Leonard Greaves had always believed in the sanctity of records. For over four decades, he meticulously archived the city's history within the labyrinthine halls of the New York Chronicle. Now, at 72, retired and ailing, he found himself surrounded by the very artifacts he once curated—newspapers, microfilms, and clippings that chronicled the relentless march of time.
His apartment in Hell's Kitchen mirrored his mind: cluttered, organized chaos, where every item had its place and purpose. The neighborhood, once gritty and unforgiving, had softened over the years, but Leonard remained unchanged—a relic of a bygone era.
On this particular evening, as the sun dipped below the horizon, Leonard sat hunched over his microfilm reader. The soft whirring of the machine was a comforting lullaby, a constant in an ever-changing world. He fed the film through the reader, eyes narrowing as the headlines from decades past flickered before him.
But something was amiss.
He paused, scrolling back to a headline that shouldn't exist:
"Terror Strikes Twin Towers: Thousands Feared Dead"
The date read: September 11, 1998.
He blinked. Scrolled again. Checked the date twice, then three times.
It wasn’t a formatting error. The issue layout matched the Chronicle's standard edition from that period. The byline belonged to a reporter he remembered fondly, long dead from cancer. There was even an image: one of the towers collapsing, grainy and gray.
Leonard gripped the edge of the table.
In 2001, he had been in Midtown, standing outside the Chronicle building when the sky tore open. The smoke, the dust, the smell. That was real. He knew it. And yet—this version claimed it happened three years earlier. A full article. A timeline. Quotes from witnesses, fire chiefs, mayoral statements. All of it.
He rubbed his eyes and walked a slow circle around his apartment, mumbling to himself. His place—cramped, cluttered, quiet—offered no explanation. Just towers of yellowing clippings, shelves of labeled microfilm, file folders stretching back to the Ford administration.
He searched for surrounding stories, the days before and after the 1998 article. Nothing unusual. No corrections. No retractions. But the more he looked, the more inconsistencies revealed themselves: a bombing in Jerusalem that he remembered as 2003 appeared dated 1996. A subway derailment he could’ve sworn happened in 1989 was now listed in 1991.
He sat down. Stood up again. Paced.
At the New York Chronicle, he was the man who caught the details before they became disasters. Misplaced datelines, inverted headlines, captions that didn't match their photographs—Leonard spotted them all. In the newsroom, he was half archivist, half oracle, with a memory so precise his editors trusted him over the masthead.
“You don’t miss a thing, Greaves,” his managing editor once told him, clapping a hand on his shoulder. “You’re the last line of defense between the truth and a typo.”
But nothing in his decades of work had prepared him for this.
In an act of desperate logic, Leonard turned to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing—the first attack. He remembered it clearly. Six people dead, a truck bomb in the garage. He had clipped and archived those stories himself.
He checked the reels.
Nothing.
Not a mention. Not a headline. Not even a weather report for that week. The gap was silent, like someone had cut it clean out of the record.
Then the lights in his grim little apartment flickered.
He froze.
A moment passed. The generator he’d installed—buried somewhere under old stereo boxes and city permits—hadn’t kicked in. Not yet.
And then the apartment fell into darkness.
Leonard cursed and fumbled for a flashlight. He couldn’t find it. The backup batteries were gone, the drawer empty. He moved through the dark like a man underwater, bumping into his own archives.
Outside, he heard a door creak open—soft footsteps in the hallway.
“Anyone there? What happened to the lights?”
Then a neighbor’s voice, sweet and low:
“Leonard? Is that you?”
Leonard froze.
“Who’s that—Louis? Louis, is that you?”
“Leonard, the whole city’s out!”
“Blackout? Oh, Jesus, I thought I was going crazy. Louis, thank God you’re here!”
Leonard squinted into the dark. A faint beam of cell phone light illuminated the figure of Louis—or rather, Loretta, dressed in a shimmering lavender blouse, black slacks, and a matching clutch purse tucked beneath her arm.
Her makeup was done with precision—lipstick, false lashes, contour. She was beautiful, poised, entirely herself. But every time Leonard saw her like this, he felt a curious dissonance, as if the hallway were a mirror turned sideways.
“Oh. You’re dressed,” Leonard said, breathless. “You scared me.”
She stepped closer, the phone casting ghostlights across her cheekbones. “You can call me Louis, I don’t mind. Was just heading out when the blackout hit,” she said. “Lost my phone signal. Thought I heard your door.”
Leonard squinted, “The whole city’s out? When did this happen?”
“Just now.” Loretta tilted her head, smiling gently.
He managed a nod. “Oh my God! Well, listen: help me find my generator, would you? It’ll only take a minute.”
