Three A.M.

by Steven John

  “You’re not the picture of health, Heller. Are you getting enough vitamins and iron in your diet?”

  “Might be missing a bit of vitamin D, I guess.”

  I snorted out a small laugh. He was a clever kid, sometimes. “Yeah … slight shortage of that these days.” We sat in silence for a while. “How old are you, Heller?”

  He looked over at me, held my gaze for a moment. “Twenty-five.”

  Fuck me … I’d figured him for at least thirty. Twenty-fucking-five … that was right about at the age where the pre-fog world would be clouded by a child’s weak memory. “Do you remember the sun much?”

  He nodded, took a sip of liquor. “Sure, I remember it pretty well. Enough to miss it, anyway. I look at pictures of sunny days all the time. I guess some of my memories kind of merged with those images. But I remember how it felt. I remember being able to see things. Being outside and … I dunno…”

  “Under the sky,” I added for him.

  “Yeah. I remember the sky.”

  “I wonder if I’ll ever see it again. I think about it all the time. I know that’s not some profound revelation or anything. I know everyone thinks about that all the time but … it’s like … well, fuck, you may be too young for this to even make much sense, but you remember how everyone used to talk about the weather? Like if it was unusually hot or cold or whatever out, whenever you’d be talking to someone you didn’t know that well, you’d say, ‘Hot out, huh?’ or bitch about how cold it was or talk about how nice it was or the rain and all. So now nothing ever changes, right? So what do we talk about? No one talks about this shit”—I waved my hand in an arc out over the balcony wall—“because you only bitch about something that’s gonna change, y’know?”

  Heller nodded. He seemed lost in thought, and it was pretty clear he didn’t want me there. Or at least didn’t want to talk much, but I needed something to do other than wander the streets or mope around at home, half-assing my way through yet another depressing case or drinking alone. So I decided to impose on the poor kid.

  “Listen, let’s go inside for a minute, huh?”

  “Sure.” He arose looking nervous. I think he felt the other shoe was about to drop. When I asked him for a refill of gin, he took my glass without looking up at me. He walked into the kitchen and I went into his living room. I sat down on one of the folding chairs and looked at the stack of cassettes by his tape player. Bach, Chopin, Sinatra … all things I knew innately but had not listened to in years. Maybe a few notes in some restaurant here, a refrain passing a door there—music really does get me down most of the time, but I was in the mood to choke back some more rotgut liquor and listen to the past for a while.

  With energy and manufacturing and all at such a premium these days, it was de facto impossible to create new recorded music. Some places had bands or at least individual musicians strumming guitars or plinking away at pianos, but most of them were too classy for my pocketbook and general outlook. Heller entered and saw me staring at his tapes. He set my mug of gin down and I nodded thanks. Without saying a word, he removed a cassette from the player and inserted another. Heller pressed play and from the little speaker came that familiar, comforting sound of a scratched-up piece of tape rolling toward music. Then came a few gentle, almost timid piano notes. Just a few notes every few seconds at first, then a deeper chord came in underneath them and strings crept into the melody and soon an orchestra filled the room with well-loved, scratched-up recorded beauty.

  Heller had been standing, leaning against the wall, but now he sat, sliding down the white painted plaster to sit with his legs crossed, staring down at his cup. I realized that I had tears in my eyes. I quickly looked away and wiped my eyes with a thumb and forefinger, as if massaging tension at the bridge of my nose.

  “You smoke in here, right?” I asked, fishing out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter.

  “Sure.”

  “Should I get something to ash in?”

  He looked up, a weak smile on his pale lips. “You can ash anywhere. My floor’s fucking concrete.” He shook his head slightly as he lowered it.

  I lit my cigarette and smoked it slowly, trying not to but constantly glancing over at him. He was a strange kid, to be sure, but there was something about Heller that made me think he understood a great deal about life. An old soul. He was too melancholy for his age. It wasn’t depression, exactly, nor angst or any of a young man’s common demons.… He seemed to bear the weight of a lifetime on his thin shoulders. He seemed very tired.

  I reached out and picked up the case to the tape he had put on.

