Even to himself.
Especially to himself.
It was, perhaps, one of the few genuinely human foibles he possessed.
He checked his air-timer: Thirty minutes. More than enough time to get from here to the drying shed three-quarters of a mile down the lake.
He’d chosen this method for his getaway for several reasons, not the least of which was that he loved the peace that lay beneath the water. It would give him time to regroup after the violence at the compound—a form of psychological decompression that was necessary to keep himself in one solid mental piece.
Aside from the ethereal quiet he found beneath the ice, Evans had chosen this method of escape because many of the roads leading in and out of the area were too bombarded with snow and ice to be traveled by any vehicle besides a snowmobile, and a snowmobile would attract too much attention.
He lowered himself down into the hole in the ice he’d cut earlier, readied himself, then pushed back his legs as if readying for a somersault until he felt the spikes take hold.
A moment later, he was under the ice, walking across the lake upside-down.
Christ, he thought to himself. Five years ago, I was a goddamned librarian.
But that was before the Limbus Corporation had come into his life, albeit in a sideways manner….
*
It didn’t occur to Blaine Evans that he might have a problem trusting happiness until his wife, Jennifer —a week before filing for a divorce—pointed out that his reactions to movies fell into one of two categories: unstoppably weepy or bitterly amused. “Haven’t you ever noticed,” she asked, “that movies with happy endings make you cry? Field of Dreams, My Neighbor Totoro, The Sting, Pinocchio for chrissakes, even The Hills of Home, that saccharine Lassie movie, all of them turn you to goddamn jelly! But then you watch something like Midnight Cowboy, Seconds, or Taxi Driver and you laugh—and don’t get started on all those horror movies where everybody gets slaughtered by the last reel! I mean, it’s not like you fall out of your seat guffawing or anything like that, usually it’s just this series of short, scratchy chuckles that make me think you believe the characters got what they deserved, even if they didn’t deserve it. Seriously, has that never crossed your mind?”
“Not really, no.”
“Doesn’t that worry you?”
A shrug. “I don’t know why it should. They’re just movies.”
“It should bother you because I think it shows how you really feel about everything—me, the kids, your purpose and worth as a human being, the way you see the world, how you see life in general.”
“Do go on.”
A scowl. “I think happy endings make you cry because at heart you don’t believe in them, but that doesn’t stop you from wishing they were real so you could know what it’s like to feel that kind of joy. And downbeat endings, well, they just reaffirm for you that every last one of us came out of the womb screwed to the wall and can’t do a damn thing about it. Look at your movie collection! A full eighty-five percent of them are movies where everyone dies—or, if they don’t die, they’re fated to spend the rest of their miserable lives alone and lonely with zero hope of things ever going their way. How many times have you watched Bring Me the Head of Alfredo-fucking-Garcia? Don’t answer that, it wasn’t a real question—but do you understand why this bothers me?”
“Not really, no. You said you’ve enjoyed all the movies we’ve watched together.”
“And I have…some more than others, obviously, but because they were important to you, I wanted to share in them. It’s just, over the past year, I started noticing the pattern of your reactions getting worse.”
A sigh. “Is this why you’ve been telling me that we’ve got quote-problems-unquote? Because I have a bias toward movies with unhappy endings?”
“We’ve got problems because you’ve never really been happy and refuse to do anything about it. I understand that you had a…less than spectacular life before we met because of what happened to your sister and then your folks, but there comes a point when you have to take responsibility for creating and owning your own peace of mind.”
“You’ve been watching Oprah re-runs, haven’t you?”
“Don’t trivialize this! For I don’t know how long, you haven’t smiled or laughed at anything in your life. Blaine Evans’s body performs all of its expected daily functions—it goes to work, it comes home, it eats dinner, it asks its family how their day went, sometimes it even fucks me when it remembers to, but mostly it plops down in front of the television and watches depressing movies that only underline how useless it thinks everything is, including itself and all the effort it puts into keeping a roof over its family’s heads and clothes in their closets and food in the fridge and cupboards. But it’s not you anymore. Your physical body is present but you’re just not here. It’s like you’re breathing and taking up space and that’s it.”
“Have I been mean? Abusive? No. I’ve never cheated on you—I’ve never even thought about it. I don’t drink, I don’t yell, I don’t smack anyone, I always do what I say I’m going to do and never expect to be thanked for it. I love you and I love the kids.”
“You haven’t shown it for a long while. The kids don’t even know how to act around you anymore. You’re not the dad they used to know; you’re just someone who looks and sounds like the person they remember. You’ve removed yourself from your own family, and we’d kind of like you to come back over to our side.”