Together, they fumbled through his stacks, shoulder to shoulder. Leonard barked directions; Loretta ignored them and found the unit in five minutes flat. Once the generator sputtered to life, dim emergency lights returned to the room. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to see each other.
Leonard, grateful and shaken, gestured toward the kitchen.
“No one’s going anywhere until the city figures this out. Do you want something? I’ll make tea.”
They sat at the small table, mismatched mugs in hand. A candle flickered between them, casting long, slow-moving shadows on the wall.
“Ever been in a blackout like this before?” she asked.
“Oh yeah. Twice, maybe three times, I think. 2003 was the last one,” Leonard replied. “New York was down all night.”
Loretta chuckled. “You mean 2000?”
“2000?”
“The millennial blackout? You don’t remember?’
“Oh, yeah, yeah, of course. When was that?”
“2000.”
“Yeah, I know. But when precisely?” He frowned. “I’m sorry; what do you take with your tea?”
“Nothing, plain. Thank you. Anyway, that blackout—I was ten,” she said, laughing slightly. “Living in Ohio with my parents. Saw it on the news. We thought the world was ending.”
Leonard said nothing. Took a sip of tea.
She noticed.
“What?” she asked.
“No, no, no. I was recalling … when …” Leonard’s voice trailed off as he stirred his tea. “Listen, um, Louis, I didn’t mean to, um, insult you before by calling you Louis.”
“You’re not insulting me. You know me as Louis. We’ve been neighbors for a while, Leonard. Come on.”
“Well, all right. You pass … very well.”
“Thank you. I work at it.”
“Oh. Well, Loretta.”
“Yes, Leonard?”
“Nice to have a little company during a blackout. Wonder how everyone else in the building is doing.”
Loretta looked around the place, “Wow, you’re quite a collector.”
“Yeah, did you know? Maybe I’ve never told you, I’m a … I worked for the New York Chronicle; the paper went under a few years ago.”
“I never heard of it.”
“Well, that’s what you see all around you here.” Leonard gestured vaguely at the stacked microfilm reels, the paper towers leaning like exhausted sentinels. “Catalogues. Dates. Clippings. Back issues. It looks like a mess, but I know where everything is. I spend most of my time going back. Checking for accuracy.”
He gave a short, bitter laugh.“This is what I do. It passes the time.”
Loretta gave him a smile—not amused, not pitying, just present. That was what made her different. She didn’t fill silence with noise. She listened like someone who’d had to fight to be heard.
Leonard hesitated, then asked: “Do you remember… the attack on the World Trade Center?”
She blinked. “Who doesn’t? You mean 9/11, right?”
“Yeah.”
“I was about eight or so. I watched it in homeroom. The teacher rolled the TV cart in. We didn’t even understand what we were looking at.”
Leonard’s face paled.
“So you’re saying you remember that before the blackout?”
“You mean in 2000?” she asked. “Sure. I was a kid, but yeah.”
Leonard’s tea rattled slightly in his hand.
“Leonard…” she said softly. “What’s wrong?”
He shook his head. “Nothing. Just… my memory.”
“You sure?”
He stared down into the tea like it could offer him a clue. “I had a good one. At the Chronicle, they trusted me to remember what the rest forgot. Dates. Layouts. When someone else couldn’t find the thread, they came to me. My mind was the vault.” He tapped his temple gently. “It was the only thing I had that was… sharp.”
Loretta took a sip and leaned back, relaxing her posture.
“Tell me about yourself,” Leonard said, changing his tone.
“I came to the city when I was twenty-one,” she said. “Worked coat check at a cabaret on 10th. A s**t-hole, really! They used to call me ‘darling’ and let me borrow dresses after hours. I’d walk home like that. Past cops. Past drunks. Past old men who looked at me with a kind of confused wonder.”
Leonard smiled faintly. “Like you’d stepped out of a dream?”
“Or into one.”
He nodded slowly, staring into the soft flicker of the candle between them.“You’d have loved New York before Giuliani cleaned it up. Before Bloomberg handed it over to the bankers. It was dirty. Raw. You could still vanish in it. In some ways …”
He trailed off.
Loretta cocked her head. “In some ways—what?”
Leonard’s voice was low, more breath than speech.
“We called men who cross-dressed transvestites.”
“Who did?”
“I did. Everyone did.”
A silence expanded between them before Leonard spoke.
“There was a place here in Hell’s Kitchen. The Mercury Lounge. Working class during the week, then on the weekends, something different. One Saturday night, I was … I met someone. And we fell into conversation.”
Leonard suddenly stopped, “I thought she was a woman.”
“Oh, interesting.”
“Yeah, maybe. I don’t know. We drank, we talked politics. She was brilliant. Confident. And she looked at me like she could see something worth keeping.”
“What happened?”