  “Chopin,” he said without looking up.

  “It’s beautiful.”

  “He was amazing.” Heller looked up now as he said this, nodding with conviction as he stared off at nothing. Then he looked over and our eyes met. “You can borrow it if you want.”

  “No. Thanks. Music … it makes me feel rotten most of the time. I can’t stand it, not more than once every few weeks.”

  “Well, if you want, take it. I’m sure there’ll be a moment when you want to spend some time with him.”

  “With who? Shoppin?”

  “Chopin.”

  I took a long drag of my cigarette and looked away, out the big bay windows on the far side of the room and into the gray.

  3

  I wandered down Forty-sixth Street later that afternoon. The fog was lighter now, and I could see three orb posts ahead of me even though they weren’t yet aglow. I was heading for Saint Anne’s Boulevard. I needed to feel some space. I’m not claustrophobic or anything, and I feel sorry for any son of a bitch who is, but I needed some open space. About twenty feet ahead of me, the mist danced and swirled and I knew I was almost there. I walked into the churning air and for a second could see nothing, and then I stepped through it and onto the wide, clear-blown street.

  I stopped to collect my thoughts, sighing as I looked up and down the wide lane. There were at least twenty people in view—more than I’d seen outside at one time in weeks. A strange sense of community washed over me. A young couple smiled to each other as they leaned against a wall. A man with coffee-brown skin in a light gray suit came ambling up the street. Beneath his matching gray hat, he wore dark sunglasses. He was smiling. And whistling. I snorted out a small laugh upon seeing him. Sunglasses. A tune on his lips … Hope springs eternal. Not for me, of course. Normally I avoided people, but just then I wanted to say hi to everyone out on this fine, windblown street. I started to turn around to ask what was on his mind worth whistling about. Then I thought to ask an older man who was passing nearby the time of day, and took a step to do so, but I hesitated and he ambled on. I watched his thin, stoop-shouldered frame shudder with each step, as if each time his foot fell, it pained him. His jacket, once fine, was thin and fraying with holes along its seams.

  My sense of connectivity with the world faded as I watched him walk away, and instead I wondered where he was going and why. Old people in shabby clothes have always depressed me. A glimpse of this old-timer shattered my whole mood. It seemed so unfair that, in a lifetime so rife with injustice anyway, at the end of their tenure, the elderly should have to shuffle about dressed in patchwork rags. Well, fuck it, I guess. I sighed and figured I’d just get home fast, picking up the pace. Ahead of me, a few pedestrians suddenly stopped walking and moved over against one wall. Then I heard it: the low rumble of marching feet.

  I ducked into the closest alley just as the patrol emerged from a side street, lingering in the dancing mists where I could just see the squad. There were about twenty soldiers walking four abreast in lockstep. Pressed grays and polished black rifles. They turned with parade ground precision and set off down Saint Anne’s the way I had intended to go. Unsure why, I turned the other way to take a circuitous route home. Sometimes I wish I’d stayed in the service. It would’ve been nice to have a routine and my meals and pay guaranteed. To feel secure rather than made to feel insecure. I needed to go over my notes from Eddie’s
case more, and then I wanted to have a few good, stiff drinks before I started to think about seeing Rebecca tomorrow.

  “Tomorrow?” I muttered out loud, picking up the pace as I headed south. Murder and suspects and fifty thousand dollars and all of it. It had no good written on it in six different languages. But it was a lot of cash, and she was a very, very pretty girl. I was intrigued by her, and a bit uneasy, which only piqued my interest and need to understand all the more. She knew my name, my drink … Those weren’t too hard to find out, really, but I had the feeling she knew a hell of a lot more.

  As I passed one of the giant blowers, I caught a glimpse of a woman with blond hair ducking into an alley. I was squinting against the fan’s wind and couldn’t be certain … but it sure looked like her. I picked up the pace and crossed the wide boulevard, holding out my hands as I plunged through the undulating mist and into the alley. I zigzagged back and forth across the narrow alley, waving one arm outstretched before me and keeping the other lower, feeling for orbs or any trash on the ground. I moved about thirty or forty feet up the alley in this awkward stumble. If it had been her, or anyone who didn’t want to be found, they would have gotten away by now.