He knew this much was true. He’d been feeling more distant from everyone and everything, and so he’d stopped making a concerted effort to remain a vital part of their lives, resigning himself instead to being simply peripheral. Sure, he asked the kids about school and listened to their chatter over dinner and half-smiled when they lined up to kiss him good night, but beyond that, he was just the guy they called “Dad,” who handed them their weekly allowances and nodded in approval when they came home breathless and beaming, proudly displaying their report cards with all the As and Bs. Blaine could feel himself becoming more and more…diminished. Maybe that was what happened when a man reached a certain point in the arc of his life, realizing that more of it was behind him than ahead, and maybe a man’s spirit was tied to his time remaining; the fewer days he had left to walk upon the Earth, the less excitement, gratitude, and hope he had for those days. Hell, maybe it was just good old-fashioned male menopause, the laughable “midlife crisis” that sent too many men into auto showrooms to purchase gleaming sports cars with sticker prices that were too high and engines that went too fast and parts that cost more than most people’s weekly paychecks to replace. If you could add a much younger hot babe to this picture, then your crisis was guaranteed to be a fiery one and your inevitable downfall and disgrace historic.
“Earth to Captain Blaine,” said Jennifer, “Earth to Captain Blaine, do you read?”
He almost laughed. Almost. “Sorry. I was just thinking how you still look thirty, if that. You look younger now than on the day we met.”
She grinned, as if hoping that she was getting through to him. “And I’ve never had any work done.”
He nodded.
Jennifer reached down and took one of his hands in hers. “Talk to me. Let me in again. I want you to tell me about all those things that happened that you never talk about.”
Standing up. Time for a clean getaway. “I’m sorry, but…the length of this conversation has now far surpassed my interest in it.”
A resigned nod. A coldness in her voice when next she spoke. “Fine, if that’s the way it’s going to be. I think it only fair to tell you that I decided to take the job offer from Limbus.”
That stopped him mid-stride. “What?” He whirled back around. “The company on that card Matt found? I can’t believe you contacted them.” He recalled the day that Matt, the youngest of their three children, discovered the card on a cork bulletin board hanging next to a restroom in the mall. Matt had pulled the card off the board because he thought the logo w
as “…cool.” It showed a globe of the Earth with needlepoint beams of light shooting out of it from all directions. It reminded Blaine of the logo used by the law group Engulf & Devour from Mel Brooks’s Silent Movie. The card had only a phone number under the company’s name and logo, and on the back were the words, “Your ideal job is waiting for you. Don’t be indecisive. Dreams never wait. We employ.” Blaine thought the whole thing smacked of a scam and said as much, but when Jen took the card and put it in her purse, he began to wonder if his wife wasn’t thinking about greener pastures—but he believed that she wasn’t so naïve as to call a number on a card found outside a public crapper. Evidently, he’d been wrong.
“I didn’t just call,” said Jennifer. “I’ve already interviewed. A lovely young recruiter named Tasha Willing talked to me for about forty minutes and then offered me a position with the company.”
“Doing what? You’re a former social worker who processed food stamp applications.”
“I’ll be doing something like social work for the company, except I’ll be overseeing the development and implementation of … I guess you’d call them ‘mental health’ programs designed to reduce employee stress in and out of the workplace. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do and Tasha just offered it to me”—she snapped her fingers—“like that! I’ve never had an interview go so well.”
He could think of nothing else to say at that moment but this: “What’s it pay?”
“Because I signed a non-disclosure agreement, I’m only allowed to say that the salary is excellent, more than either of us combined has ever made. They’ll even pay for the family to relocate, including the cost of a new house.”
Blaine shook his head. “You’re being scammed.”
“I thought you might say something like that.” She walked into the other room and returned moments later with her open laptop. She typed in a few commands with her free hand while she held the computer in the crook of her arm like a newborn. Finding what she was looking for, she turned the screen in Blaine’s direction. “Our joint account. I could have had it deposited to my own account—and believe me, I thought about it—but I didn’t. Hopefully I get Brownie points for that.”
Blaine took the laptop and looked at the screen. The balance in their joint checking account stunned him so much he nearly dropped the computer.
“Wh-what is…where did that kind of money come from?”
“It’s my signing bonus.”
“Signing bonus? That’s more money than I’ve made in the last six months!”
Jen took the computer. “And my salary makes this look like … well, not quite chump change, but close enough to call it.” She closed the laptop. “Still think it’s a scam?”
“Okay, okay…maybe the company’s on the level, I’ll give you that. But what about this ‘relocation’ shit? We are not going anywhere.”
“Thus Spake Zarathustra time, is it? You giving me some kind of ultimatum?”
“What if I am?”
“Christ, Blaine! Are you that attached to the library? You’ve been there for almost fifteen years.”
“I like it there. There are never any surprises. The day porter rolls the carts of books and movies in, I scan them into the system as returned, re-enter them into circulation, and send everything out to be re-shelved. One-two-three, lather, rinse, repeat. I worked my way up to assistant day librarian without any kind of college education. Over half the people there have degrees in library science and they come to me when they need help.”
“And what about the people you work with? Do they treat you as anything more than your function? I know all of you probably talk and joke and maybe share personal information of the most surface and non-intimate variety, but when all is said and done, are you seen as an individual or only your function?”
“That doesn’t make any goddamned sense.” But it did. For the last few years, Blaine had begun to feel as if his presence at the library was an afterthought to everyone around him. Sure, they might miss him the first couple of days after he left, but soon enough, he would be just another someone-who-used-to-work-here-once; a fading face, a forgotten voice, nothing of himself having made enough of an impression to linger in the mind or heart after the chair at his desk became an empty space soon to be filled by someone else.
