Nino, stressed out of his mind as usual, glanced up from an enormous pile of paperwork as I entered his office. He tendered a gas-lock smile and motioned to a chair in front of his desk. “Have a seat.”
I closed the door behind me, stepped over to his desk but stayed on my feet. “Nino, listen, I’m sorry about all this, I—”
Nino held his hands up, tossed a pen onto his desk and sat back in his leather swivel a bit. “I know you are, Al, I know you are.” Again, he motioned to the chair. “Sit.”
I moved to the chair and lowered myself into it, feeling like a child summoned to the principal’s office. “Nino, there’s no excuse for what happened, and I’m sorry, sincerely I am. I give you my word nothing like that will ever happen again. Ever.”
His eyes darted about, looking anywhere but directly at me. He leaned back further in his chair and nervously stroked his mustache with stubby fingers. “You been with us a long time,” he finally said. “You’re the best employee we got. The best we ever had.”
“I got fifteen years in here, Nino,” I reminded him.
“I know you do. You’re senior guy by like ten years, for Christ’s sake.” He again smiled briefly through obvious discomfort. “And besides all that, you—well, shit, you become a friend, you know what I’m saying?”
“I just—I’m having some problems at the moment, but—”
“Yeah, I hear ya.” He straightened the chair, pushed away from the desk and stood up. A squat and bulbous man with a penchant for flashy jewelry, ill-fitting slacks and imitation silk shirts, on this day he had worn a sweat suit and tennis shoes, signaling he didn’t plan to stay at the office long once our meeting was concluded. “Here’s the thing, though. I talked to Petey last night, and I did what I could, but my brother’s the boss, Al, you know how it is. I got say, but he’s got final say.”
“Look—”
“He thinks the world of you too, man, you know that.” Nino waddled over to a water cooler in the corner, found the cup dispenser empty and grabbed a nearby coffee mug instead. “But shit, Al, you walked on a job.”
“I know. I fucked up bad.”
Nino sniffed the coffee-stained mug, then slid it under the nozzle and filled it with water. Watching the bubbles rise in the plastic bottle, he said, “Thing is, we lost the account.”
“Christ, Nino, I’m sorry.”
“I did everything I could.” The mug now full, Nino returned to his desk and plopped into his swivel. From his middle desk drawer he pulled a package of two Alka-Seltzer tablets, tore them open and dropped them into the mug. “I’m sorry, we gotta let you go.”
“Come on, Nino,” I said, standing again. “I fucked up, but I got years in here.”
“You walked on a job! You fucking walked away in the middle of the night and left the place unlocked!” He grabbed the mug and killed the contents in one frantic gulp. “Then, if that ain’t bad enough, the guy finds beers all over the place!” He slammed the mug on the desk and it split from the force into two even halves. He glanced down, realized he was only holding a handle, and fired it at the wall. “Drinking on the fucking job happens now and then, you don’t think I know that? But you clean the shit up, for Christ’s sake! What kinda fucking moron leaves them lying around? What are you, freakin’ stunadz? Petey had to get involved personally; you see what I’m saying? Petey don’t like to have to get involved personally. He had to talk to the guy and calm his ass down. Shit, Al, he mighta sued us. He still might.”
“If you can just give me a week or two,” I said. “Just a week or two to get my shit together. A leave—give me a leave. No pay, just some time off so I can straighten things out.”
“Come on, man, don’t go making this more of a bitch than it already is,” Nino said. “Me and Petey talked it over, and we decided even with the shit that happened we’ll give you a good recommendation, OK?” He grabbed an envelope from one of the stacks on his desk. “Now, here’s the money we owe ya from your last check, plus your vacation pay. I slipped a month of base pay in there, too. Take the money and run, Al.”
I grabbed the envelope, stuffed it into my jacket and dropped my badge and employee/ID card in front of him. I’d clipped the two-way to my belt earlier, just in case, and with a tug, pulled it free and tossed it onto the desk with the other items.
Nino extended his hand across the desk.
After a moment, I accepted it.
