Page 4

Three

T he very toned half-naked man climbing up the wall of my building is a violation of the condo covenants, conditions, and restrictions.

Even at three in the morning, I’m fundamentally incapable of letting an infraction slide. This Spider Man imitator is breaking the law.

And while I should be worried about my physical safety, I’m delirious from lack of sleep.

Grabbing my phone, I scan the sidewalk three stories below.

It’s all concrete and shadows, punctuated by pools of light from the streetlights.

The coveted street-side parking is bumper-to-bumper cars, but traffic is still nonexistent.

A siren wails in some more distant part of San Francisco.

Things don’t get lively on weekdays until my fellow building residents stage a mass exodus at five and six o’clock.

Yes, in the morning.

It takes forever to traverse the city, so everyone rushes out before the sun rises. It is one of life’s many ironies that San Francisco rentals cost a fortune, requiring you to work insane numbers of hours and therefore never having any free time to enjoy the city.

The tsunami of software bugs filling my TripFriendz testing queue runs through my brain like a badly nested for loop of code.

In my out-of-office hours, I wear pajamas and subsist on Sour Patch Kids, the food of choice for important deadlines and existential crises.

I’m on top of things. Integral to my team. About to make the magic happen.

Liar.

Tonight, I allowed myself an hour to work on my cozy space-mining game and somehow it became two hours.

Then six. Now I have to be up in three hours.

The sugar crash hitting me is why I stare morosely at the man climbing the wall rather than take defensive action.

My brain spirals listlessly through options.

for (burglar count 0; burglar count =10) {

System.out.println(Panic later!);

}

I debate calling down to the doorman, but the nightshift guy has indicated that I’m not to bother him again unless something dire happens.

Since he’s provided multiple examples of said direness (earthquake registering greater than an 8.

9 on the Richter scale, catastrophic ceiling or water damage involving an antediluvian flood, photographic evidence of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse riding down our San Francisco street), I’m aware that he does not actually want to hear from me.

The words when hell freezes over may have come out of his mouth.

As a building resident whose monthly rent partially funds the man’s salary, I pointed out that it’s his job to be on call.

We ended by failing to negotiate the maximum number of times per week I can bring my late-night concerns to his attention.

He argued for none, which did not work for me.

Tomorrow is another day.

Unless, you know, Mr. Wall down there turns out to be a serial killer. It’s an inefficient way to go about a crime spree, although he’s definitely getting his workout in.

Given his slow upward progress, I have time to plan. Since my brain is beyond tired, however, it spins, going nowhere. Bits and pieces of the most recent book I’ve read suggest themselves as a possible solution. What would my favorite alien barbarian hero do in this kind of situation?

I give it a quick thought, but I’m fresh out of wooden spears. Rock-studded, leather-wrapped snowballs are also infeasible. The only logical option is calling the police.

Is this a TikTok video gone awry? A drunken prank?

The climber’s hand slips, but there’s no need to despair.

The impressive musculature of his bare shoulders bunches and flexes, saving the day.

A husky chuckle floats up to where I crouch out of sight on my half of the balcony I share with the next-door unit.

It’s fortunate for me—and unfortunate for the intruder—that I decided to bring my laptop outside to work.

My phone buzzes with an incoming text, and I look down automatically. Can you plz review my code ASAP? THX!

Who… Oh. My late-night texter is Jayson, a coworker from my former place of employment. Naturally, no one at TripFriendz is working this late. My coworkers have personal lives and excellent sleep hygiene. This is why we’re so behind on our product launch.

Equally naturally, Jayson assumes that I’m a) working in the middle of the night on a weekend and b) willing to drop everything to help him out.

He’s 98 percent right.

And yet, as a former employee of Miles to Go (and damn them for ruining my favorite Robert Frost poem), reviewing Jayson’s code is not my responsibility.

The problem is, he doesn’t seem to have noticed that I was terminated six months ago.

Nor have any of the other engineers on my former software team.

