Limetown

by Cote Smith

  * * *

  Emile had made his way to Eugene, Oregon, having meandered west after combing Utah, then slowly heading north. He called Larry again after his shift at the movie theater but their conversation was short. Larry had recently met a widow at church who understood what it meant to lose someone. They were going to a show that evening.

  “You hate plays,” Emile said.

  “But I love women.” Larry laughed. “Hey, I wanted to talk to you about something.”

  “That doesn’t sound good.”

  “Actually, you should be happy. I’ve decided I’m done cashing your checks. I’ll still run by the motel to check if she’s been there, and you can call me whenever you want, but after all this time—”

  “I get it.”

  “I’ll give you a refund. A partial refund, I mean.”

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  The doorbell rang in Larry’s house.

  “I’ve got to run. Take care of yourself, okay?”

  Then, before Larry could hang up: “Larry?”

  “Mr. Haddock.”

  “I don’t know what to do.”

  The doorbell rang again, but Larry stayed on the line. “You want my advice?”

  “Does it cost extra?”

  “Go home,” he said.

  “Home?”

  “I don’t know what you’re running from, but at some point you have to face your demons. You’re from Texas, right?”

  “Kansas.”

  “So go to Kansas. There’s more than one way to make it all work.”

  The doorbell continued to ring, and Emile pictured Larry’s date holding down the button until the melodious ding turned into a single drowning note.

  “You should go,” Emile said.

  “I’ll talk to you soon.”

  “Sure, Larry.”

  Emile would never speak to Larry again. He sat in his bed, looking around his room and thinking about what Larry said. He had a few hundred dollars saved. If he put in his two weeks tomorrow at the movie theater, he could probably make it most of the way. He would be lying to himself if he said he hadn’t thought about it before. Returning to Lawrence. He could drive by his high school, visit Ginny’s classroom and apologize for how things ended. And if she wasn’t there, he could leave a note on her chalkboard. I still have questions. I still need answers. He could visit the guardians, and Austin, all the people he left behind. As he went to sleep that night, he wondered how he could feel homesick for a place with so many bad memories, and that had never felt like home.

  * * *

  Two weeks later he was on the road. Larry’s refund was much more than Emile had expected. He must be very happy with his new woman, Emile thought. Instead of a bus ticket, Emile bought a used car from the owner of the motel. It had a million miles on it, but it still ran, Emile was assured, and it would give him the luxury of returning at his own pace, taking whatever detours and pit stops were necessary to steel himself for the final leg of his journey.

  Which was how he ended up in Archer Park.

  He didn’t plan on returning, though he supposed the Eldridge had been on his mind since Larry had given him the advice about facing his demons. How else could he explain why he took the exit directing him northeast through Boulder and Estes, instead of south through Denver? He stopped at the same rest area he and Jacob had, what was now over six and a half years ago, expecting a sense of dread to catch in his chest, or some latent animal instinct to fire in his brain telling him to flee. But as he looked down at the town, at the Eldridge, all of which looked the same, he felt something different. He had escaped, after all, made his way on his own terms. He had the sudden desire to show them that what they had done hadn’t broken him. He decided he was done running.

  * * *

  The lobby was exactly as he remembered it. The wood decor, the fireplace, even the elderly guests. Emile had changed, his face was a little fuller, his mind sharper, but this place had not. As he walked around the lobby, he reminded himself that there was power in that, in evolving while everyone else stayed the same. He sat for a moment by the fireplace, warming his hands and wondering if things would have been different if he had trusted his instincts when he first came to the Eldridge, if he had gone with Jacob instead of staying here. Though whenever he did think this way, he came back to the same thought. If you left, you wouldn’t have met Claire.

  He wasn’t sure what made him remember it, but he walked toward the hallway he had stumbled upon the morning Jacob left. It had smelled like chlorine. Perhaps he was thinking of the motel he planned on staying in that night, in Kanorado, just over the state line, and whether or not it had a pool. His entire time working at the Eldridge, Emile never found the source of the smell. But for some reason, he could never get it out of his mind.