* * *
It was a little after noon by the time I got back to town. Rick and Donald were waiting for me at the base of the staircase leading to my apartment. Decked out in a black leather jacket, heavy sweatshirt, jeans and a baseball cap worn backwards, Rick stood watching me with concern in his eyes. Donald, in a suit and tie, gave an awkward half-wave and a nervous smile. I didn’t need to say anything; they knew I’d been fired.
“Motherfuckers,” Rick mumbled.
I shrugged. “I had it coming, man. Can’t walk on a job.”
“Are you all right?” Donald asked.
“I’ll live.”
Rick scratched his five o’clock shadow then turned to face a gentle but crisp breeze blowing in off the water. “One of the part-time door guys is leaving next week,” he said a moment later. “Already gave his notice. I can get you in at the club if you want.”
“Thanks, but I need some time. I got to pull myself together.”
Rick nodded; eyes trained on the still water, the slowly gliding ducks. “You didn’t tell them about…you know.”
“Yeah, I told Nino the reason I freaked out was because I’m being haunted by the ghosts of a little boy and his mother.” I shook my head and turned into the breeze myself. “Not to mention the pink elephants under my bed and the flying elves that live in my fucking carpet.”
“I called the landlord, told him one of my buddies thought he saw someone in the vacant apartment the other day. He sent someone from his office down and they checked it out. The door was locked; the place was totally secure. No signs of forced entry or any signs at all that anyone had been in there since the last tenant.”
“I know what I saw, Rick.”
He looked at me. “I was there. I went in with the guy. No one’s been in that apartment.”
“I know what I saw.”
“I’m just telling you what—”
“No—horseshit—you’re riding the fence. You’re either with me on this or you’re not.”
“You’re sure it was the same lady and kid?”
My whole body trembled. “Yeah, I’m positive.” But the truth was, I could no longer be positive about anything. The truth was, I was terrified I’d lost my mind.
“All right, all right,” Donald said, “everyone just calm down.”
Rick turned and strutted toward his Jeep. “Come on.”
“Where are we going?”
“Donny’s on his lunch hour,” he answered without looking back, “Let’s go get something to eat and talk this through.”
Five minutes later we parked a couple streets over, about half a block away from a Vietnamese guy selling hotdogs and cola from a vendor pushcart.
He and Donald both ordered hotdogs. I ordered a Coke. Lunch in hand we drifted a few feet away to the entrance to one of the parks in town. The sky was cloudless for the first time in recent memory, and the sun was strong and warming despite the chilly temperature in the air, a teaser now that Spring was only days away. Although the area was heavily traveled, it afforded enough privacy for us to quietly continue our conversation.
“Let’s cut to the chase,” I said. “You guys don’t believe me, that’s the bottom line.”
Donald bit into his lunch, chewed for a moment before responding. “No one said that, Alan. But you have to admit there’s quite a difference between nightmares—dreams—we all shared and the things you’ve described. The dream aspect is strange, no doubt about it, but at the end of the day, all we’ve experienced are dreams. You’re talking about things taking place while you’re awake.”
> “All I know is that whoever this woman is, whoever this kid is, they’re connected to Bernard somehow.” I sipped my cola then dropped the rest of it into a nearby trash bin. “They’re obviously trying to contact me. They’re trying to tell me something.”
Rick and Donald exchanged glances, but neither said a word.
“You know what? Fuck both you guys.”
“You said you were drinking that night,” Donald said. “Could that have had something to do with what happened?”
I faced him. “Oh, I don’t really think you want to go there, do you?”
“Now, look, I’m just saying—”
“What? What are you just saying, Donald?”
Tension hung in the air like a shroud.
Rick took a bite of hotdog, grimaced, and looked at it as if to be certain he was, in fact, holding something edible. “You told me there was all kinds of weird shit in the factory,” he eventually managed.
“Yeah, shit painted on the wall and what looked like an altar.” I ran my hands through my hair. “The place is fucked up, I…” I can’t even remember the worst of what happened there, is what I wanted to say, but couldn’t. “It’s just fucked up in there. You don’t believe me, go look for yourselves.”
