, his hammer grew warm inside the cupboard upstairs.

Mrs. Alderman said she was asking a question, not accusing anybody.

Lou looked at Dale. “Then why are you looking at me like that?”

Dale put the phone down. “You’re the one who’s been moving things. We need to know which things.”

“The things you told me to move.”

Several passengers turned toward them. The woman with the ticket held her case closer to her chair. Lei Shen knew the movement: a room beginning to agree that a person might be guilty because other people seemed to suspect it.

He had stood at the center of that agreement many times.

Lou took off his new gloves and put them on the counter. “You can look in my bag. There’s a sandwich and a change of shirt.”

“Nobody’s searching you,” Mrs. Alderman said.

Dale asked everyone to leave the question there while he finished speaking to dispatch. Lou did not look reassured. Being asked to wait beneath an accusation gave the waiting a shape of its own.

Lei Shen went upstairs. The cupboard door was open, although he remembered closing it. The hammer rested against the little drum, bright along the chisel edge. His tools had always recognized the moment before a verdict. They mistook his confidence for the authority they were made to serve.

He picked them up.

In the old stories told about him, thunder pursued a hidden wrong and made the sky its witness. He had believed those stories because they were often told by people relieved that the strike had passed them by.

Downstairs Lou was pulling on his coat.

“I’m not leaving,” he told Dale. “I just don’t want everybody thinking I have to stand here while you decide what I look like.”

The god stepped onto the landing. He could see the white neck of the young man, the line of Dale’s shoulders, the little gap people had left around the counter.

He raised the hammer toward the drum.

It was meant to be a warning. It was meant to demand that anyone hiding the bag restore it before a heavier judgment came. He did not choose a name. He did not check whether any name had yet been earned.

He struck.

Thunder filled the building.

The waiting-room lights flared and went out. A pane in the upper door cracked from corner to corner. Somebody dropped a cup. Dale shouted for everyone to stay where they were until he could get a light.

For an instant, Lei Shen heard nothing but the diminishing sound of his own power.

Then the people began to speak.

No bag appeared. No guilty hand opened. A child who had been dozing against a woman’s coat began to cry. The drinks machine gave a final little click and went silent.

Lei Shen lowered the hammer.

Dale reached the bottom of the stairs with a flashlight. “What did you do?”

The god came down slowly. He had no explanation that would not describe an intention instead of a result.

“I made the thunder.”

“I noticed.”

Dale shone the light across the floor, checked that no one had been struck by broken glass, and called the building’s emergency contractor. Mrs. Alderman moved the passengers away from the cracked door. Lou found another light in the storeroom and helped her guide people into the clear part of the room.

They did not need Lei Shen to announce who was responsible. They needed him to put down what he was still carrying.

Mrs. Alderman pointed to the table in the office.

“There. Both of them.”

He obeyed.

The contractor told Dale to keep people away from the affected area and wait for qualified help. Nobody tried to restore the electricity with the god’s hammer. The little terminal became a collection of islands lit by phones and the flashlights its staff had remembered to keep charged.

Lou knelt beside the child and asked if she wanted to hold the small light while he found the cup she had dropped. She stopped crying long enough to direct him.

Lei Shen watched. The young man had not acquired innocence by helping somebody. Nor had he acquired guilt by being the person carrying boxes. The god had known this in words before he struck.

Knowing it after the room went dark felt different.

Dale returned from the office. “Nobody’s hurt. We’re checking another place for people to wait if the heat goes. Dispatch knows what happened.”

He looked at Lei Shen. “Tell me why. And do it without making me guess.”

The god told him about the warning he had intended. Dale listened, his face growing still.

“Did you know Lou took it?”

“No.”

“Did you know anybody did?”

He glanced at Mrs. Alderman. She was wrapping the child in a spare blanket.

“No.”

Dale put the flashlight on the counter between them.

“Then your noise didn’t know either.”

Outside, snow moved through the parking lights in pale diagonal lines. The weather had not changed because a god had lost his temper. It continued according to its own enormous indifference.

Mrs. Alderman came over. She asked Lei Shen whether he could promise not to use the tools again in the building. He said yes. She said she wanted the promise spoken while both tools remained in the office where everyone could see them.

He repeated it.

Lou stood in the doorway. His face was white with anger.

“You thought you could make me confess?”

“I thought the sound might compel a truth.”

“It made a kid cry.”

He went to get another blanket. Lei Shen had no answer worth calling him back for.

At the counter, Dale tried to reach Andre again. The signal connected long enough for a voice, then failed. Dale stared at the phone with the expression of a man trying to decide whether another failed call was an accusation too.