Jennifer reached over and gently shook his arm. “Hey you.”
He blinked, exhaled, and looked at her. “Sorry, I guess I … went around the corner there for a moment.”
“This could be a new start for all of us, a better life, one where you could drop your guard and allow yourself to feel happy, to feel needed, to feel useful. That’s the biggest problem, honey. Somewhere along the line, because of all that violence that happened to you before we met, you started believing that you or anything you did or hoped for was meaningless. Come on! What say we blow this pop stand and make like the old-time settlers? Create a new life in a new location.”
He stared at her for several seconds, trying to find the exact words—something he should be much better at since his livelihood revolved around books—but no matter how tried it out in his head, it came out sounding awful.
“Look at me, Jen. I’m fifty-three years old, I’m thirty pounds overweight, I wear a partial denture, and the most interesting thing about me is that I can reserve new books and movies for people months before they’re released. I’ve got a bad leg, more gray hair in my beard than I wish I had, type II diabetes, high blood pressure, and, for the icing on the middle-aged cake, I take Prozac every morning—I’m a goddamn living wreck on my best days, let alone those where I feel every damn minute of my existence crawling along over broken glass. I’m…I’m done, Jennifer. Probably have been for a good long while now. Pulling up stakes and moving to a new place to start a new life, that’s for younger people who still have something of value to offer the world.” This said knowing that his wife was ten years younger, and suspecting what this younger woman would do once she heard those words.
“You’re not a used-up wreck,” said Jennifer, reaching toward him.
He stepped back, out of her reach. “You can’t say that—you can’t know that. I am sickeningly aware of what lies in here”—he touched the center of his chest—“and I’m telling you, whatever mechanism it is that allows people to acknowledge and embrace happiness, I don’t have it. Okay, maybe I did once, when I still wore shoes the size of my hand and got up on Saturday mornings to make sure I didn’t miss the new episode of Scooby-Do or Aquaman, but it’s gone, poof! Without so much as a ‘sayonara, sucker.’”
“Self-pity doesn’t look good on you.”
“It sounds better than saying I’m sad and tired all the time and feel comfortable with it.”
She stared at him for several seconds before saying it. “It wasn’t your fault. You were both just kids.”
He pointed at her, angry that she’d brought up his sister again. “Don’t. Just…don’t. You know goddamned well I’ve played it over in my head a thousand times and there’s…there’s no excuse, okay? Sure, we were both just kids, but if I would have gone in first, then –”
“—then Carolyn would be the one still around and beating herself up every day because she’d think she should have gone in first!”
“Stop it, please.”
Jennifer took a deep but unsteady breath. “This is killing you, honey. It has been for years. It’s this place, this town. We have to get out of here, Blaine. We have to. Or we’ll all suffocate.”
“There are worse ways to go. And I’m done talking to you about all of this.”
The next day Jennifer took the kids (who didn’t say goodbye) and went to her parents’ house.
*
For the first fifteen minutes, Evans’s otherworldly underwater walk was bliss. He had cut out two exit holes, in case of any trouble with the oxygen tank, but he didn’t think he’d need to use it.
Then he heard something like a drum. As he neared his exit, the sound became louder, and irregu
lar—not like a drum at all.
The water, so much denser than air, conducted sound as air molecules never could. As a child, Evans had liked to lie in the bathtub, his ears in the water, and hear the enormous clanks and knocks his toy boats could make as they bumped against the porcelain. It made his boats real. Now Evans heard sounds that seemed like footsteps: far away, yet all around him, the water carrying vibrations too long for air to carry. As he approached his entrance, they did not seem to grow louder from there—the water unlocalized sounds—rather, they grew louder from everywhere.
Evans stopped and stood still. Tried to listen. The sound was too confused.
Then, since he stood inverted, Evans looked “down,” as it seemed, and saw very clearly, in front of him, one black, ripple-sole footprint of a man on the ice, directly over him.
Another joined it—perhaps the man had raised a knee to fix a boot.
Two black bootprints. Guard’s boots.
A guard from the compound was standing on the opposite side of the ice from him: right side up on the other side of the ice which Evans stood on upside down, like figures on a playing card.
Evans tried to figure out how the guard had gotten here so quickly—probably used a hover-car—then decided it didn’t matter.
The guy was here now, and that didn’t figure into Evans’s Scenario.
The ice was translucent, not transparent: only the black boot soles pressing flat against the ice could be seen. Evans’s silver air bubbles began to congeal on the ice’s surface, and he stiffened, deciding they were too light for the guard to see. Evans’s boots, suspended from the ice by crampon spikes, should be similarly invisible.
The man’s shadow fell across the ice.
Evans flinched and looked around, then realized he cast no shadow in his otherworld.
The black soles turned, and Evans saw the unmistakable outline of a gun fall across the ice.
It looked thin, but that could be a trick of the light; thin and long like a rifle, not a gun you’d use to hunt anything out on this ice. In winter there were only ducks and geese out on the marsh. Any hunter worth the price of his ammo would use a shotgun to hunt.
Limbus, Inc. Book II Page 20