Donald forced down the rest of his hotdog. “Stop being so confrontational. We never said we didn’t believe you.”
I looked to Rick. “So, what do we do?”
The frustration and anxiety etched across his face was disquieting. I was used to Rick having a temper, but I hadn’t seen him struggle with this kind of fear and uncertainty since the day of his prison sentencing years before. “I don’t know what the fuck’s going on anymore. Dreams and thoughts and all kinds of dark shit racing through my mind, I—I don’t know what’s happening here, but there’s gotta be something to it. It’s like nothing seems real anymore. It’s all fucking hazy and—”
“Incomplete,” I said.
“Agreed.” Donald lit a cigarette and looked at the ground. “It’s the same for me. I feel like I should be able to remember certain things but I can’t, I try but sometimes nothing makes any goddamn sense.”
“I think no matter what,” Rick said, “we stick together. We stick together and we look out for each other, like always. We go off on our own or start fighting between ourselves and we’re fucked.”
I nodded, welcoming them to my madness, grateful to no longer be drowning in it alone.
Rick spit out a bite of hotdog and fired the rest back in the direction of the vendor. “Jesus, these are fucking disgusting.”
The vendor watched the remains of the hotdog roll along the pavement with a quizzical look.
“Take it easy,” Donald said, “don’t make a scene.”
“Goddamn things crunch, for Christ’s sake.” He motioned to the vendor and increased the volume of his voice. “Peanuts crunch, motherfucker, not hotdogs. Fuckin’ slant. What the hell you doing selling American food anyway? Ass-bags come to this country and—”
“Scoop up all the good jobs like selling hotdogs on street corners and picking produce for pennies a day. Bastards.” Donald flicked his cigarette away and took Rick by the elbow. “Come on, you have to drive me back to work.”
Rick jerked his arm free and started toward the vendor with a slow but threatening gait. “You looking at something, you fucking cocksucker?”
“I cannot tolerate it when he behaves like this,” Donald said. “Goddamn child.”
“Come on, man,” I said, stepping between him and the vendor, who had already begun to move to another corner. “Don’t take it out on him, let’s just get the hell out of here.”
Rick glared at me, looking like he might literally explode if he didn’t hit something, and for a second, I thought that something might be me, but he spun around, stormed back to the Jeep and punched that instead.
* * *
The ride to Donald’s office building was quiet and uncomfortable. After some brief and standard good-byes, Rick and I continued on to my apartment. He parked near the railroad tracks and we sat there without speaking for quite a while.
“I shouldn’t have freaked out like that back there,” he eventually said. “I just get—you know, shit builds up and—”
“Whatever,” I said. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Maybe we’re all going a little nuts.”
“Maybe.”
There was anger in his eyes, a defiance of fear. “What the hell’s happening?”
“I don’t know. But I think you were right when you said that whatever it is, it’s some bad shit. And we don’t know the half of it.”
“You think we ever will?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Whether we want to or not.”
CHAPTER 9
I blinked open my eyes, escaped one darkness for another. What little I was able to discern of our bedroom slowly blended into focus. The shade was pulled but enough moonlight bled through to partially illuminate the far wall. I couldn’t be sure how long I’d been out, but it felt late. I’d taken another one of those damn pills and slipped into dreamless sleep, and though I was now fully awake, I knew the aftereffects of the tranquilizer would linger for quite some time. The blankets were off and kicked down around my feet. On Toni’s side of the bed they’d been neatly turned back and were still tucked in at the side. In the darkness beyond, the bedroom door stood slightly ajar, a faint light visible along the gap between its edge and the doorframe. I pawed at my eyes, the lids still heavy, and let loose a lengthy yawn.
Somewhere outside a siren blared before fading to silence. It was replaced by the distant sound of Toni’s voice. I lay still and listened. She was on the kitchen phone, talking just above a whisper, the floor creaking occasionally as she walked. I couldn’t make out any of what she was saying, but her tone was somber.
