The Hours

by Robert Barnard

  “I know,” Chloe said.

  “People at school don’t sit next to me, don’t talk to me, when they find out I’m from New York. They look at me like I’m some alien. I hear the neighbors gossip about us. They resent that we couldn’t afford this house if it wasn’t for the survivor’s benefits we got.”

  “Not all the neighbors here are awful,” Chloe said. “Mrs. Collins, across the street? She loves us. She’s baked us cookies on a dozen different occasions.”

  “It’s just, just,” Nolan paused, desperate to stop his stutter. “Sometimes, I feel like we’re cursed to relive that day over and over and over. Like there’s no getting away from it.”

  Chloe exhaled. “Go to class tomorrow, Nolan. Get out of the house. It’s the only way to put it behind you.”

  “Is that why you spend eleven hours a day training to be a cop? To take your mind off of it?”

  “Partly,” Chloe said.

  Nolan said: “Hmm. Maybe I’m not as good at distracting myself as you are.”

  Chloe twirled atop the bed, clicked her nightstand lamp off. The room turned dark, save for the cold glow thrown off by the television. “I can think of one way to distract you,” she said, and she slowly pulled her t-shirt up and over her head.

  Nolan smiled. “Thought I was on probation?”

  “You are,” Chloe said. She reached for a remote, turned the television off, and the room went black. “Consider this a get out of jail card.”

  There was little arguing the next morning about whether or not Nolan would go to class. Chloe woke early, ironed one of the clean uniforms that hung in her closet, skipped her morning cigarette. Nolan woke at the same time she did, brushed his teeth, shaved, and made breakfast: scrambled eggs and bacon. He actually made breakfast, Chloe would later think to herself. Not too bad.

  Chloe dropped Nolan off at the north campus of Cherry Valley Community College bright and early, before speeding off to pick up Hannah and attend one of her last days of academy.

  Even though Nolan was on campus hours before the start of his first lecture, he didn’t mind. He used the time to wander the still dark buildings and courtyards of the old campus, and when he was bored with that, he curled up onto a couch outside of his first class and caught up on some reading. After what felt like an eternity, a security officer for the school swung by, unlocked the front door of his lecture hall, and Nolan and the six or seven other students waiting out front huddled inside.

  Even more time passed, and more and more students filled the lecture hall, until it was nearly full. After it seemed like no other bodies could possibly squeeze in, a door at the front of the auditorium opened. Professor Holbrook stepped in, set a briefcase on the desk beside his podium. He looked around the classroom skeptically from behind his thick, black glasses, then took a swig from the can of diet cola he held. He let out a refreshed little ah, then clapped his hands. “Gettin’ cold out there early this year. Damn.”

  The students in the auditorium nodded and groaned.

  “We settled in? We ready to go?” Holbrook asked the class. “Anyone need to piss before we get started?”

  Nolan smiled. Steven Holbrook was his favorite professor. He made boring topics interesting. He was cool. He said words like piss and hell and fuck, and no one seemed to mind. For the life of him, Nolan couldn’t imagine a single teacher at his high school uttering a word remotely close to “piss.”

  “Today we’re going to talk about a couple of men named…” Holbrook turned to the whiteboard behind him, pulled out a dry erase marker, and wrote the words LOCKE and HOBBES next to one another. When he turned away from the board and back towards his students, he was greeted by a sea of confused faces.

  “You’re all looking at me like I’m speaking Greek.”

  The faces in the auditorium contorted and frowned and nodded.

  “If any of you had done the reading that was assigned for today, you’d know exactly who I’m talking about. Come on. Anyone.” Holbrook pointed to a chubby, tired looking girl in the center of the room. “You. Tell me about John Locke.”

  The girl shrugged, sat silent.

  “C’mon. Anything. Spill it.”

  The girl opened her mouth slowly and with zero confidence said: “Didn’t he…like…invent a kind of gun?”

  Holbrook brought his hand to his face and muttered “Jesus Hallelujah.” Nolan smiled at this, felt confident enough to give an answer. Having done the required reading for the day in just the past couple of hours, the material was still fresh in his mind.

