by Brett Savory
I don’t even know whose house we’re at, only that it’s a very large and well-decorated house. Some rock star or actor or politician.
I see my wife across the room. She’s talking to someone who might be the President of some country or other. Never was very good at remembering faces.
She swishes the wine in her glass around and around. Always counter-clockwise. A nervous habit, and one which I find distinctly irritating. She laughs at something President Whatever says. Tilts her head back and everything.
My socks have pooled completely around my ankles again. I want to scream. Instead, I walk over to the bartender, ask for a bottle of his best imported beer. He hands me a brand I’m unfamiliar with.
“Such a fine evening tonight,” he says.
“Thank Christ for air conditioning,” I say, tip back my bottle and drain half of it in one go.
“Outside, I mean.” The bartender points toward the balcony. Silky, thin blue curtains blow inward gently.
I nod slightly, wander away toward the open doors leading out onto the balcony. I do not leave a tip.
Earlier in the day it’d been unbearably humid to the point where it felt like I was breathing through wet cheesecloth. But now, as I step outside, the air is just this side of crisp. I frown, button up my jacket.
It’s a large balcony, so I pass a lot of people as I make my way through the crowd. People I recognize: judges, lawyers, religious leaders, politicians, famous actors, infamous musicians, crime bosses, police chiefs, corporate CEOs. The ones who make the world go around. Mixed with these are faces I don’t recognize. They seem incredibly out of place, like someone just stuffed them into a nice suit and told them to smile and keep their mouths shut. Nervous. Unsure why they’re in attendance at such a high-class event. I wink at a couple of these out-of-placers. This tiny gesture says: I know your secret, friend. And it’s okay; it’s safe with me. You’re someone’s friend. Someone important. Nothing to be ashamed of.
I take a quick look behind me. See that my wife is no longer talking to President Whatever. I scan the crowd, but don’t see her anywhere.
A gust of wind sweeps through the crowd. Women clutch at their purses, hold down their skirts: a balcony full of Marilyn Monroes. Men clutch their drinks to their chests, put hands up to their heads to protect their hairdos. People start heading indoors to get out of the wind.
I get to the end of the balcony, rest my beer bottle on the ornate granite railing. Look down. Tiny, tiny specks bustling about in the dark. Bumper-to-bumper traffic, even at this time of night. I wonder how many of those specks would kill to be invited to this party.
Take another swig. Look up. Squint to see a bunch of pinholes in the fabric of night. Moving away very, very slowly—nearly imperceptible. Squint harder, concentrate. What the hell are those? Can’t be stars. Another swig, drain the bottle, tip it all the way up, getting every last drop of foam.
Forget about the pinholes.
Place the bottle on the railing again, turn to head back inside. Party seems to be thinning out. I glance at my watch, frown. It’s early yet.
“Cameron! Yo, Cam!”
I glance about. Teeth flash, mouths open and close with fake laughter, eyes bulge too far out of their sockets. Feet shuffle, side to side, impatient. Expectant.
My name again. Go up on tiptoes to peer over everyone’s heads, can’t spot the speaker. Join the shufflers trying to get back indoors. Another gust of wind slices through the crowd.
“Cam! Jeez, man, wait up, would ya?” A firm hand drops onto my left shoulder. Grips it there. Too tight.
I pull my shoulder out of the man’s hand, immediately irritated. Step back.
“Didn’t ya hear me?” the guy says. He’s all shark grin, stiff hair, and Armani.
“Going to get another drink, fella.” I lift my empty bottle. “Do I know you or something?”
“Ha!” the guy says, claps me on the back. I have a brief, intense vision of my fist ramming into his perfect choppers, blood running down his chin. And him still with his idiotic grin. “Good one, Cam. Good one. Say, look—”
“No time for looking, guy, sorry. Need to refill.” I turn away.
Again, he clamps a hand on my shoulder. “You really don’t recognize me? Jordan. From IBM. Remember?”
I shrug out of his grip, my voice hard as brick. “No fucking idea who you are. Now, if you’ll excuse me.”
