The Next Step

Act I

6:03 a.m. Mark sits in a booth at Lou's Diner, two blocks from Cleveland City Hall. He is eating eggs. They are over-easy, slightly burnt at the edges. The coffee is bad. He drinks it anyway.

The bell on the door rings. Councilman Frank Kowalski walks in. He is Polish-American, like Mark's father. Same nose. Same hair. Same way of wearing a suit that says he worked for it. Frank spots Mark, walks over, and pulls out the chair without asking.

"Got a job for you, Mark."

Mark nods. He has learned not to ask what kind.

"City hall. File runner. Minimum wage."

"Thank you."

"Start Monday."

Frank leaves. Mark finishes his coffee. It is cold now. He leaves a dollar on the table and walks to City Hall.

His father wanted him to be a teacher. "Teachers make a difference," his father used to say, in the kitchen, over breakfast that was always the same: toast, jam, coffee. "You help somebody. That's something." Mark is not sure he believes that anymore. He is twenty-seven. He has a community college associate degree in political science. He has been unemployed for eleven months. He has a wife who works at a hospital and a small apartment that smells like other people's cooking because the walls are thin. He has a car that needs new brakes and a father who calls every Sunday and asks if he has found anything yet.

"This is something," Mark tells his father on Sunday evening. "City hall. File runner."

"Good," his father says. "Good start."

Mark does not tell his father that "start" is the wrong word. A start implies going up. Mark suspects, though he cannot articulate why, that this job will not be about going up. It will be about staying. About surviving. About learning the shape of a room and staying in it.

He starts Monday. His job is to carry files from one office to another. To deliver memos. To make copies. To stand in hallways and wait to be told what to do next. He is good at waiting. He is very good at standing in hallways and looking like he belongs there.

Act II

The first promotion comes eight months later. File runner to office assistant. It requires a small humiliation: covering for his boss, a man named Donahue, who comes to work drunk three days a week. Donahue is not subtle about it. You can smell him from the hallway. You can hear the rattle of the bottle in his desk drawer when he thinks nobody is listening.

One morning, Donahue does not show up. His assistant calls Mark: "Tell the deputy nobody's feeling well." Mark makes the call. He says the words. He watches the deputy's face change—the slight shift from concern to suspicion to the decision not to ask further questions. This is how government works. You look away. You let people feel unwell.

By noon, Donahue arrives. He is sober. He does not thank Mark. He does not need to. The understanding is sufficient. Mark is promoted the next week. Office assistant. Small desk. Slightly better chair. He tells Elena: "It's a step."

She looks at him. "What's the next step?"

"I don't know yet."

Each step requires a new understanding. To get the deputy assistant position, Mark accepts that the deputy mayor's son will receive a no-show payroll job—twenty thousand dollars a year for four hours of work per week. Mark does not approve it. He does not oppose it. He signs a form that places the son on the payroll. The form is routine. The signature is invisible. The son never comes to the office. Mark's boss says, "This is how it works." Mark says, "Okay."

His wife asks him again: "Is this what you want?"

He thinks about the question. He has learned that the honest answer is not useful in this house. "It's a step," he says.

He is thirty-two when he becomes Deputy Assistant to the Deputy Mayor. He has a business card with a title on it. It feels heavy in his wallet, like a key to a door he did not choose to open.

By thirty-five, he is Deputy Director of Municipal Services. He has an actual office. Actual nameplate. Actual salary that pays the mortgage on a actual house in a actual suburb where the schools are "acceptable" and the driveway is too short for both cars. Elena works double shifts at the hospital. She does not ask him about his job anymore. She has learned that the answer is always the same: "It's a step."

But the city is bankrupt. He knows this because he signed the documents. Water shutoffs—thousands of them. Schools closing—seven in the third ward alone. People leaving. Not moving to better places. Just leaving. The houses sit empty. The porches sag. The lawns grow tall and brown and nobody cuts them.

Mark has to deliver the news to a neighborhood association. They're cutting the community center on East 55th Street. The woman who runs it—Mrs. Radzik—raised him when he was seven and his parents were working late and he needed somewhere to go after school. She let him play chess with Mr. Petrov, who was seventy years old and had lost his wife and found comfort in sixty-four squares and thirty-two pieces.

"You used to come here," Mrs. Radzik says. She is standing in a room that is already half-empty, boxes being packed, chairs stacked. "You played chess with Mr. Petrov."

Mark has no response. He looks at the floor. He looks at Mrs. Radzik's face, which is not angry. It is worse than angry. It is disappointed. And disappointment from a woman who raised you is heavier than anger because it means she thought better of you and you proved her wrong.

"That night," he says. "I sit in my house. My actual house. My actual mortgage. Elena's asleep beside me. I whisper: 'What's the next step?' No answer."

He is not talking to Mrs. Radzik. He is talking to the ceiling. To the empty room. To the man he was before he learned to sign forms without reading them.

Act III

Mark stands on the balcony of City Hall at midnight. He is smoking a cigarette. He used to smoke in college. He quit two years ago. He started again three months ago, when he signed the order to close four more community centers and twelve public libraries.

Below him, the bridge he just cut the ribbon on. It is underfunded. He knows this. The contractor underbid by thirty percent. The materials are substandard. He has seen the inspection reports. He has filed them. Nobody reads the files.

He thinks about becoming a teacher. Like his father wanted. He is not too old. He is thirty-six. He has a degree. He could go back. He could teach high school civics. He could stand in front of kids and tell them that government matters and that public service is about making a difference and that the work is hard but it is meaningful.

He could lie.

But the machine has him now. He is deep in it. His salary depends on it. His house depends on it. Elena's health insurance depends on it. The kids' private school tuition depends on it. They are not rich. They are not poor. They are in the space between, where the ground is soft and the walls are closing in and you tell yourself it is enough because you have no other word for it.

What is the next step?

He stubs out the cigarette. He goes inside. The building is empty except for the night guard, who nods at him but does not ask why he is here at midnight. The guard has worked here for twenty years. He knows the answers to questions that are never asked.

Act IV

Mark stands on the city hall balcony. He is smoking again. The cigarette burns between his fingers. Below him, the bridge. Underfunded. Already cracking. He can see the hairline fractures from here, if he looks carefully. Most people cannot. Most people drive over it every day and think it is solid because it has not collapsed yet.

He thinks about becoming a teacher. His father's dream. His father, who believed in things. Who believed that teaching was noble and that students could be changed and that the world could be improved by people who chose to stand in front of a classroom and do the work.

Mark is too deep now. The machine has him. His salary. His house. His wife. His kids. They all depend on the steps. They all depend on him climbing, or at least standing still, or at least not falling.

What is the next step?

He does not know. He really does not know anymore.

The cigarette is finished. He drops it. It falls, slowly, like something that has lost the will to burn.

He goes back inside. Tomorrow there will be more files. More signatures. More steps that are not steps at all but horizontal movements in a room that is slowly filling with water.

He will do it. He will go to work. He will carry the files. He will sign the forms. He will stand in the hallways and look like he belongs.

Because the machine doesn't need him to believe in it. It just needs him to participate.

And he does. Every day. Without hesitation. Without comment.

The next step is the one he has always known. The one that leads nowhere. The one that leads to a desk with a nameplate and a view of a bridge that is already cracking.

He goes back to his office. He turns on the light. He sits down. He opens a file. He reads. He signs.

He does not know. He really does not know anymore.