  Nolan sheepishly raised his hand.

  “Yes!” Holbrook cheered. “Mr. Fischer. So glad to have you with us today. Enlighten us.”

  “Okay,” Nolan said. “So, John Locke was a philosopher in the 1600’s. He basically believed that men could survive without government. In the state of nature, men inherently honored their promises and kept their word, and there’d be peace among them. So that affected a lot of what he viewed the role of government should be.”

  “Okay,” Holbrook said. “Pretty good. We’ll talk more about him later, but you’ve got a pretty good roundabout idea of Locke. Want to restore my faith in the student body and tell me about Thomas Hobbes?”

  “Sure,” Nolan said, and he leaned forward in his desk. He bit his bottom lip for a moment, chewed on it, and his seat creaked. “Hobbes believed the opposite. He thought that government was absolutely necessary; in the absence of it, men were not peaceful and honorable. They were brutish and warlike. ‘The condition of man…is a condition of war of everyone against everyone.’”

  “Very good, Mr. Fischer,” Holbrook said. “Color me impressed. Of course, there’s a lot more to both of them than that, but you’re catching on.” Holbrook smiled at the class and raised his eyebrows. “As for the rest of you, eh, who knows. We’ll see how much you’ve read come time for midterms.” He strolled over to his podium and took another swig from his soda can. “Can anyone tell us why we’re learning about these two?”

  A tall kid with gruesome acne, no older than nineteen or twenty, perked up towards the front of the room. “The philosophies of Locke and Hobbes were influential in how the founding fathers of America sculpted our nation.”

  “Absolutely correct,” Holbrook said. “Perfect. But that’s been, what—a few hundred years ago now, yeah? I think we got a clear cut, picture perfect view into the minds of Locke and Hobbes’ just about two years ago, did we not?”

  The class bobbed their heads and murmured.

  “Let’s look at New York,” Holbrook said. “Two years ago, something horrible happens. Some fishing boat sails into the New York City harbor—toot toot—and it’s carrying something nasty with it. An uninvited passenger. A virus. A virus which breaks loose. It causes people to commit horrible acts of violence. It kills them. Now, we can’t really comment on those who contracted the virus, can we? They were left essentially brain dead. We won’t know what they were thinking. But what about the rest of us? How did us fine, civilized humans fare during that brief interim between the government disappearing and reappearing again in full force?”

  Nolan swallowed and thought of Dana. Was she his step-mom now? It wasn’t very clear. Whatever she was to him, the two of them had become close. Over the past two years, Nolan heard almost every awful story that Dana had to share about her time during the NYVO event. There were two solid days of bedlam before the military showed up to start evacuations. No police. No 911. And what happened to Dana during that time? Two separate men, one a pedophile and one a former student of hers, tried to rape her. There was looting and riots at the local grocery store. Vehicles were stolen, homes were broken into, people were murdered over food and gasoline and supplies.

  Nolan was starting to think that Thomas Hobbes had the right idea.

  “I would argue,” Holbrook continued, “that two years ago, society went to shit. Society took a backseat to man’s most primal and urgent desires. Approximately one million people perished during NYVO. T
hat’s a big number by any scale. There’s no concrete data yet, but some predict that of that million, around one hundred and fifty thousand died from violent crimes. In a typical year, the United States has sixteen thousand homicides. Thirty thousand gun related deaths. In forty-eight hours, America experienced nearly three times as many violent deaths as it did in an entire year.” Holbrook scoffed and then, as if he’d read Nolan’s mind, said, “Hobbes might have been on to something. Those that maintained law and order and kept us safe disappeared for only a short while, and did society keep its cool until they caught up with what was going on? No. For lack of a better term, we all lost our shit.”

  Holbrook crossed his arms, took a deep breath. “Safety. There’s an odd concept. I want to talk about safety with you guys for a moment. You’re sitting in your bed late at night, watching Netflix, elbow deep in a bag of Doritos. You hear a window pane shatter. There’s a burglar breaking into your house. What’s the first thing you do?”

