“I meant the plot of this movie.”
Christopher, though, had seen it twice before and disagreed.
* * *
A mile from there, Jen sat up in bed, eyes fixed on a show but her mind replaying every second of the afternoon meeting with the Maori man in the gray suit. Every time she rewound, it ended with the captain saying the exact same words: “Jen Lu? She’s nothing. Absolutely fucking zero.”
Waves of emotion pounded at her, and she considered turning on Chandler to help regulate herself. But she wanted to suffer alone. One minute she was seething with anger, running monologues about spending her whole life crushed by shits. The next minute she was close to tears. She screamed silently at her mother for being a garbage parent and at Brooks for calling her a fucking zero. In her mind, she told Les to stop badgering her to be more assertive: enough Cobalt Blue already.
She heard a siren wail. She heard little Ezra crying in the apartment next door. She heard the incessant oompa-thud of polka-thrash coming from her neighbors up above.
The sounds jerked her away from her self-torturing loop. For the first time, she thought not about Brook’s answer to Gray Suit’s question, but about the question itself. Why had Gray Suit singled her out? All she’d done was ask one question about Eden. He’d answered her respectfully and calmly. What was he worried about?
It had only been a month since she’d begun hearing rumors about Eden. Not much at first. The word. The word once again. She had overheard a man at a store checkout talking about it, but when she asked him what it was, he’d stared at her with suspicion and walked away. Once while getting her hair cut, she’d listened to two women talking quietly to each other: “We’re going.” “You know how to find it?” “Not yet, but Benny’s the best at figuring things out.”
Little clues, crazy rumors. Eden was a new underground railroad that would sneak you across Canada’s electronic barriers. Eden was in Africa. Eden was hidden in the mountains of Wyoming. Eden was a vast network of bunkers, a virtual underground city. Eden was on the far side of the moon. It seemed, as Captain Brooks had said, a load of crap; Gray Suit had called it a fairy tale. And yet the whisperers kept whispering, and their whispers kept working their way into her head.
She had heard one rumor that in Eden they gave you the treatment without anyone having to exit. It was salvation for children and rescue for parents. And that thought, as she lay in bed, wrenched her mother into her mind. Her nasty mother, four months shy of exit.
“We were getting to Eden,” the dying woman had said.
She pinged Zach to see if he was still awake. No answer. She thought about their visit to the strange store. Why had it been unsettling? It wasn’t the place. It was … Zach’s enthusiasm … their differences … politics, police, the world … her life versus his.
She tried Les. Got a message back: Go to sleep!
At two in the morning, Jen still had her eyes open. The movie in her head started again.
“She’s nothing. Absolutely fucking zero.”
She snapped on the light, squinted as she fumbled into her clothes, and tiptoed to the apartment door so she wouldn’t wake up Ava or Taylor. She thought of catching a rental to the station, thought again, and unlocked her bicycle.
She passed an encampment of Shadows. A group of men and women huddled around a small fire with some type of animal, likely a squirrel, roasting on a makeshift spit. A baby angrily cried, and she thought of little Ezra, by now happily asleep in his crib next door. Shadows. A generation or more without a job or social support. Didn’t exist in anyone’s reckoning of anything. Ignored, shoved around, and pushed away whenever they became too big a nuisance or whenever some politician needed a populist boost. Large migrating camps descending on fields and parks like locusts. Non-people. Mere shadows.
She arrived at the station.
The duty officer said, “What the hell you doin’ here?”
“Nothing. Couldn’t sleep.”
She saw him shake his head at the sheer stupidity of this.
She went to the Elder Abuse Unit. Sat at her shared desk. Didn’t turn on her computer. Didn’t turn on Chandler. Sat there for ten minutes. Slipped the plastic bag with the Johnsons’ door card into her pocket. Headed out.
The duty officer commented, “That was fast.”
“You were right. It was stupid to come in.”