“I kissed her,” he said, eyes glassy. “I didn’t mean to. Or maybe I did. And she didn’t stop me. Not at first. Later… I don’t remember if it was before or after, but she told me her name wasn’t what she’d said. That she wasn’t what I thought.”
Loretta was still. Her expression unreadable.
“I left,” he continued. “Panicked. Didn’t ask her real name. Just walked out like a goddamn coward. Like she’d shown me something sacred, and I spat on it.”
Silence expanded between them.
“You wanted to stay,” Loretta said gently. “But you didn’t know how.”
“Yes,” he whispered. “And I’ve been trying to rewrite it ever since.”
Their eyes met.
She touched his hand across the table—warm, deliberate, genuine.
“That night didn’t disappear just because you walked away.”
He nodded slowly.
But something in him changed—like a current turning under still water.
“What if that night was the break?” he said, voice cracking. “What if that moment rewrote everything after it?”
Loretta’s brows drew down slightly.
“What do you mean ‘rewrote’?”
He stared at her now—not at her dress or makeup or the softness in her voice—but through her. Like he was seeing something overlaid on her skin.
“Does that mean you did follow her?” she asked cautiously.
His mouth opened, then closed.
He rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand. The tension in the room thickened, but not from anger from recognition. A corner turned inward.
“When you spend your life organizing history, the last thing you want is a memory you can’t place,” he murmured.
Loretta tilted her head. “What are you saying?”
Leonard didn’t answer right away. He stood, walked over to his desk, and stared at the blank screen of his microfilm reader as if something might return to it. Then he exhaled slowly, eyes still fixed forward.
“I’ve been chasing inconsistencies,” he said. “Dates that don’t match. Events that don’t exist. Things I know happened… but are gone from the record.”
Loretta shifted in her seat, her demeanor softening slightly—until Leonard finally turned to her, and there was something new in his expression. Not just confusion but dread.
“I think it started with her,” he whispered. “That night. I don’t mean her personally. I mean what I did, what I didn’t do. I filed that night away like a mistake. But it wasn’t. It was… it was real. And I think the world punished me for burying it.”
Loretta didn’t interrupt.
Leonard stood again, slowly walking to the microfilm cabinet. He opened it, pulled a reel, and slid it in. The machine sputtered, flickered, and then steadied.
He scrolled in silence.
Then stopped.
“I saw the headline,” he said.
He looked at Loretta, eyes distant, voice dry and cold.
“The Towers. 1998. Not 2001. It’s a real article. In my files.”
He looked back to the screen.
“And now you’re telling me the blackout was 2000. Not 2003, like I remember. And the ’93 bombing? It’s gone. Like it never happened.”
He backed away, almost dazed.
“I thought I was chasing the past. But it’s chasing me. Rearranging itself. Hiding what doesn’t fit.”
He looked to Loretta as if she might confirm it. Instead, she just watched him with a quiet, tightening concern.
Leonard's breath hitched.
“The record is wrong,” he whispered.“Everything is wrong.”
Loretta pulled her hand back. Her voice cooled. “Leonard, what are you talking about?”
“No,” he snapped, rising. “You’re the one not remembering!”
“Maybe you’re just a little confused,” she said.
“And maybe you’re part of it, Louis!”he hissed. “You and her. You’re the same, aren’t you? You both wore the face of truth! But when I looked underneath—there was nothing there!”
Loretta rose slowly, jaw clenched. Her voice was steady but dark now.
“Leonard.”
“I kissed a lie,” he spat. “Thirty years ago. One time, that’s it! And then, something changed. The world’s been lying to me ever since!”
Loretta took a step back. “You kissed a person.”
“She wasn’t real.”
“You mean she wasn’t what you expected,” Loretta shot back. “That doesn’t make her fiction.” Loretta took a beat and then, “Did you have sex with her?”
“No! How dare you ask that?!”
“It sounds to me like something more happened!” Loretta spat.
Leonard staggered back toward the microfilm machine, panic flaring. The reel jammed. The screen flickered. He banged his fist against the casing, hard.
“You’re all frauds!” he shouted. “Every one of you!”
Loretta stepped closer, eyes hard. “You don’t get to erase people just because you’re afraid of what they show you.”
He turned on her, wild.
“What the hell do you know? You’re just a man in a wig!”
“And you’re a man drowning in your own lies.”
The microfilm reader went black.
And Leonard was left staring at his own reflection in the blank screen—fragile, shaking, half-erased.
The screen, thought dead, gave a mechanical groan. A soft flicker—then static. Leonard flinched. Loretta stood still, her eyes locked on him.
Then, slowly, a headline scrolled into view:
“MURDER IN HELL’S KITCHEN: MERCURY LOUNGE ENTERTAINER FOUND SLAIN”
Date: March 1993.
