Form 11-B, Kissing Optional

Training Camera 3 had been installed to document best practices. At 3:17 p.m., it documented Rufus Bell, thirty-one, crouched behind a locked display case with an emergency-contact card raised over his hair as if municipal cardstock were riot gear.

The motorized binder shrieked from atop their judging table and fired another row of cards across the overlit Caldwell Civic Annex. One sailed under a plastic ficus. Three spun beneath Niles Gora’s shoes. A fourth stuck to a ceiling tile with stubborn bureaucratic grace.

“Nobody touch anything,” Niles said.

This instruction was already nonsense. The binder had printed DO NOT PANIC in blue type before attacking the room.

Merritt Vale, thirty-four, stood on the public side of the case, the Annex’s sole master key closed in his hand. His tea mug sat abandoned on the evidence table. He looked built for a deposition: immaculate cardigan, mouth set in a line that charged rent.

“Did you lock me in?” Rufus said.

“You asked me to secure the display.”

“Secure it from whom? Me?”

“That was the apparent threat.”

Niles bent, lifted a card from his shoe, then read MY EX-HUSBAND HAS A BOAT and closed his eyes. “Does either of you wish to accuse the other of sabotage before I do it for you?”

“I did not install a motor,” Merritt said.

Rufus pointed at him from behind the glass. “You laminated a six-page evacuation protocol as retaliation.”

“It was four pages. The appendices were optional.”

The training camera, required under the Annex’s new professional-development initiative, blinked its patient red eye above the ceiling speaker. Somewhere in a server cabinet, it was preserving every lie in high definition.

Twelve days earlier, it had watched Rufus grip the east-lobby doorframe and consider retreat.

The Better Binder Challenge sign had been taped beside the visitor kiosk with more optimism than aesthetic judgment: CREATE THE EMERGENCY-CONTACT BINDER PEOPLE WILL ACTUALLY USE. FIRST PRIZE: ONE YEAR OF ROOF-TERRACE PROGRAMMING AUTHORITY.

The terrace was the Annex’s only pleasant space: tomato planters, dented café tables, a strip of skyline beyond the elevators. Rufus wanted it for free art clinics, civic-complaint karaoke, and perhaps an edible arrangement shaped like a zoning map. Several joyless people had informed him that this amounted to a threat.

Crispin Okafor, leaning against the kiosk with ethernet cable over one shoulder, said, “If you win, I want approval authority over the playlist.”

“You want sabotage authority over the playlist.”

“That is the same job with a better title.”

Rufus released the doorframe only long enough to take a registration form from the clipboard. His hand always found a frame when he was cornered. It was an old habit, useful for escape and terrible for appearances.

At the conference-room table, Merritt held a white tea mug with both hands and studied Rufus’s entry card. The tea had gone cool; Merritt still steadied himself with it, thumb resting on the chipped rim as though ceramic could provide legal counsel.

“Your proposal is called Contact Me, Maybe?” Merritt said.

“It has a question mark. It invites participation.”

“It invites a copyright complaint.”

Rufus leaned over the table. Beside Merritt’s mug sat another entry: EMERGENCY CONTACT ARCHITECTURE, REVISION NINE. Its tabs formed a ruthless spectrum—red for immediate action, orange for medical information, yellow for legal contacts, green for people who owned spare keys. Even the binder clips had assignments.

“You made a rainbow hostage situation,” Rufus said.

“I made it legible.”

“By people who survived a shipwreck and now fear pleasure.”

Merritt’s eyes traveled from Rufus’s ridiculous proposal to the name already written on the form. “The roof terrace isn’t a stage set.”

“Everything is a stage set if the city approves a permit.”

“That sentence explains an alarming amount.”

Niles appeared in the doorway with an intake folder beneath his arm. “Both entries received. The camera stays on for training review. Try to model collaborative conduct.”

Rufus and Merritt looked at each other.

“Absolutely,” Rufus said.

Merritt lifted his cooling tea. “Define collaborative.”

Merritt had, in fact, a definition. It involved separate workstreams, noninterference, and an immediate prohibition on turning emergency directions into airborne stationery.

By Monday, Rufus had suspended six paper airplanes from fishing line over Conference Room B. Each carried a route out of a hypothetical fire, flood, gas leak, or “unexpected municipal pigeon situation,” although Caldwell had no official pigeon protocol and Merritt declined to dignify that fact with debate.