  “Hi, Rebecca!” I called out into the misty evening. Silence. It was worth the try. Probably hadn’t been her, anyway … just my mind playing tricks on me. I made my way back out to Saint Anne’s Blvd as the orbs switched on in the alley. The spheres gradually changed from a pale, flickering yellow to the soft orange glow that would guide me home yet again.

  * * *

  I sat in my apartment with a glass of scotch in one hand and the cassette of Chopin’s music in the other. I had decided to take it from Heller after all, reasoning that I might end up wanting to listen to it or, if not, returning it would at least be something to do. An education and idleness just don’t go well together.

  Having Rebecca on my mind was keeping me from my usual brooding sessions, but the more I thought about her and the more I drank, the more a sense of dread worked its way through my veins. The thing I kept coming back to was not Rebecca, but whoever was behind her. There was no way a pretty young girl walked into Albergue and offered up a huge sum of cash on her own, a wronged-man murder backstory and having done her homework on me, no less. I was staring at the worn, gray cassette as I thought about Rebecca, and twice already I had leaned forward toward my tape player to put it on; twice I’d paused, arm outstretched, and then leaned back into my seat—not yet.

  When I talked to her, I knew I’d need to feed her information that would be digested by someone else. But it’s hard not to say too much or to ask the right questions when the person you’re plugging for info isn’t the one holding the hand you need tipped. She was sharp, too. Intelligence lurked behind those smiling gray eyes. But people who think they’re smart almost invariably think they’re brighter than they actually shine. I could use that to my advantage.

  I set the cassette tape down and rose. Pacing around the place, I finished off my glass of whiskey and set it in the little kitchen alcove. I was hungry, but about all I had in the apartment was rice and beans. I tried a few pieces of old, dried-out bread, but it was too moldy. I went for the pills instead.

  I popped open the little white bottle and dumped its contents out into my palm. Four pills. Fuck. I had meant to see Salk that afternoon, but a few drinks and a bit more time than I’d expected at Heller’s had thrown my plans off. I didn’t like having that few meds around. The addictive mind never truly craves something until it’s in short supply.

  I filled my glass and stood by the window, staring out into the charcoal gray night. I felt bad for having grabbed the kid’s neck so roughly earlier. It had turned yellowish by the time I’d left him. Heller had seemed like a strung-out nuisance when I met him; now he seemed more like a lonely, sad-bastard young man. I wondered what he thought about me. He must have hated me to some extent. But I’ve been changing over the past couple of years—growing less tough, more resigned.

  I wheeled from the window and set down my glass. Moving quickly, before I could hesitate again, I shoved the cassette in the player and turned it on. For the next hour or so, I slowly got drunk and more than a few times sat with tears running down my cheeks as music filled the room and my mind. Eventually, around two o’clock, I collapsed onto my bed. I had the rare pleasure of sleeping soundly through three o’clock that night.

  * * *

  As I made my way to my office the next morning, I felt uneasiness akin to the apprehension before a first date. But I needed to realize that all the conversations and exchanges that I had imagined might occur between us would not. Any words I had put in her mouth were not going to come out, so all my clever or charming rejoinders were useless. I needed to act the consummate professional I used to be and drop all the preconceptions. I stopped in the dead air behind a blower and lit a cigarette.

  “Also,” I said aloud, unconsciously gesticulating with my hands as if explaining the situation to an external self, “she won’t fuck you, Tom.”

  Hearing it ring out loud like that straightened my thinking a bit. I took a few drags off my smoke and then walked at a faster pace toward my little closet of an office. The glowing numbers on my sun sphere had read 11:18 when I left home, so it was likely now half-past. I figured I’d have at least a couple of hours to get on my game face.

