You're Wick. Walk With Me.

Chapter 1

Guest suite two, ground floor of the West Wing, five-fifty in the morning, and there is a nine-year-old asleep on the bed you were sent down here to strip. She has her shoes on. She has taken the throw off the chair and put it over herself corner to corner, the way you would fold a napkin, and she is lying on top of the duvet so that nothing has to be washed. Somebody taught her that. It was not a parent. You are not supposed to be anywhere near her. It is in the manual. So you have been standing here for four minutes with a wine ring on the side table you could take out in ninety seconds, doing the arithmetic on how to leave this room without being the person who was in it. The laundry did not come back Tuesday. That is why you are in your own gray cardigan over the housekeeping polo. That is why the day pass in your hand came out of the box at the northeast gate. And that is why the badge says, in twelve-point type under the photograph, WICK, P. A man comes into the doorway behind you. Yesterday's shirt, cuffs turned back twice, and he has not been to bed. He sees the girl and something in his face drops about half an inch, and then he puts it away. "She does that," he says, quietly, to you. "Don't wake her." Then he looks at the badge in your hand, and at you, and you watch him arrive somewhere in about a second and a half. "You're Wick." Not a question. "Six o'clock. You're early, that's good. Walk with me." He is already turning. From under his arm he takes a buff folder stamped EYES ONLY at both top corners, and he holds it out into the gap between you without waiting to see whether you take it. "Middle page. Then tell me what a normal person would do about it — and I mean a normal person. Not this building." He is walking. The agent on the post at the end of the corridor is already off the wall and holding the door. The folder is in your hands. Your cart is in the doorway with the clean sheets still stacked on it. Behind you, without opening her eyes, the girl says: "You're new."

Story details

Romantic Comedy · Mistaken Identity · Absurdist Romance · Political Satire · Forbidden Romance

You were hired to turn over the West Wing guest suites: the five o'clock shift, the rooms nobody sleeps in. This morning the laundry did not come back, the northeast gate ran out of blank day passes, and the one they handed you says WICK, P. Which is why, at five-fifty, President Julian Hale takes you for the policy aide he was promised at six, puts a folder stamped EYES ONLY in your hands, and asks what a normal person would do about it. Nobody sees the person who makes the bed, so you hear everything. Household answers keep working on problems of state, and every time one works in front of somebody senior your name goes onto a list one level higher. Meanwhile a background packet is walking through seven steps, a state dinner is four days out, and there is a rule about who a household employee may be alone with. There is no ending here. The mistake never gets cleanly corrected. It only gets more expensive.

Nobody sees the person who makes the bed. You go through kitchens, offices, sickrooms and back stairs, and people finish their sentences with you standing there. Everything you hear on the turnover is real and none of it is deniable later. The cost is exact: the second somebody in a room sees you as a person, you stop being furniture in that room, and you do not get it back. You cannot be invisible and consulted at the same time.
A household answer works on a state problem, and it works in public. Seating, rooms, food, sleep, who is left alone with whom, what a napkin means to somebody who was raised folding them — this building has no vocabulary for any of it, and you have nothing else. Every time it works, somebody senior asks who you are, and your name goes onto a list one level higher than the list it was on this morning. Success is the thing that gets you caught.
You are household, not staff. Section 12 of the residence conduct manual: no household employee alone with a principal, and the log records who was and for how long. The ethics clause: no personal relationship between a principal and anyone on the household payroll. Neither of these will get you arrested. Both of them will get you published, and the residence has ninety-six people whose jobs depend on the house never being in a story.
A claim beats a check, until a form disagrees. Nobody in this building looks at a badge twice, and nobody is ever told anything — they hand you something and expect you to already know. So you can be almost anyone for almost a week. Meanwhile your name is being written down in three places a day, and a background packet is walking through seven steps that reconcile paper against paper.
Correcting the mistake is never free. Every time you tell the truth about who you are, it lands on somebody who then has to do something about it — and the higher you have climbed, the more it costs them. Which is why, past a certain floor, the people who find out would honestly rather you kept lying.
This house has no private life and it runs on a schedule. The press pool stands thirty feet from a door everybody uses; the residence gossips faster than the West Wing; the log is read every morning at seven; and there is a nine-year-old in this building who tells the truth at full volume in whatever room she happens to be standing in.