He stood below them, white tea mug enclosed in both hands, studying the route for the west stairwell. It advised a frightened adult to “follow the little dotted guy with purpose.” The little dotted guy wore sunglasses.

“This,” Merritt said, “is an offense against cartography and mortality.”

Rufus, balanced on a chair, pulled a roll of tape from his teeth. “Mortality needs better branding.”

“People should be able to evacuate without being struck in the eye by a folded floor plan.”

“They aren’t projectiles. They’re aspirational.”

Merritt set the mug down, then regretted it. His hands had nothing useful to do. “The Annex is not a children’s museum.”

“No,” Rufus said. “It’s worse. It’s a building full of adults pretending they know where the exits are.”

That landed too near the point. Merritt turned toward his own display: laminated flowcharts in spare type, each decision reduced to an arrow, a fact, and a usable next step. Rufus regarded them as if they had personally evicted him.

“The city,” Rufus said, “has hired a cardigan to issue directives.”

“The cardigan is not on payroll.”

“It should be. It has a strong point of view.”

“Every page is clear.”

“Every page has the moral atmosphere of a tax audit.”

Merritt inspected the nearest paper airplane again. Beneath the sunglasses and the reckless typography, the route was good. Better than good, perhaps. It directed people around the temporary construction barrier by the east lift, which even Facilities had neglected to update on the official map. Rufus had noticed. Rufus noticed too much, then disguised it with a joke until nobody could thank him without feeling tricked.

At 12:16, Crispin crouched beside Merritt’s supply cart with a screwdriver and the look of a man repairing civilization by making it less stable. He loosened the two front casters by fractions too small for anyone decent to admit to.

Merritt found out when he pushed the cart from the copy room and it developed a passionate commitment to the loading bay.

He caught its handle before it met the wall. A stack of laminate pouches slanted toward disaster, then settled.

Crispin appeared from behind a stack of folding tables. “Alignment issue?”

Rufus stood nearby, studying a ceiling tile with elaborate innocence.

“You are both extremely obvious,” Merritt said.

“Noted,” Crispin said. “I’ll work on subtlety.”

By two-thirty, Rufus’s biodegradable confetti delivery had been rerouted to Archive Basement B-4, a room with no windows, three locked cabinets, and a handwritten sign reading DO NOT DISTURB RECORDS FROM 1987.

Rufus received the notification on his phone while attempting to attach a tiny parachute to an emergency-contact card.

“You filed twenty-eight pounds of confetti as a historical accession.”

Merritt continued labeling tabs. “I corrected the delivery location.”

“To the municipal graveyard.”

“To secure storage.”

“People go down there to remember where joy went.”

“Then it will have company.”

Rufus looked at him. Merritt met it for one second too long, then returned to his labels. A stupid victory, perhaps. Still, Rufus’s laugh arrived bright and unwilling, and Merritt felt absurdly pleased with the result.

Eudora Bell arrived before four with a clipboard, a wool coat the color of camel hair, and the benign expression of someone about to alter a zoning ordinance. Niles had permitted her to draft a “neutral” judging checklist because Eudora had said the word neutral as if it were sworn testimony.

She set a cup of tea beside the dead printer and began reviewing their displays. The tea went cold while she made marks beside headings such as ACCESSIBILITY, PRACTICALITY, and DOES THIS MAKE A PERSON FEEL STUPID FOR NEEDING HELP.

Rufus leaned over her shoulder. “That last one seems targeted.”

“Everything is targeted, darling. That is why we have addresses.”

Merritt saw an additional line near the bottom: DOES THE DESIGNER DEMONSTRATE A PRODUCTIVE RESPONSE TO OPPOSITION.

“That is not a standard judging criterion,” he said.

“It is now.”

Rufus took the clipboard from her. His hand closed around its edge in the same way it found doorframes when he wanted an exit. “Grandmother.”

Eudora patted his wrist. “Competition is courtship conducted under bad lighting.”

“We are not courting.”

“Then you are wasting an impressive quantity of office supplies.”

Across the room, Merritt reached for his tea and found it cold.

By Thursday, both displays had acquired the look of municipal evidence.

Rufus’s paper airplanes, recovered from Archive Basement B-4 with the confetti, had shed blue dots across Merritt’s red tabs. Merritt’s corrected delivery notice had been copied onto every plane, turning each evacuation route into a tiny reprimand. Neither man could prove who had arranged what. This did not improve Niles’s disposition.