The Oligarch

The contours of the storage unit concerned the Oligarch. He had wrested a desk chair from under an ottoman and a heap of beanbags bright like succulent fruit. It must have been midmorning by then, the insulated silence of the unit a dawn chorus. He yawed and swiveled, thinking about wrinkled things—not just metal, but also time, the human body. The problem as he saw it lay in the seams. Something was amiss.

The corrugated metal walls met in soldered pleats: a big space, really, enough for two king-size mattresses, a billiards table, a gun cabinet, and a man almost six feet tall, in heart-patterned boxer shorts, his head roughly sheared. What the Oligarch knew for sure was that something had gone terribly wrong.

A real storage unit wouldn’t permit slits of sunlight to crisscross space like fourth and fifth walls. But more to the point, a real storage unit wouldn’t contain an oligarch. By nature, he was the one who contained storage units—and banks, laws, people, and all their petty dreams.

“Fuck,” spoke the Oligarch.

The last real thing he remembered was a tumbler of High Salute and spotty internet. It’s possible he slept with a lady. He could smell her on his forearm. But the rest of the past tense appeared wrapped in a patina of fiction, like someone streaming the life of an oligarch on a flat-screen in his head. He knew he was more complex. He didn’t even like hearts.

The Oligarch found a box at the top of a tower of boxes and tore at the taped binding until its wings flapped open. There had to be an answer inside. But all the Oligarch saw was sand—the kind one might sink into on a beach backed by volcanoes. Buried at the bottom of all that sand, he excavated a single framed photo.

“What the fuck, lady,” screeched the Oligarch, starting at the photo. It was me. Smiling.

His voice rippled along the corrugated walls. The seams of light had sewn shut. Somewhere in the distance a swamp cooler churned. It smelled like things that wait.

The Oligarch from the movie in the Oligarch’s head was the CEO of a tremendous corporation, one that wheedled people into shopping, screwing, and working online. It was a real public service, the Oligarch liked to say. He and the other oligarchs threw sex parties on verandas and never had to see the plebeians. There were robots to serve them dinner and drinks. The extreme weather and disease had all been handled by theirs’ or others’ corporations. And if things got screwy, there was always the Moon.

The Oligarch stopped screeching and pulled another box down from the stack, using the sharp corner of the picture frame as a knife this time, slitting it with a ferocity that scared him. He was huffing. Sand under his nails. Still wearing those goddamn heart-patterned boxer shorts. But in the second box, he discovered more beach, and buried beneath it like a child’s play-dead body, another framed photo. Me again. Standing before rows of books. The author shot.

The Oligarch threw the photo against a headboard. I bounced and landed face up, looking smug. He found the edge of a nightstand and bashed the glass plate until it acquiesced. Shaking off shards of glass, he gripped the photo, a 4 x 6. On the back I had drawn something. Another heart.

“Fuck the hearts!”

The Oligarch was out of control. He tore through another box and then another, making it past twenty by the time he heard a noise outside the corrugated metal cage. It was booted footsteps, thudding toward him and then away.

“Help!” yelled the Oligarch.

He jumped despite himself, holding an image of me in one hand and a glass shard shaped like a bird’s beak in the other.

Storage units tend to be the territory of hoarders, dudes with bad bands, drug dealers, and college students. But the Oligarch didn’t care. He still believed in reality.

“What do you want?” The voice on the other side didn’t fit the thud of boots. It was whispery, impatient, female.

“I’m stuck.” The Oligarch couldn’t quiet his yelping. “Please help me.”

Silence spanned a moment, then a minute, then two before the voice spoke again. Her tone had changed. It was lower, more potent.

“If I let you out, what will you do?”

The Oligarch stared at the rippled metal door, deciding how to lie. He wanted to go back to being an oligarch, but the woman on the other side wanted something different. He could tell that by the thudding footsteps, the shift in her voice.

“I’ll have sex with you,” he said. “I’ll give you lots and lots of money, and then I’ll have sex with you. On a veranda. Near the beach. It will be amazing. Leagues better than the life you have now. Just let me out and you’ll see.”

Saying all that, the Oligarch could almost see this new reality: him fucking the body attached to those boots. Her screaming in a good way. The money all around them in the bed, like it is in movies when people without money suddenly come into a lot of it. They’d be fucking on twenties or hundreds, and afterward he would peel them off her back. Maybe even lovingly. The robots would bring them more champagne.

“The thing about the imagination,” said the voice with the boots, “is how violent it can be.”

A long silence followed that and the Oligarch knew she was gone. He didn’t hear anything, but he felt a change in the room’s vibrations. Though why he had thought the word vibrations,he had no idea. He refused to believe there was no way out. That he was alone. Until he spotted one final unopened box. It stood like a tiny shrub in the corner of the storage unit, rooted to the concrete, accented by crushed cardboard, piles of spent sand, and tattered photos. He stared at the box. The same shape as all the others, the same oddly blue duct tape sealing it shut, the same potential to proffer something true. A response to all this bullshit.

The Oligarch opened the box gently, resigned to the fact that I was now his oligarch. It was night. Cicadas resounded from the twitchy fluorescent lights. Something somewhere smelled like a pyre smoldering. Peeking inside, the Oligarch braced himself for more beach, but instead he found water, a tiny ocean, turbid and oscillating. He reached his hand in without thinking and grasped for the bottom but found none. Only the slither of tiny minnows, the drag of seaweed. It felt cool and otherworldly, like nothing the Oligarch had before experienced.

His mind blazed briefly with a memory that felt real. He was a boy. Before the plagues and weather events and clickbait, he could see himself. In tiny swim trunks. A parental hand guiding him toward advancing and retracting waves. Walking on tiptoe. Sand crabs in the swash zone. A shrill scream escaping him like pitched joy. On his bathing suit were red hearts laced with arrows. When the Oligarch finally pulled his hand from the ocean, hours had passed. His skin had puckered, and he stared at himself as if he were now the object. At the top of the Oligarch’s palm, running like a shallow valley, was the heartline furrowed deep in his flesh. He could hear a knocking, either from inside himself or beyond the wrinkled walls.

Read more from Issue 22.1.