  Anyone would call my office a shithole. And I knew I was not in the right mental frame when the first thing I thought upon entering was that it would make a bad impression on a refined lady. There were stacks of paper and cassette tapes strewn everywhere. A few of the photos and items Eddie had let me take as samples were piled in one corner. My chair is a dumpy wood and cloth thing I found in an alley. Tripped over is more accurate. Before finding it, I’d sat on a metal folding chair for almost two years, and that’s where I was going to put Rebecca.

  The desk, gray metal with rust spots and coffee stains, sat beside an ugly black file chest against the wall opposite the door. No windows. The building had been renovated post-fog. Most of the other chambers in it were either vacant or rented out to government drone types. The more scarce power and water had grown, the more people had been employed to make the getting of it complicated.

  I usually kept a negative score when I walked in, starting right after I closed the first air lock door. Each person I passed was a point off. I got a perfect score of zero today; I hadn’t passed a soul in the lobby, on the elevator ride up, or on the long, dimly lit walk to my unmarked door. The number next to it—1023—was the only way to know where Thomas Vale pretty much never was.

  I cleaned the ten-by-ten space as best I could for about half an hour, shoving everything into drawers without the slightest trace of order. I’d been trying to arrange the photos from Eddie’s warehouse chronologically—it seemed like most of his clients were missing material from the same time, when the sky turned from haze to real fog. Hours of busy work was erased in seconds.

  I grabbed two mismatched coffee mugs and a little blue plastic pitcher. I figured it would be best to seem prepared for her.

  In the kitchen, I lost a point. She was short, fat, and dressed in clean, pressed clothes. Lipstick. Why she still bothered was beyond me. I tried to avoid contact with her dull, watery eyes smiling behind thick glasses, but she wouldn’t let me.

  “Hi, there! How are you?”

  Nappy brown hair and pudgy cheeks and that stupid smile as she filled a large plastic cup at the tap. The fuck was she so happy about?

  “Morning,” I mumbled.

  “Actually, it’s just past twelve, so good afternoon,” she practically beamed.

  “Oh. Good afternoon,” I said, pausing after the oh and sounding about as pleasant as I felt.

  I waited until she left with her tepid water before cleaning out the bacteria cultures growing in my mugs. I filled the pitcher with coffee from the tap in the wall and grabbed a few napkins off the counter. The coffee tap never ran dry. I never had any idea who filled whatever
container it came from. It was awful stuff but par for the course no matter where you looked. All the coffee in this town must come from the same greenhouse. Gourmet had long gone.

  I went back to my office, sat down, arranged the mugs and pitcher, and waited. For an hour. Then longer.

  I smoked cigarettes, tossing the plain white pack from hand to hand then pausing to study it. It had the word CIGARETTES printed across it in black letters. There were no tobacco brands left. God save us if the liquor ran dry. Halfheartedly, I flipped through notes no longer pertinent to Eddie’s case. I got up, dumped out the cold coffee, refilled the pitcher, and then waited some more. I nodded off at some point.

  * * *

  I woke up confused. It was quiet, but I knew something had awoken me. I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes and shook my head to clear it. Then a knocking sounded on the door, so faint it was almost lost in the gentle hum of the building’s vents. I rose, stretched quickly, and opened the door.

  Rebecca wore slim khaki pants and a conservative button-down shirt beneath a gray blazer. She was simply beautiful. Try as she might to hide beneath these clothes, she was just as pretty as when she wore that slutty red number. I stepped back into the office and wordlessly gestured for her to come in.

  “It’s so strange to actually find you here,” she said quietly as she entered the room and stepped past me. I leaned close to her blond hair as she crossed in front of me and breathed in before she turned. She smelled sweet, vaguely like honey, but damp. Like everyone always does. We stood there, facing each other for a moment.

  Then I turned crisply and walked behind my desk, sitting down and indicating she should do the same. “Coffee?”

  “Sure. Thank you,” she said. I filled her cup and then my own and then leaned back in my chair, sizing her up. I wanted her to make the first moves … set the tone and pacing of our first official meeting. Evidently she was waiting for me to do the same; she looked up at me a few times with those pale, gray eyes, but mostly Rebecca sat, staring down into her lukewarm coffee and seeming very uncomfortable. Fuck it. I started things.