  Through two lobbies, past two fireplaces. Down the long hallway. He inhaled the chemical smell. At the end of the hallway, there was the window and the locked door. But the door was slightly open now, held ajar by a sneaker. Inside the door he found a stairwell. The chlorine smell grew stronger as he climbed five flights of stairs. At the top, there was another door, propped open by another sneaker. Through this door shone a blinding, warm light, and for a moment it felt like the stairs he had climbed had gone so high they’d taken him to the sun.

  “Don’t shut the door! I forgot my key!”

  Emile waited for his eyes to adjust. He listened to the lapping of the waves before realizing that he was standing at the edge of a large aquamarine pool, on the hotel roof. A swimmer made a beautiful turn, gliding underwater, resurfacing half the pool later. Emile shielded his eyes and waited for the swimmer’s face to come into focus, and when it did, he was surprised to find that he wasn’t surprised at all.

  “As I live and breathe,” the swimmer said. “Haddock.”

  Max pushed himself out of the pool and slapped his wet feet straight over to Emile, whom he gave a big, soaked hug.

  “I just . . . I never thought. Quick: tell me what I’m thinking.”

  “You’re happy,” Emile said. “You’re very happy to see me.”

  “Yes! That’s right! Come, let’s sit in the sun. You can watch me tan.”

  Max looked good. Standing before Emile, then sitting in a pool chair next to him, a large pair of sunglasses dwarfing his face. His hair was longer, thicker, and an impressive beard covered his chin.

  “So you’re back,” Emile said.

  “So you’re back,” Max said.

  “How was college?”

  “College was sunny, sinful, but ultimately boring. I graduated, started a master’s, then stopped said master’s. The professors and I, we didn’t always see eye-to-eye.” He put a fake gun to his head and pulled the trigger.

  Emile lay back in his pool chair. He thought about his experience versus Max’s, how different they must’ve been. Max had left, gone to college. Emile had barely escaped. The disparity gnawed at him.

  “Hey,” Max said, “I heard about Brenda.” He turned to his side, propped himself up on his elbow. “That was messed up. Brenda and I went way back.”

  Emile didn’t look at him. He stared at the sun until his eyes were on fire. “How is she?”

  “Gone,” Max said. “Long gone. Vince too, in case you were wondering. Things are different now. The big man is making sure of that.”

  Emile sat up. He hadn’t thought about the big man. Or, not as much as he thought about Vince. But the idea of the same mysterious figure working in the shadows, the voice—name- and faceless, still directing cruelty—that such a thing was still possible—

  “Who is in charge?” Emile asked. “I want to meet him.” He’d clenched his fists without realizing it.

  “All right.” Max stuck out his hand. “Max Finlayson. Pleasure.” Emile didn’t understand. “Don’t look so shocked, Haddock.”

  “You,” Emile said. He stammered. “You?” He was picturing Max as the man in the office, the one who persuaded Jacob to leave, the one
who ordered the experiments on Brenda, on Emile.

  “Oh please,” Max said. “That wasn’t me. That was the big man. I may have a sizable ego, but it’s not refer-to-myself-vaguely-and-in-the-third-person big.”

  He sat up and explained. How when he was in college, at Stanford, he was never really alone. He thought it would be a clean break. That was the deal, wasn’t it? Put in your time, then be set free. But he always felt watched. First, in his dorm. Later, living off campus. In the beginning, he told himself it was just the Eldridge checking up on him, making sure he had everything he needed, as promised. But he began to notice the same cars in the parking lot no matter where he went. And how when he returned home after a long night in the lab, the air in his apartment was different. It wasn’t a smell or a taste, he said, more of a feeling, like someone had broken in and rearranged the molecules.

  Emile thought of the motels, the Polaroids sitting in the trunk of his car, the strands of hair across his closet doors.

