The Care Liaison

by Henrick Karoliszyn

I used to think the best part of my job was that nothing ever happened.

This wasn’t an ethical position but a practical one. When nothing happened, the notes fit into their boxes, and I went home without feeling like I’d taken something unfinished out into the street.

I was a Care Liaison. When the system couldn’t figure out what was acceptable, someone like me arrived. We weren’t emergency responders or enforcement. We were meant to be less detectible than both. We listened, observed, absorbed. We spoke calmly and avoided promises that might later need further explanation.

Most mornings began the same way. I rode the bus in with a uniform of people — faces I recognized but never greeted — and stepped out for coffee on the building’s first floor. The barista wrote my name wrong, with so many different variations of Derrick I felt creative looking at them. I never corrected him, never questioned how he never recognized me. It felt like an insignificant joke the morning and I agreed to keep telling

Our department was rubbed and wiped down overnight. On the fourth floor, where the Care Liaisons worked, the ventilation puffed a faint citrus odor, intense and synthetic. Something like wipes my mother used when she was nervous in public and squished them into her palms. It was a smell I associated with orderliness, anxiety, and a familiar neurosis.

At work we sat at identical desks arranged in careful rows with divided cubicles between us. The monitors were set to the same brightness, the chairs adjusted to the same height, all of them lacking ergonomic comforts. Even the plants — broad-leafed, plasticky, dust-resistant — lack their own identities. The job attracted people who liked instructions, or those who liked believing instructions worked.

My supervisor liked to say that our jobs were about consistency. It was a flexible word. It could mean safety, or that nothing would change, in perpetuity.

The file appeared in my queue late one morning, after two routine video check-ins. It wasn’t marked urgent, but it wasn’t ordinary. The request specified an in-person visit, which usually meant the person had stopped responding, or the apartment had begun to register irregularities. Something about the situation made the arrangement uneasy without being able to say why.

The address was in the Outer Blocks.

That alone woke up my suspicions.

The Outer Blocks weren’t dangerous in any dramatic sense. They were mostly older amd less updated. Things there tended to accumulate within the structures. The objects, patterns, and people had not been reassigned. The system put this group here because they didn’t yet know how to delete.

The man’s name was Elias G.

His history was long and mostly unremarkable. He spent years of steady participation. Public-facing work. Consistent self-reporting. In earlier photos, he smiled too broadly, the way people do when they’re trying to demonstrate they have nothing to hide but might, in fact, have something to hide.

More recently, the file shrank. Missed appointments. Irregular sleep patterns. Minor reporting errors. Shortly after, the companion arrived.

Nonhuman. Female. Primate.

One photograph of a chimp was clipped to the page. She sat on a bare floor with her back against a wall, holding something, maybe fruit. Her eyes were open and steadied, directed at the camera without interest or fear. It was the kind of image that invited interpretation, which was why we were trained not to linger.

Her assigned name was Mara.

Under special considerations, a sentence had been typed quickly, with an error that detained my brain: Chimp living with person w/  perm gun to hand in case.

Permit gun to hand in case?

I leaned back and stared at the wall which offered no help. I had encountered weapons before, but only as abstractions, namely as risk factors, technical issues, and probabilities. This was different. This was an object I might have to confront.

My supervisor appeared beside my desk.

“You’ve got Outer,” she said.

“Yes.”

She glanced down at the open file.

“That one’s particular.”

“In what way?”

She tapped the desk once with a red pen.

“Stick to procedure.”

That was the entire conversation.

I took the bus after lunch. As we moved farther from the center of the city, the buildings lowered and the sidewalks collapsed in spots. People still ran errands, still carried groceries, but the rhythm was unusual. It became less decorative, more direct, and less choreographed.

The building Elias lived in was ancient. Not charming-old. Instead, it was worn down by lack of upkeep. The elevator was out of order. The stairwell reeked like dirty cooking oil. Someone had written STAY USEFUL in marker on the lobby mirror, the U retraced until it had scarred its surface.

Outside Unit 9B, I paused. Not because I was scared, exactly, but because I wanted to clear out any expectations. I reminded myself that this was a check-in. That my job was to notice and document. That nothing needed to happen. This was the goal.

I knocked.

I heard movement inside — rapid, repetitive— and then silence.

The door opened a few inches, and a face shone through a stringy chain.

Elias looked older than his file suggested with uneven gray hair in patches. His hooded eyes moved over me fast, as if searching something inside my brain.

“You’re late,” he said.

“I’m on time,” I corrected.

He considered this, then unhooked the chain.

The apartment was dim, curtains drawn despite the daylight. Light leaked in narrow stripes across the floor where the cloth was torn. The furniture was mismatched but arranged with care, as if he’d tried to impose order without buying any new items.

Posters covered the walls with public service I recognized from transit stations but they’d been altered. Slogans underlined. Faces scratched out. Torn sections in the  center.