  Someone in the middle of the room hollered: “Call the cops.”

  “Great,” Holbrook said. “How long does it take a cop in the U.S. to respond to an emergency call?”

  No one could offer an answer.

  “The typical response time is ten minutes. Kind of spooky when you think about it for a bit, isn’t it? Is your burglar violent? Does he know you’re home? Does he have any interest in harming you, or does he simply want your television and your Xbox? Regardless, do you think he’s going to hang around for longer than ten minutes? I was at home once while my home was robbed. And the very first thing I did was call 911. The cops came—eventually—but let me tell you something…when you’re in a moment like that? The minutes feel like hours, the hours feel like years. It’s scary. I can’t imagine what was racing through the minds of the citizens of New York during NYVO.”

  The class had gone a bit silent. The awkward boy with the terrible acne up front raised a hand.

  “Mhm?” Holbrook said. “Go ahead.”

  “What did you do,” the student asked, “for the ten minutes that you waited for the police to arrive?”

  Holbrook rubbed a finger across the stubble of his chin, looked thoughtfully at the floor and wondered how to phrase what he’d say next. “Dialing 911 was the very first thing I did, yeah. But the very next thing I did was reach for the 9mm handgun that I keep beside my bed. I was in my bedroom when I heard him come in. And I stepped out of my room, carefully, and looked down my stairwell to see a large man in a dirty green coat walking out my front door. Under one arm was my laptop computer and under the other was a loaf of bread and a half eaten jar of peanut butter. I mean, come on. Does it get any sorrier than that? And I wasn’t even sure that he’d heard me leave my room, but before he left he turned around. I looked at him, dead in the eye, and he looked back at me. Without a second’s hesitation he dropped the computer, the loaf of bread, and the jar of peanut butter. Before I heard them clank against the floor he’d drawn a revolver from his waistband. His thumb was on the hammer, ready to fire, when I fired the first of thirteen shots into his body. He died, there, on my living room floor. A full eight minutes before a police officer arrived.” Holbrook’s voice cracked. “There were a million different ways I would have preferred that night to have ended. Hell, I would have made the guy a peanut butter sandwich myself.”

  Nolan swallowed hard. He felt a little ball of anxiety deep inside of him start to grow and grow.

  “Did I feel safe before that day? Maybe. But not because some hero was going to come in and save me at the touch of a button, but because I knew how to look after myself. This school enacted a lot of changes after NYVO. There was that horrible safety video they produced. Anyone sitting in this room had to watch it a million times as a condition of their admission. ‘What To Do In Case of a Viral Outbreak.’ You know, us faculty had to watch it, too. It was a joke. There was nothing valuable in that video that would help you should what happened in New York happen here. But you had to watch it, right? Because it made you feel safe. Anyone care to share any other conditions that were mandatory for admission?”

  Nolan raised his hand, said: “We needed to be immunized. Against EV1.”

  “Very true indeed,” Holbrook said. “And so, now, you can never be infected, thanks to—ta-da!—your immunization. You’ll never be compelled to flay the skin off of your fellow students, or myself, or any of us, should that dreadful virus make a resurgence. And since all of us have been immunized, we should be golden, yeah? There’ll never be a repeat of NYVO. At least, not here. So tell me, Nolan, do you feel safe?”

  Nolan took a second to think it out. It felt like a trap. But all of those things did make him feel safe, and so he nodded.

  “So you feel safe,” Holbrook went on. “But are you safe?”

  Nolan felt his hands turn cold, and he shook his head: No.

  “Safety doesn’t exist,” Holbrook explained. “Danger exists. Safety is just an assumed absence of danger. It’s what Locke and Hobbes squabbled over, and it’s going to be the main theme of today’s lecture, so open up your texts to page one hundred and eleven and we’ll carry on…”

  SEVEN

  Jim sat at a barstool in front of his kitchen counter, lazily pecking at a ham and cheddar sandwich. He’d called out of work—took a sick day—and moped around the house all day, awaiting Sherri’s arrival. It was late afternoon now, and there was little left to do but wait. He’d swept the floors, vacuumed. Tidied up the living room.