When I get back indoors, I pull up a stool at the bar. Despite the breeze, the air inside is stuffy.
“Party’s clearing out fast, huh?” the bartender says, one towel-wrapped hand inside a beer glass, wiping, wiping.
“Yeah,” I say. “Night’s still young and all that.”
I twist around in my stool, glance about quickly for my new best buddy, Jordan, but he’s nowhere in sight.
“Another beer, sir?”
“Yeah, same kind.”
He pops the cap, hands it to me.
In my peripheral vision, I see several waiters scurrying around. I turn to see what the big event is that requires so many of them. But I catch only flitting glimpses of the waiters’ activity through the crowd, like in one of those flip-books where the action moves one frame ahead for each page you turn. I’m skipping pages, though, and no matter which way I lean, I can’t get a clear view.
Gulp down half the new bottle. Wonder distractedly where my wife went, surprising even myself with my level of apathy toward her.
My vision swims when I turn my head to face the bartender.
There are suddenly four of him, crisscrossing one another. I blink my eyes, rub the back of one hand across them. Blink some more. Down to three bartenders, but still two too many.
I turn around for a moment, look behind me; the room is getting more and more empty every time I look at it. Only a handful of partyers left in the room now. Swing my head in the general direction of the balcony: completely empty. Only the billowing curtains showing any sign of movement.
And my wife is nowhere in the room.
My wife. I try to make the words mean more by saying them again in my head.
“You alright, buddy?” the bartender says. Him and that fucking beer glass, wipe, wipe, wipe, and I want to smash it, jam the shards into his throat.
“Yeah . . . I’m fine, I’m fine. Buddy,” I say, and sneer. The corner of my lip lifts impossibly high, Elvis-high, and at that moment I’m not sure it’ll ever come back down.
“You sure don’t look it, chum.” Wipe, wipe. Smash, smash.
“Look, mind your own goddamn—” I teeter on my stool, sweat dripping down the sides of my face. “—business, ya skinny little . . . ”
I fall directly sideways, floor coming fast. Then hands grip me tight, lift me back vertical.
My head is a steam press. I imagine smoke billowing from my ears. My skull feels like crushed ice.
“Easy there, Cam. You alright?”
Jordan—Mr. Armani, Mr. IBM, Mr. SharkTeeth—has his grubby mitts on me. “Not you again,” I slur. “What’s your fucking deal, guy? Christ.”
Every word from my mouth sounds drenched in syrup, a sporadic stream of out-of-sync letters falling like stones, thumping on the carpet.
“Sorry about earlier, okay? Mistaken identity,” Jordan says. “Thought you were someone else. You’re Cameron Jacobs; I thought you were Cameron Jacobbs—two bs. No worries,” he says, pats me on the back twice, releases his grip, walks away quickly.
I fall forward onto the bar countertop.
And then the lights go out.
When I come to, my hands are tied behind my back and my head is a thick fuzzy sock filled with marshmallows.
I’m seated in front of a wall of small televisions. A black-and-white surveillance video plays on all the screens. The only difference between them is that they’re each showing a different angle. But they’re all of the two rooms I was just in: the one with the bartender, and the balcony.
Hurts to twist my neck side-to-side, so I angle my head back a little bit, try to see behind me. Only darkness back there, though I hear breathing. Two sets of lungs.
“Hey, uh . . . ” I croak. “Could I, like, get a glass of water or something? Christ.”
No answer.
On the video, a man—my good pal Jordan, by the looks of it—flits around the party clapping people on the back, smiling, teeth like tombstones, even on the small, grainy screens. People drink and drink, then they fall over. Drop like flies. I realize I’m watching a slightly sped-up playback of about half an hour ago. And here comes me, slithering to the bar, then out onto the balcony. Back in again, over to the bar. Jordan saves me from a carpet-to-face meeting, then I slump over forward on the countertop. Some waiter lifts me up by the armpits, drags me away, out of the shot.
The video screen switches to snow, then starts again from the beginning of the party.