* * *
The lights in the vestibule flicked on when she opened the front door of the Johnsons’ building. The hallway and stairs were spotless; they still smelled of polish. She tiptoed to the second floor. She was shaking so badly she had to brace her arms against the wall before she could slip on a pair of latex gloves. She removed the crime scene tape and let herself in. She was relieved when the lights didn’t go on automatically, and drew out her light, but then realized that a neighbor seeing a light moving around was more likely to be suspicious than if all the lights were on.
It was hot and stuffy inside. It stank of uneaten food, unwashed dinner dishes, and frying pans. It stank of dirty diapers and blood. She was spooked at the thought of going into the kitchen, so she started in the living room. The curtains were drawn back, and her face in a window against the blackness beyond kept startling her. Childhood. Alone in her room after her mother said that bad men came after girls like her in the night. The dare game she’d played. Dared herself to look at the yawning blackness of the window, perhaps to see a stranger’s face hovering in the night outside. And if she didn’t look, she’d be even more conscious of what she wasn’t looking at, and soon the windows would become all she could think about, as if they were growing by the second, swallowing up the room and the house and her life.
Now, as then, she made herself look at the window. She held her gaze and stared out the panes and counted. One. Two. Three.
She could not stop shaking. Be Cobalt, she told herself with a laugh. Do what Cobalt would do.
But her hands still trembled as she closed the curtains. At least no one would see her as she rifled through the meager bookcase, as she lifted cushions off the sofa, as she sorted through a stack of battered library books, as she patted the bottoms of chairs. At least no one would see her shaking.
What was she looking for? She had no idea, but it would be a clue. A map to Eden? A button chip? A description? A URL and password? A name?
Forty-five minutes later, she had finished with all but the kitchen. Searched every pocket in every coat and pair of slacks, flipped through every book in their small bookcase, stuck her hand inside every sock, rummaged in every drawer and cupboard. Each room, lights on, then lights off. She checked the time. She’d been there much too long. She needed to get out. Maybe she should leave this very second.
But instead, her stomach cramping with dread, she entered the kitchen. She tapped on the lights and, as she expected, saw the plates with food still on the table and a greasy frying pan on the stove. The plates seemed to be alive; they heaved with motion. Then froze. Fifty cockroaches had raised their heads as if guided by one mind. They stared at her, every last one of them, the big suckers that had migrated up from the Amazon. And then they skittered away, disappearing as quickly as taxis in a rainstorm.
Jen let out the breath she hadn’t known she was holding. She took another breath. Damn if she didn’t hate these big-ass roaches. She examined the room from the doorway. Brown splotches of blood stained the tablecloth and chairs where Mr. and Ms. Johnson had sat. Blood colored the old wooden floor. She entered the room and slid open every drawer, doing so carefully, but the cockroaches seemed to have vanished entirely. Odette Johnson had run a tight kitchen. Jen poked a spoon into bags of sugar and flour and carefully replaced them exactly as they had been. She stirred a fork into a jar of mustard. She removed the filter in the ancient range hood, finding it remarkably clean.
Finally, she tidied up after herself, then sat where Delmar Junior had.
“Where are you?” she said. “Eden, where are you?”
Her focus s
napped. Footsteps, climbing the wooden stairs. It couldn’t be anyone coming here, she thought; it couldn’t be, but she jumped up and clicked off the kitchen lights. The apartment plunged into darkness, and she slipped into a space next to the fridge.
She waited. Hearing things, the rustling of the roaches as they returned. She imagined she heard the wood splinter around the lock and the faint squeak of the hinges—then knew that was precisely what she’d heard. Footsteps. A flashlight beam shot into the kitchen, and she held her breath as the beam rested on the table, which started to come alive again with roaches. The light rested on the chairs one by one, then whipped quickly around the room and was gone. Footsteps down the short hallway to the living room. She counted, not knowing why, fifteen steps, and then heard them in the hall again. It had only been seconds. This person knew what he or she was looking for.