  “Anyway,” Max said, “it gave me the creeps, you know. But what was I going to do? Drop out?” He thought about it, but by then he’d come so far. And why should he let his unverified paranoia get in the way of his dream? So he finished school, double-majored in parapsychology and neurogenetics. Took him less than three years too, a record he proudly touted to whichever woman would listen. Sadly, the dream of marrying his college sweetheart eluded him. There were one or two flings, of course, but no one willing to stick around while he made himself a genius.

  “This one girl,” Max said, “she actually said this to me. She said, ‘Max, you’re the smartest person I know, and you’ll probably win the Nobel Prize someday, but I can’t sit around forever and wait for that to happen.’ Can you believe that?”

  Max took off his sunglasses and looked at Emile, expecting someone with whom he could commiserate. “Tell me who he is,” Emile said. “Tell me who’s responsible for what happened to Brenda.” He took a deep breath, but couldn’t bring himself to say, What happened to me.

  Max looked away. “Would that I could, Haddock. But I never met him.”

  He was telling the truth. Emile could see that. He dipped inside Max’s mind and saw him receive a phone call one afternoon after he’d quit his master’s program, when he was sitting in his dorm, wondering what he was going to do with his life. When the phone rang, Max answered, but Emile heard it too. And though it had been years since Emile heard the voice—and even then, secondhand, through Jacob’s thoughts—he knew it was the same person who’d told them that their mother was dead, and that if Emile stayed at the Eldridge, he had no reason to worry.

  “He said the hotel was mine if I wanted it. I would have total control over the experiments, the staff—everything. All I had to do was report back every now and then, and not scare off the talent like the former minister.”

  “What did you say?” Emile said, though he supposed it was obvious. It was what Max had always wanted, free rein to pursue whatever wild idea hatched inside his brain.

  “I told him I’d have to think about it.”

  “That’s it.”

  “Well, not quite,” Max said. He put his sunglasses back on and Emile watched a full sun dance in each tinted lens. “I asked him where he was going.”

  “And?”

  “He said he was moving on to phase two.”

  * * *

  Emile agreed to have dinner with Max, though he refused his offer to stay the night. Max said he understood, but Emile wondered how much. He knew about what had happened to Brenda, so he must have known what happened to him.

  As they sat down for dinner, underground, in the limestone tunnels, Emile felt claustrophobic. He felt like he was making a mistake. Worse, a mistake he’d already made. Max knocked back teacup after teacup of a cloudy drink, talking openly about his plans for the Eldridge now that he was in charge. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to do here yet, he explained. Lately he had the strong impulse to create something. Really make something, you know? Something he could share with the world. It wasn’t enough that he was the youngest person in the country running a top research facility. He wanted the Eldridge to be special again, but to stop hiding in the dark. After all, what was the point of making a scientific breakthrough if you couldn’t brag about it to everyone you ever knew?

  “Complete and total transparency,” Max said. “Well, that’s what we’ll present to the public anyway. Some things will have to remain between you and me.” He pointed to Emile’s plate. “We won’t show them every step of how the sausage is made. We’ll just make it better.”

  Max stuffed a forkful of meat in his mouth. “So?”

  “So.”

  “Come on, Haddock. Don’t make me beg.”

  It took longer than it should have for Emile to understand. Max wanted Emile to join him. That was why he invited him down there.

  “Are you out of your mind?” Emile said.

  “You tell me, percipient. I mean, I’m a little tipsy—”

  “Don’t call me that.” Emile pushed his plate out of the way. “You’re drunk. Which explains why you genuinely believe I would consider staying here.”

  “But you’ve come back, haven’t you?”

  “Do you know what they did to me?”

  “I heard the highlights. Right before I fired him, Vince tried to justify all that happened. I’ll be honest, I never cared for that guy. Creeped me out.” Max wiped his mouth with a napkin, covered up what remained on his plate. “Listen,” he said. “I’m no mind reader. And my dreams, well, they’re mostly sexual in nature. But I have my own talents. And part of me knows a part of you wants to stay here. Why? Because you’re a helper, Haddock. Deep down, that’s who you are. That’s what you do. Brenda, the rest of the percipients. I need people like you, to keep me honest.” Max leaned back in his seat, pulled out a cigarette. He flicked a lighter but couldn’t get it to spark. “So. What do you think?”