While my access to all things corporate ended during the time it took me to trudge from the beach to my car in the overflow parking lot, my former coworkers continued to randomly message me throughout the remainder of the week.

And not to offer sympathy or to network—no, they’d wanted me to review their code before they committed.

Brainstorm solutions for a particularly knotty piece of Java.

Forward me bugs so horrible that they were the office hot potato, bouncing from one developer’s queue to the next.

Despite the ubiquitous open floor plan at Miles to Go and eighteen months of non-adversarial working together (or at least adjacent), they haven’t connected my empty cubicle with my permanent absence.

I was just a nameless, faceless robot blessing their code with the green light or fixing their blocker bugs.

Hi, my name is Pandora Fyffe and my secret power is invisibility.

Things will be different this time. TripFriendz is my redemption tour.

The burglar makes it to the second floor and pauses.

Presumably he’s searching for handholds.

Or maybe his impressive biceps require a rest break.

Since I’ve never climbed a vertical surface, I am unfamiliar with the appropriate process.

Maybe it’s like diving, and without regular stops, your lungs explode.

While the burglar hangs in there, I make a quick call to the cops (who advise me to go inside and lock my door while promising to send someone out just as soon as they’ve finished handling all the serious crimes in the city) and then hold my phone through the decorative railings of the balcony to snap a picture of the intruder.

I’ve watched enough true crime documentaries to know the power of photographic evidence.

Never underestimate the power of a good cell phone tower and its ability to sniff out exactly where you were with creepy certitude.

This guy won’t get away with breaking and entering. Not on my watch.

I wait.

Impatiently.

He’s the world’s slowest climber.

Eventually, I lean over cautiously. The balcony’s railing appears made to code, so the likelihood of my tumbling over it and down onto the street is acceptably low.

“Psst!” I whisper-shout like a lurker librarian.

I must be louder than I think—sound does carry at night, which is why the condo has a noise ordinance that starts at nine o’clock—because the burglar’s head snaps up.

Gotcha. I take a new picture, this time with my flash on.

The unexpectedly bright pop of light kills any chance of subtlety on my part, but I’m not the person caught in the middle of a felony.

Burglar Boy curses, a low, rough sound, followed by an even lower, huskier laugh. His happiness at his exposure sounds like a lion chuffing. Hmm. I’m not sure if they do that right before they pounce on their prey or not. My knowledge of lions is deficient.

I make a note to google the predatory habits of Panthera leo .

He tips his head back and yells up at me, unconcerned about sleeping neighbors. “You’ve blinded me, darling.”

I revise my animal identification. He’s not a lion. He’s a patronizing ass.

Despite my tank top riding up, thanks to my Sour-Patch-Kids-influenced belly, my yoga pants more than cover my lower half and my ancient cardigan is toga-sized.

I’m not the person who’s in danger of being arrested for public indecency.

Squinting downward, I try to memorize his face.

Since my glasses are inside the condo, he’d need to be less than two feet away for me to appreciate his details.

Still, from what I can see, he is, objectively speaking, gorgeous.

Those good looks will get him exonerated by sex-starved, lonely juries.

And wasn’t there a romance I read where the hot burglar broke into a house and then showed his appreciation for the housewife’s blind eye while he cleaned out the family jewels? There are way too many puns in there.

He laughs while I try and fail to remember the book title, pulling himself up another foot and closing the distance between us. Wait. Is he coming here ?

“You want to throw down a rope, Rapunzel?”

“This is private property.”

I double-check the time on my phone. Five minutes since my call—not enough time for the cops to make it here. I’m not sure what the etiquette of the situation is. Do you make small talk with a burglar? Drop things on his head?

He sighs. It’s a loud, gusty, very put-upon sound. I’ve spoiled his night.

“I’ve called the cops,” I inform him. “And I’ve got your picture.”

He grunts, unconcerned, and shifts upward. Game on.

My phone buzzes urgently. Jayson again. Can you code review me?