Jen rushed out the kitchen door, ready to grab whoever it was. The flashlight shot at her face, blinded her, and a darkened figure, more a presence than a person, rushed at her like a defensive tackle. He slammed into her, and Jen tumbled backward onto the kitchen floor. She landed flat on her back, the impact knocking the wind out of her. She heard footsteps running away.
One minute passed—two? The apartment was dead quiet. Jen staggered to her feet. Her head spun, and she braced herself on the table. She dropped into a chair. Even when she realized there were roaches skittering up her arm, she was too spent to worry about them. “Fuck off,” she said, and brushed them away.
She stood up, snapped on the kitchen lights, and stumbled into the front hall. The door was open, the wood in the jamb pried ajar. She went into the living room. It was exactly how she had left it. Of course it was. The person only took fifteen seconds to find whatever it was they were looking for. Where had it been? What had it been? None of the cushions seemed disturbed. The drawer under the coffee table was still shut. The ancient picture album rested, closed, on top. The books in the small bookcase seemed in order.
Except that between two books, there was one conspicuous space she could swear hadn’t been there before. A thick space for a thick book. She closed her eyes and saw the Bible resting right there.
Of course.
Eden.
But she had flipped through every book, shaken each one to see if something would fall out. Some had contained receipts—actual paper receipts, some handwritten and a few printed out from old machines, because the law said if someone asked, stores still had to provide them. And now it seemed as if the Johnsons had used books as a filing system, but none seemed significant. A fan. A used refrigerator. A phone. A highchair. A stroller.
The Bible, though, had been stolen. Worth breaking into a crime scene for. Worth assaulting someone for. Worth going to jail for.
And it had slipped right through her shaking hands.
7
Sunday, July 8—16:59:00
Once a month, the boss visited her old lady. “Twelve times a year too many,” Jen had once told me. Tough words to say to a guy who doesn’t get to have a mom.
“Leave me on so I can meet her,” I said. It was the butt-end of a long Sunday shift, and Jen was about to sign out, pop me off, and go for her visit.
“Why would I want to do that?”
“So I can understand why you go on about her like you do.”
“You’ll never understand.”
But she did leave me on. We grabbed the Metro and then an auto-rickshaw. She phoned Zach, but he was still at his meeting. Community Action for Sustainable Prosperity, CASP, a group Zach was helping set up. He shot her a text back: Meet you in an hour.
The winds were now coming from the north and the temperature had leveled at a hundred. It was a remarkably clear day, the sky like the Tahitian sea. We arrived at a three-story building with yellowed vinyl siding and landscaping done by someone who hated plants. Probably just as well, since those few plants now looked like kindling for a campfire. We walked up the potholed driveway. They might as well have hung a sign out front that said, “Old people locked up here to die.”
We stepped inside. Four more visits to go, Jen thought. Four more payments. Four more months until I’m done with her forever. I pretended not to hear any of it.
She waved her ID over the pad and passed through the metal detectors. I don’t want to sound mean, but the first thing I noticed was a smell I didn’t like. Dying skin, Jen said.
No, I replied. That’s only four percent of the smell, along with medicines and foul food and floor cleaner and smelly lotions and cheap perfumes and antiseptic soaps and diapers and accidents.
Aren’t you full of interesting information, Jen said.
We went into the administrator’s office, where we were greeted by a bubbly white woman with thick makeup and hair so stiff I thought she was wearing a football helmet.
Jen said, “There’s a problem with my June payment.”
“Oh my,” said the administrator, “that won’t do now, will it?”
I figure you’d have to either be a saint or working off an overdose of uppers to stick with a job here. I didn’t have the administrator pegged for a saint, but who knows. Look what Mother Teresa had gotten away with that didn’t leak out until thirty years after her death.
I checked the administrator’s chestnut-colored hair for cracks while she checked her records on an old-fashioned opaque computer screen on her desk. “No, it adds up like a charm.”
Jen asked to see the screen. Math genius that she is, it didn’t take her long to spot the problem. She tapped the glass. “There, that’s it. She gets her hair done twice a month. You’ve repeated it every day.”