“Is that everyone?” someone behind me says. A man.
“Think so.” A beat. “Should be,” says the other set of lungs. A female pair.
“What about this one?” A boot kicks the back of my metal chair.
“Take him home, I guess. Wrong Cameron. What else can we do?”
“Fuck it. Let’s put him on the plane, too. No one’d know. And it ain’t like he’s some shining example of the species.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Every seat is already assigned on every ship. At least for the next few waves. Now just backup the tape and let’s go. Come on, hurry it up. We’ve got less than twenty-five minutes to rendezvous.”
Noises of quick but measured movement: bags zipping up, laptops clicking shut, plugs pulled from walls, metal chairs folding, a door opening. Light from the hallway cuts the interior swatch of darkness like scissors, momentarily blinding me.
“So, no water, huh?” I say, my eyes scrunched tight.
“No. Not right now. There’s some in the van,” the woman says.
I nod, move my pasty tongue around in my mouth, making dry clicking noises. “Fantastic.”
The man behind me hoists my inert body from the chair. Only my mouth and brain seem to be working properly.
Into an elevator. Doors close, down we go. Doors open.
Someone’s cell phone rings. I hear its owner flip it open. What I gather from the one-sided conversation is that the proper Cameron Jacobs has been found, and everyone has been “loaded in,” whatever that means. And that these two charming persons currently dragging me by my armpits along a cracked chunk of pavement outside this high-rise’s lobby are needed ASAP—no time to drop off the other Cameron.
The last words I hear before I drift off again are: “Waves two and three launched; preparing to launch wave four.”
My brain reboots one more time and now some hatchet-faced fucker is dousing my head with cold water. I inhale sharply. He moves the lip of the bottle to my mouth, tips it back. I gulp greedily.
The front of my shirt soaked, water dribbling off my chin, and the rope tying my hands together digging deep into my wrists, I blink my watering eyes at my surroundings. I’m in the back of a van. It’s dark except for little blinking lights coming from row upon row of electronics on shelves stacked floor-to-ceiling on both sides. Again, I’m seated in a metal chair between the stacks, face toward the back doors.
Crouched low to avoid braining himself on the ceiling, Hatchet Face steps behind me, moves to the pas- senger seat at the front, says something to the driver that I can’t quite make out.
We bounce over pothole after pothole. Definitely not in the city anymore. As my eyes adjust to the darkness, I look out the two small windows in the van’s doubledoors: pitch, except for the slight red haze of the van’s running lights.
I clear my throat, wish desperately I could wipe my sandpapery eyes. “Cameron Jacobbs,” I say. Hatchet Face’s gravelly voice barely cuts through the noise of the truck: “You say something?”
“Cameron Jacobbs. The other one. What did he do? What do you want with him?”
Silence.
We ram into a monster pothole and I bounce up off the chair, fall sideways, slam my head into a piece of electronic equipment with small knobs and buttons peppered across my face. I feel blood on my teeth.
I wind up on the van’s floor, crammed between the chair and the wall of equipment.
No one moves to help me.
I slip in and out of consciousness for awhile. Then Hatchet Face and the driver of the van—a frail-looking twig of a woman in her forties with a soiled do-rag on her head—stop the vehicle, drag me out the back doors by my feet.
Twiggy cuts the rope tying my hands together. Hatchet Face pushes me in the back, tells me to walk. I wring my wrists with my hands, trying to get feeling back. I look around, see that we’re in the middle of a desert.
My eyes clear up a little with the dry air; I wipe them on my sleeve. Blink the last of the grittiness out. Up ahead: lights. Fiercely bright. Some winking, some pulsating. The sound of massive engines as we get closer. Looking left to right across the horizon, I see a row of launching pads similar to the ones that used to be at Cape Canaveral, before NASA was forced to shut down. Probably ten or twelve of them.
Shuttles lined up, aimed at the sky. Not as wide and bulky as the old shuttles, though—the ones I used to watch on TV when I was a kid. These are longer, sleeker. Shinier. Other shuttles are on their sides away from the launching pads. Teams of workers move about. Sparks fly from blowtorches scorching metal.