  “I think you’re one of the smartest people I’ve ever met,” Emile said.

  “Yeah?”

  “But I’d burn this place to the ground before I stayed another night.”

  Max closed his lighter. His cigarette hung from his mouth for a moment, before he sighed and put it back in its pack. “They’ll never stop,” he said. “The big man. The Eldridge. Someone will always be after you.”

  “Let them find me,” Emile said. “I’m done running.”

  * * *

  Emile drove all night. In the morning he sped through western Kansas, counting windmills to pass the time. He recalled his drive west years ago, how big the world seemed blanketed in night. Now, he saw things for what they were.

  He made it to Lawrence that afternoon. He’d had plenty of time to plan where he would go first, but once he arrived, he couldn’t decide. He ended up in the parking lot of his old high school. School was already out for the day, and Emile idled in his car, wondering if Ginny was still in her classroom, supervising the delinquents in detention. Write down why you’re here, she might say. Now turn to your fellow felon and ask them the same.

  The school was open but mostly empty. No one stopped Emile as he walked the familiar halls. Little had changed here too. A few more trophies in the trophy case, a fresh coat of paint in the cafeteria. The rest was as it was. It took Emile no time to find Ginny’s classroom. The door was unlocked, but the room dark. She wasn’t there. He clicked on the light and was startled, not by how much the room had changed—it too was the same—but by its smallness. Perhaps he’d spent too much time on college campuses, in their enormous, cathedral-like halls. He stood at the front of the classroom, where he’d once given a poorly received presentation on Williamsburg back when Mr. Church was still around.

  He sat in his old desk, uncomfortable and cramped. On the desk to his right, which Austin once inhabited, Emile ran his fingers over the letters engraved. Names and places, initials and curse words. RIP MR. C. LFK. Jonestown. Croatoan. He thought of the tree he carved into at Lost 80, that night with
Austin. Was the tree still around? Was Austin? He wrote a note for Ginny and left it on her desk. He told her where he would be, if she wanted to find him.

  He ate and checked into the airport motel off Highway 40. It was too late to visit the guardians. He lay in bed that night, and when he couldn’t sleep, he grabbed his keys and drove to Lost 80. He was disappointed to see that, unlike the high school, it had changed drastically. A large part of the woods had been cleared away; in its place, the city had built a picnic area, complete with metal tables and a small coal-fired grill. He parked across from a few other cars, leaned on by cocky teens. In high school, they were the type of boys he would have taken pleasure in punching. He kept walking when one of them said, “Hey man, what’s up,” and another, “You the guy with the good time?” He pressed into the woods that remained only to bump into more high schoolers, smoking, giggling. He eventually found his tree, and when he read John Donne’s line—No man is an island—the words rang bitterly and untrue. After Jacob disappeared, after Claire disappeared, he had never felt more apart from the rest of the world. It was hard to imagine a geographical feature that better described him than an unattached landmass, alone in the ocean.

  One of the leaning teens came up beside him.

  “You’re not him, are you?” the boy said. “The good-time guy?”

  “I am not,” Emile said.

  The boy leaned against the tree Emile sat under. Emile wondered if he knew any other position. “You sure?”

  The boy was thinking about beer, about getting a girl named Lucy into a questionable state of mind. “I’m not buying you beer.”

  “Nah. He buys himself beer. But sometimes he feels like sharing. I thought—”

  “I don’t drink,” Emile said. “And if Lucy’s smart—that’s her name, right?—she won’t either.”

  The boy startled. It had been a while since Emile looked inside someone’s mind and used their own thoughts, the desires they thought private, against them. It felt good, to show his strength, to flex that part of his mind again, which he’d hidden for some time now, but never let atrophy.