“Oh, but in June she went each and every afternoon. And doesn’t she look the charm?”
A few thoughts rammed through Jen’s brain: I can’t possibly afford this. I won’t pay. But no words came out. Instead, her brain flooded with a long-familiar feeling of utter defeat.
The administrator agreed to spread the extra payment over the final four months and to make sure Jen’s mother didn’t go every day.
We took the stairs to the second floor two at a time, Jen’s mood worsening with every step. By the time we reached the door to the activities room, I was shattered and wished I’d never been born.
You’re dramatizing, Jen said to me.
Empathizing.
You never had to live with her.
I knew it all, though. She was a monster. She had scared away Jen’s father when Jen was only five, but that made him a total fuckup too. She had absolutely destroyed every single day of Jen’s life until Jen had finally moved out, and even then she’d done her level best to keep on spoiling it ever since.
We went into the activities room. Windows so dirty I thought there’d been an unscheduled eclipse of the sun. A potted ficus, dead on all fronts. A couch that must have had more organisms living in one square nanometer than the whole human population of the world—I swear I could see the cushions wriggling.
The place seemed to specialize in activities that made no sound. A man and three women played cards, one of them trying to sneak looks at her neighbor’s hand. A man whose ears had been hijacked by a squadron of bristly hair was doing a mildly pornographic jigsaw puzzle. Another man was parked in front of a huge screen, ancient, oversized Beats headphones on his bald head, eyes shut in sleep, controls clutched in his shriveled hands, and World of Warcraft frozen in his avatar’s death agony. Two women—alert and neatly dressed—played chess at a small table dragged as far away from the others as possible.
Wandering between them all was a Chinese woman, tall like Jen, with a great smile on her face. A gentle face, but slightly vacant. She saw us. “Oh, look who’s here!” she said with excitement. She came toward us briskly, her hands reaching out in greeting. “Oh, my,” she said as she grabbed Jen’s hand. “Now tell me, who are you?”
And with a metaphorical click, Jen shut me down.
* * *
Next morning. 07:00.28. Back at the office and born again. I exist i
n shifts. But I’m not one to complain. It simply isn’t part of the program.
Monday morning meeting. Jen, Les, Hammerhead, Amanda, and Captain Brooks.
Item One: A moment of silence for Brittany, who succumbed last night to ROSE. Fifty-one years old. Her brain had rapidly turned into a three-pound hunk of Swiss cheese left out in the sun too long.
Item Two: Amanda was going on a two-week holiday, starting Wednesday. No temp replacement. Hammerhead said, “That makes us down to, uh, three people.” Captain Brooks congratulated him on his arithmetic.
Item Three: Air-quality update. Winds had shifted, Great Shenandoah just about out, particulates dropping, but we still needed to keep our eyes on our seniors.
Item Four: Jokes about Les’s black eye coloring his white face, even though everyone knew it had happened at his weekly basketball game.
Item Five: Run-through of trial dates. James O’Neil, rich punk. Preliminary hearing coming up in a week for July 3 assault on the Tidal Basin path. Jen to meet with district attorney.
Item Six: One of the Johnsons’ neighbors reported their apartment had been broken into. Les volunteered to take a look, but Jen said, “I might notice if anything was taken.” Les said, “Good call. I’m too dumb to spot a television missing from the wall,” but Captain Brooks told Jen to go. Adrenalin spiked and I calmed it down for her.
* * *
“Jesus,” Jen said, “someone smashed it in.”
I caught a strange vibe from Jen and a burst of fluttering thoughts that told me there were things she knew that neither she nor Jesus was about to reveal to me. I didn’t share her off-duty memories. I didn’t even get to know all she was thinking.
We went in.
“It stinks in here,” I said.
“Not surprised,” she said, and it was clear she wasn’t.
We went into the kitchen and peered around. I heard her think cockroaches, but there were none to be seen. To the bedroom. The living room.
The Last Exit Page 4