I nod my head toward the ones aimed at the sky, turn my head around to call over my shoulder, “Where they going?”
“Up,” Twiggy says, tells me to turn around, keep walking.
Few more feet and we hit pavement. Armored trucks coast by. Diesel fumes cough out. Enormous tented facility to our left. People in uniforms I don’t recognize drift in and out. One of Hatchet Face’s frying-pan-sized mitts slams into my back, pushing me in the tent’s direction.
I gawk up at the closest shuttle, watch people move about on its scaffolding. Beetles scurrying over a biscuit. I’m reminded of the party, looking down at all the people bustling below. I realize I’ve never bustled for anything in my life.
We walk through the tent’s flap opening. Inside, more bustling, but at least the scale isn’t dizzying.
People brush by me, eyes straight ahead, purposeful. I glance behind me: Hatchet Face and Twiggy are still in tow. Twiggy’s knife by her side, fist clenching it tight.
At the back of the tent, a short, overweight woman with dark, shoulder-length hair, and John Lennon glasses waddles around in the same unfamiliar uniform everyone else is wearing. Glance behind me, see Hatchet Face nod toward this woman.
She’s got charts, maps, and other papers scattered all over a desk in front of her. She shuffles through the papers, wheezing like she just climbed several flights of stairs.
“The other Cameron Jacobs,” Twiggy says, motions for me to sit. Again, it’s a metal chair.
Darkroast coffee wafts up my nose. I look at Lennon’s cup staining some of the maps on the desk. Perhaps my eyes widen a little or I lick my lips, because Lennon says, “Conklin, get Mr. Jacobs a coffee.”
Hatchet Face wanders off.
“Thanks,” I say.
Lennon moves to the other side of the desk, flips through some papers there. She does not tell me I’m welcome.
“Those glasses don’t really suit you,” I say, unsure what prompts me to speak at all.
Lennon looks up at me, smiles, says, “Your suit is too tight.”
I smile in return.
Hatchet Face arrives with my coffee.
The moment passes like sun glinting off chrome.
“Now, before you start asking a million questions, Mr. Jacobs, I shall inform you quite seriously that I’m shadowy and cryptic and all that, and you won’t glean anything of importance from what I tell you.”
“Good, I would expect nothing less of a criminal
mastermind,” I say.
“Is that what you think I am?” she says, picks up her coffee, sips, places it back precisely on the ring it had previously left on the chart paper.
“Well, by your own admittance you’re shadowy and cryptic. Plus, you have a bunch of space shuttles lined up and ready to launch God-knows-what into space for some presumably dastardly purpose.”
“Dastardly, you think?”
“I do.”
“Shall I show you what I’m launching into space, then?”
Lennon moves to a small monitor, flips a switch. The screen flickers to life.
“Will you have to kill me if you show me?” I ask, not really enjoying this silly banter as much as I thought I might.
“No, no need to kill you, Mr. Jacobs. You’ll read all about it in tomorrow’s newspapers, anyway. And the day after that, and the day after that, too. I suspect what I’m doing will be newsworthy for quite some time to come.”
Outside: the whine of airplane engines. Rubber screaming on pavement.
Inside: the monitor shows where the party in the high-rise moved to. But no one seems in a partying mood anymore. Strapped to narrow seats. Row upon row of them. The view is from the back of one of the shuttle’s compartments. Important people. Incredibly important. But again, shot through with nobodies. Some I’ve winked at, some I haven’t.
“Wave four?” I venture.
“Wave four,” Lennon confirms.
One of the women in the seats nearer the front turns her head enough so that I see her profile.
I point to the monitor. “That’s my wife.”
Lennon says nothing. Sips her coffee, asks Hatchet Face for a refill.
It occurs to me to ask that Lennon release her, give me my wife back. Demand to know what this is all about, who she thinks she is, kidnapping people, sending them up into space for whatever insane purpose she has in mind.