In the downtown of the room, on a rug that had lost its auburn color, sat the chimp.

She was gnawing on grapes from a plastic tub, using her fingers with careful precision. She did not look at me. Her attention fixated on the food, though I noticed the slight tension in her shoulders.

“Hello,” I said, because not doing so felt rude.

She chewed, neglecting me.

“She doesn’t like strangers,” Elias said.

“That’s fine,” I said. “I won’t engage unless necessary.”

He nodded.

It took me a moment to notice his right hand. It was not a set of fingers, but a silver Glock-molded brace enmeshing his wrist and palm, secured with silver straps. The grip fit so tightly it looked anatomical. A light blinked steadily on the side of the device.

I felt my face rearrange itself and willed it back into neutral work mode.

“Permit gun to hand,” he said, as if reciting a line he’d been given. “For protection.”

“Okay,” I said.

In the kitchen, he sat at the table and positioned the weapon between us. I took the chair across from him. The sink was full of rinsed bean cans. On the table lay a stack of printed article clippings, their edges curled, and dried beige. I recognized one headline immediately about a chimp moving into the Outer but looked away.

“They don’t like when you remember,” he said, tapping the papers with the barrel, attached to his hand.

“I’m here to check in,” I said. “Make sure things are stable.”

“Stable,” he repeated, digesting the word.

From the living room came a muted thud. The chimp had carried the grape tub to the far corner of the rug and placed it there deliberately, away from the space between us.

“She does that,” Elias said. “Puts things away.”

“Is that new?” I asked.

“No.”

“She’s been assigned to you for how long?” I asked.

“Eight months,” he said. “Long enough.”

“And how has that been?”

He shrugged.

“She’s quiet. Smarter than people think. Smarter than a lot of people actually.”

The chimp glanced up briefly, then returned to her grapes.

“The device,” I said, gesturing with my pen. “When was that issued?”

He leaned back.

“After the incident.”

“I’m not here to discuss incidents,” I said.

He laughed.

“Of course you’re not.”

He looked at his wrist, lifted it, moved it around.

“They showed me videos,” he said. “They said it was education. Risk awareness.”

I nodded.

“They said animals turn,” he went on. “They said it happens fast. You become faceless.”

The chimp shifted slightly. One grape rolled onto the floor. She ignored it.

“They said better safe,” he said. “They said this would keep everyone calm.”

A reminder chimed somewhere outside. Elias popped his head up.

“I don’t like the noise,” he said.

“It’s just a reminder,” I told him.

“You hear it too?”

“Yes.”

That seemed to comfort him.

“Show me how it works,” I said, not part of the planned interview.

He smiled weakly.

“You want a demonstration?”

“It’s part of the assessment,” I lied.

He stood.

The chimp froze.

He lifted his arm and pointed the gun at the wall above the couch, where the posters stared back at us. He adjusted his stance, breathing deliberately, training the device.

“It reads my pulse,” he said. “It knows when I’m agitated.”

“That seems complicated,” I said.

“It’s very simple,” he said. “I don’t have to decide.”

The chimp made a sound —not brash, not aggressive, not loud.

Elias turned his head.

The gun blasted off.

The sound split the room. I ducked without thinking. Plaster dust rained down. A poster slashed apart, his shoulder popping back.

The chimp leapt sideways, so fast I barely registered the movement. A book fell from a shelf and hit the floor.

Elias stared at the wall.

“I missed,” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

His breathing was irregular.

“I didn’t—”

He stopped.

The chimp emerged gradually from behind the shelf. She approached his arm cautiously and touched it.

The device on his wrist buzzed.

Elias gasped.

“She knows.”

I stood, my legs shaking.

“We need to remove it,” I said.

He shook his head.

“They’ll say I’m unsafe.”

“They already do,” I said, and immediately wished I hadn’t.

He sagged back into the chair, making it squawk along the floor.

The chimp pressed her fingers along the seam of his brace, then looked at me. Her eyes were dark and unreadable.

I followed her lead. The panel of the device came loose. A wire disconnected.

The beam of light shown went dim.

The gun slackened. I removed it from his hand.

Later, the report would be brief. Procedural. Accurate in the way accuracy can still be a lie. The apartment would be cleaned. The poster replaced. The chimp reassigned. I would return to work the next day. Nothing would happen and I knew now that this was the most dangerous part.

BIO: Henrick Karoliszyn is a writer based in New Orleans. His fiction was selected by the Ernest Hemingway Foundation and published in the 2025 Hemingway Shorts literary anthology, winner of the 2025 Breakwater Review fiction contest, shortlisted for The Letter Review Prize, and a finalist for the 2026 Kurt Vonnegut Speculative Fiction Prize (results pending). His work has also been featured in McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Flash Fiction Magazine, and ExPat Press along with forthcoming editions of BULL, Modern Flash Fiction, and Blood+Honey literary magazines. He's at work on a debut short story collection and a novel.