I focused on my feet, there at the edge of the bed. They looked so pale in the dark, so white and bloodless, as if they’d been carved from ivory.
One day I’ll be nude and stretched out just like this, I thought, but instead of being in bed I’ll be slapped atop a cold metal table. Someone I don’t know and have probably never met will hover over me, preparing my body, desecrating it, draining the blood, replacing it with something else, something foreign and unnatural; something that once introduced will render me subhuman. The idea that my body would one day be transformed and treated, protected from decay so that it could lay sealed away beneath the ground—no longer a living organism, more an unseen ornament, a perverse version of what it had once been—seemed both hideous and fascinating. What would it be like? Would I know or even care when it was happening to me?
I wondered if other people looked at their bodies and thought about the same things.
My eyes shifted to the nightstand, and the dark lamp, leather Bible draped in rosary beads, and the clock radio that resided there. I wondered when each item had been manufactured, and realized that regardless, unless purposely destroyed, in all likelihood each would be here in one form or another long after I’d gone.
The events of the last few days flashed through my mind in rapid succession. As the progression slowed, my memories focused on Rick strutting about and screaming at that poor hotdog vendor like some testosterone-gone-wild teenager. We were very different, Rick and I, and though I found certain aspects of his personality appalling, there were also those I envied. I didn’t possess the discipline to hit the gym five days a week, to run three miles a day; I didn’t share his fascination with keeping the body beautiful, his compulsive desire to stay forever young. I’d never longed for immortality. But for Rick, life and age were no different than any of the other games he’d mastered. In his mind they were opponents, and Rick played to win.
Some days it seemed nothing more than a desire to turn back time and erase the year he’d spent in prison, to freeze the clock and live instead as the person he’d been in the days before it all went bad. He never discussed his time behind bars, and I’d always respected that. In many
ways, I had a healthy dose of guilty admiration for Rick. He was capable of things I was not, yet it often seemed he did things in order to prove to himself what was already glaringly apparent to everyone else. At eighteen, I wouldn’t have survived a week in a maximum-security prison, and in my late thirties I didn’t have the balls, confidence or even the inclination to go white water rafting or skydiving or mountain climbing the way he occasionally did. I couldn’t remember what it was like to have a girl on my arm I didn’t plan to spend more than a few hours with, or how it felt to make love to more than one person in the same week. That sort of lonely and vacuous freedom was a memory so distant, I questioned whether it had ever been a genuine facet of my life at all. Still, as Bernard had so cruelly said on the tape, Rick had never imagined his life would be spent as a bouncer at a local nightclub. Now, those things that had always given him the edge were necessary tools for survival. Younger, stronger men would soon be bucking for his job, if they weren’t already, and eventually, one of them would show him the curb. Then, all the rugged good looks, pumped muscles, independence and tough-guy-swagger in the world wouldn’t save him. As incomprehensible as it seemed, Rick would one day be old and unable to rely on his physical prowess, forced to admit he was just as frightened and uncertain as everyone else, and in the end, just another lost soul trying to find his way.
Perhaps that had been the source of his anger, his rage at how life had turned out and a fear of what lie ahead. But the violence in Rick had been there as long as I’d known him. Was the constant pressure of living up to the Superman image he’d created to blame, or were there specific incidents hidden somewhere in the past that better explained it?
That day in the forest with Bernard came to mind. Had something happened out there? Had Bernard done something to Julie Henderson in those woods? Had Rick helped him? Would Rick do something like that—could he have done something like that even then, even at thirteen? I closed my eyes, tried to remember back through the years. As far as I knew, Julie had gone off to college that September, but she’d been a lot older than we were and I’d hardly known her. I couldn’t recall seeing her around town after that summer, and my friendship with her brother had waned so I’d no longer been privy to even casual information on Julie’s life. But had something happened, it would’ve been big news in Potter’s Cove. Everyone would’ve known about it, charges would’ve been pressed, assuming she’d told anyone.
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