Leonard froze.
Below the headline was a photo—grainy, black and white—of a police cordon outside the Mercury Lounge. A name he vaguely remembered surfaced in the byline. Details blurred at the edges: suspect at large. The article ended mid-sentence as if it had been yanked from the page.
He staggered backward.
“No…” he said, barely audible. “No, that’s not—this can’t be!”
His hands trembled as he reached for the microfilm knob. He scrolled back and forth. The story remained. Glued to the screen like a wound that wouldn’t close.
Loretta stepped cautiously around the table. “Leonard?”
He turned on her with a suddenness that made her stop mid-step.
“You brought this,” he said. “Your being here—this—it rewrote the file.”
She blinked. “What are you talking about?”
He jabbed a finger at the screen. “This never happened. None of this happened! Not until you showed up. I didn’t kill her!”
Loretta frowned. “Leonard—”
“Don’t say my name like that.”
Her voice was firmer. “You think I control your machine? You think my being here conjures headlines?”
He pointed at her, desperate, unraveling. “You’re not just here. You’re part of this.”
In one jagged motion, Leonard stepped forward and ripped the wig from Loretta’s head, sending strands of styled auburn cascading to the floor.
“Louis,” he spat.
She recoiled.
“You’re not a woman. You’re just another lie! And now I have you here, trapped.”
Loretta stumbled backward as Leonard lunged. He was faster than he had any right to be—gripped not by strength but by something ancient and unspent, the kind of rage that outlives reason.
She grabbed for anything—a stack of files, a wobbling shelf—toppling a paper tower that collapsed like a broken ledger between them.
Leonard tripped, crashing into the debris of his life’s work. He grunted, knees splintering, as he crawled through the wreckage like a man clawing out of his own grave.
Loretta stood over him now, breathing hard. Her voice was shaking, but her aim was steady.
“I have you trapped, Leonard. And you’re going to confess to what you did.”
Leonard raised his head, blood in his eyes, his mouth trembling somewhere between laughter and a snarl.
“Confess to what?”
She stepped forward, towering over him.
“The police never even questioned you. Why would they? No one cared about men like her. Not in Hell’s Kitchen! When the Chronicle folded, you thought it would be the end of it. You never knew her name,” Loretta whispered, “but you remember her smile. The way she touched your hand. She saw you. Not the files, not the facts—you. You were never more afraid in your life.”
Leonard shook his head. His hands searched the floor for something—balance, maybe. Or denial.
“She waited for you outside that night. The bar was closing. She leaned on the lamppost like a question you didn’t want to answer. You don’t remember following her. You don’t remember what you said. But you remember… the sound her body made when it hit the alley floor.”
Leonard shook his head slowly. “It’s not true; it’s all a lie! I left her!”
“You left her alright; you left her dead.”
Her voice cracked, but she didn’t stop.
“You spent decades trying to file it away—like a misprint in the margins. Thought if you buried her deep enough, history would forget her too.”
Leonard whimpered, crawling closer.
“But she didn’t stay buried.”
Loretta’s breath was sharp now.
“She keeps resurfacing. In headlines that don’t exist. In files that rearrange themselves. In voices, you can’t silence. And now—”
He looked up at her, hollow, eyes shining.
“You see her in me,” she said.
Loretta nodded. Her eyes were no longer filled with pity—but something colder, resolute.
And then—
The lights returned. The city-wide Blackout was over.
The lights in Leonard’s cramped apartment blinked on all at once—kitchen, hallway, overhead—a sudden flood of electric daylight that stunned the room out of shadow.
Leonard gasped and looked up, caught in the shock of light. His pupils narrowed like an animal before the blade. His mouth opened. His hand clutched his chest.
“Too late,” he rasped. “It’s too late for the truth. Far too late.”
And then, he collapsed sideways with a final exhale, like a building folding into dust, his breath cut short and silent.
A long moment passed.
And the microfilm reader blinked once—just once—a brief blue flicker. Then it faded to black.
The room was still again.
Only Loretta remained standing, her torn blouse trembling at her ribs, strands of hair clinging to her damp brow. She looked down at Leonard’s body—not as a victor, not as a witness, but as the last living page in a long-forgotten archive.
And in that moment, with the machines silenced and the light returned,
the record was finally complete.
In the days that followed, the newspapers would carry an account of Leonard Greaves’ passing. They reported he had stumbled in the dark during the brief city-wide blackout and died of a heart attack. He was found by a neighbor who came to check on him. No other information was forthcoming.
© Michael Arturo, 2025
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Michael Arturo writes fiction, contemporary political/social commentary, parodies, parables, satire. Michael was born and raised in New York City and has a background in theater and film. His plays have been staged in New York, London, Boston, and Los Angeles.