  Chloe was still at Cherry Valley High with the other cadets, Nolan was still on campus at class. The house felt cavernous and lonesome with no one else home. A giant home, more than Jim deserved, he sometimes thought, that felt only more enormous and hollow with no one else inside it.

  Jim heard the hum of a rental sedan purr into the driveway out front, stepped towards the front bay window, and peeked out through the blinds. Parked beside his Suburban was a small economy car with a New York plate fastened to the front. Sitting behind the steering wheel, checking her makeup in the mirror of the flip down visor, was Sherri. Her red hair stopped right at her shoulders, her mousey features were highlighted by a simple amount of makeup. She was exactly as Jim remembered her.

  Jim stepped back from the blinds, tugged uncomfortably at his clothes, waited anxiously for the doorbell to ring. In no time flat it did, and he hurried to the front door, swung it open wide.

  “Jim!” Sherri exclaimed, and she thrust her arms out in front of her.

  “Sherri,” Jim said, and he leaned in for a hug. “It’s been so long.”

  “You look good,” Sherri said. “It’s a relief that you haven’t been texting me fake pictures of yourself this whole time.”

  The lines around Jim’s mouth creased. His careful tap-dance with infidelity was real, now. It was tangible. It was standing right in front of him.

  “Come in, come in,” Jim said. “I’ll whip us up an early dinner. You must be starving.”

  “I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t,” Sherri said, and she let out a little laugh.

  The two strode into the enormous home side by side. Sherri gasped at the tall ceilings and wide rooms, craned her head back like a tourist in a foreign city.

  “You did all right for yourself,” she said.

  Jim shrugged. “We could never afford this home, not in a million years,” he said, “if it wasn’t for the survivor’s benefits. New Yorkers got preferred lending and lower interest rates, too. It sometimes feels like more than we deserve.”

  “Nonsense,” Sherri said. “I remember what you and your family went through. You all deserved a little ‘happily ever after.’” She slid her purse off of her arm, set it gently on the kitchen counter, and unzipped it. She reached her hand inside, fished it around a little, knocked her knuckles past her cell phone, packs of gum, and a small packet of travel tissues. At last, she found a small note curled up near the bottom of the purse. She tugged it out, smiled plainly, and handed it to Jim.

  Jim took the note
from Sherri slowly, unrolled it, and read. The words, jotted out in Sherri’s handwriting, said:

  Jim—

  Be quiet and play along.

  Don’t talk much about New York.

  Don’t talk much about anything.

  When you’re done reading this, you’ll see me pull a small device out of my bag. I’ll use it to check for bugs and other wire taps that could possibly be hidden around your home.

  When we’re clear, I’ll tell you. Until then, don’t say anything you wouldn’t want someone else to hear.

  ❤, Sherri

  Jim crumpled the note into his hand, stared quizzically at Sherri. Sherri simply nodded, reached back into her purse, and pulled out a small, black box with a digital screen atop it.

  “Why don’t you give me a tour of the house?” Sherri asked.

  Jim said, “Sure. Of course. Well, we’re standing in the kitchen, obviously.”

  Sherri nodded, strolled through the kitchen, waved the device high and low. She scanned it over the refrigerator, the oven’s range, the counter tops and cupboard. Seemingly pleased with her findings, she shrugged and said: “How about the living room?”

  Jim took eight big steps towards the living room. “This is where we spend most of our time,” he said, dumbly.

  “It’s beautiful,” Sherri said. “I love the furniture.” She tiptoed through the living room, brushed her device over lamps, over the television, into the furniture and coffee tables. At one point, she carefully teetered herself on Jim’s favorite recliner so that she could reach an air condition vent and smoke detector, and check there, too.

  Sherri went on like this for a total of thirty-five minutes. She inspected every square inch of the house, room by room. The whole while Jim made stupid, idle conversation, and Sherri would “hmm” or “hah” and play along. When finally she was done, she set the small black device back down on the kitchen counter, where they started, clapped her hands and said: “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”