The Loop

by Wesley Cross

  Perry opened the heavy padlock on a steel gate and with a fast pull sent it rolling up and away, scaring a flock of pigeons nearby. He then unlocked a glass office door and walked the long corridor to his desk. On his right, the wall was replaced with glass that showed off the machinery of the car wash. In the dim red light of the exit signs, the giant brushes looked like some prehistoric predators ready to strike at unsuspecting prey.

  The workers and the guards overseeing the loading would come in the next twenty minutes, and Perry usually spent the time before they showed up drinking a cup of coffee and fast-forwarding the tapes from the CCTV cameras installed on both sides of the building. The cops didn’t bother Engel’s operation or were blissfully unaware of its existence, but Perry dutifully watched the tapes every evening to make sure. Complacency was a deadly sin in the drug business, no matter how powerful your employers were.

  He filled the paper filter with ground coffee and fired up the dripping machine. Then he sat in front of a dual monitor and started the playback. He zoomed through the first few hours of the tape as the waves of pedestrian and car traffic came and went. Three delivery trucks came during the day to the small supermarket next door and Perry watched the two-men crews unload the goods. For a small place, the supermarket did surprisingly well, Perry thought, as it always had at least two deliveries—one around nine o’clock in the morning, and one closer to five in the afternoon, with the occasional extra truck from a produce company that seemed to come every other day at noon.

  The coffee machine beeped, and Perry got up to pour himself a cup. He glanced at the buttons on the remote, considering pausing the playback but decided against it. He tore a packet of Sweet’N Low and spilled the sweetener into a paper cup, added coffee, and thoroughly stirred it before adding some cream. Then he returned to his desk, set the cup near the keyboard, and returned his attention to the screen.

  A produce truck rolled by the car wash and parked next to the supermarket, a bit farther than it usually would. Perry could see the large rearview mirror sticking out outside of the CCTV camera range. The door swung open, and presumably, the driver got out of the truck, though Perry couldn’t actually see it happening. He looked at the clock at the bottom of the screen and felt a tingling sensation crawling up his spine—the clock read 6:12 PM.

  Perry picked up the coffee cup and walked back outside. He locked the glass door again and walked by the rows of shabby flowers and buckets of vegetables in front of the supermarket and went in through the automatic doors. After a few seconds, he’d spotted the night manager, a small bald man bent over the shelves, who was replacing some price tags.

  “Tony,” he called out, approaching the man and pointing at the croissants. “Are they fresh?”

  “Oh, hey, Ralph.” The man straightened up and flashed a quick smile at him. “They’re from this morning, but they should still be fine. Tell Gina at the counter I said they are half-price.”

  “Thanks, man,” he said, picking up a croissant wrapped in plastic film. “How’s it going? When are they gonna make you the general manager?”

  “I don’t think it’s happening anytime soon,” the man replied. “But I’m okay with it, to be honest. At least for the time being. Maybe once my youngest goes to school, I’d feel more ambitious. For now, I’m rather happy to be home during the day, so I can spend some time with him.”

  “How old is he now?”

  “Turned two last month. Getting big now.”

  “Wow,” Perry said and turned as if he was ready to get going, but then stopped and made a vague circle with the croissant. “It’s a chain of stores, right? They must be doing something right.”

  “Yeah. Six locations, all family-owned since 1963.” The man lowered his voice to a whisper. “Live like kings.”

  “I bet. I’m always amazed by how busy you guys are. Even the produce truck comes twice a day, and from what I know that’s good profit margins.”

  “Eh, margins are good, but we only get produce once every other day.”

  “Oh,” Perry said, “I thought I saw a truck come twice, once around noon and once in the evening.”

  “No,” Tony said, returning his attention to the price tags. “Only once and always before Mohammed leaves and he leaves by one.”

  “Ah. Must’ve been something else, then. Never mind. See you around, pal.”

  He walked to the register, paid for the croissant, and went outside. Then he walked back to the front of the car wash and stood there, looking at the black dome of the CCTV camera. Something was up, he thought, as he went back into the office. He sat in front of the monitors and rewound the tape to see the truck pulling up next to the supermarket again. Nobody is going to screw with my business, Perry thought. He had no idea who the people were who brought the fake delivery truck to his doorstep. But whoever they were, he would find them.

  25

  The Station

  Jay hadn’t slept all night, but even if he had, for once Cal felt like she didn’t care. She watched for hours as he paced the suite from one side to another, occasionally stopping and pounding his right fist on the palm of his left hand, but said nothing and kept to herself until he finally broke the silence.

  “Are you going to stay quiet, then?”

  “What would you want me to say, Jay?”

  He stopped pacing, sat down on the floor, and crossed his legs. His entire body seemed to slump as if he were a marathoner who had finished the race and now collapsed on the ground, exhausted.

  “Why am I here?”

  “I don’t know,” she said in a way that made him look up. “I’m not entirely sure why I am here either. For a while, I thought my sole responsibility was to take care of you and the Station, but now I’m not that sure anymore.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I feel like there’s something wrong with me,” she said. “Although I have no idea how to explain it. I just know it.”

  “I guess a better question than why am I here is how did I get here?” Jay stood up and started pacing again. “Can you open the window again?”

  She brought the opaqueness of the panel to zero, and Jay walked to the window and put his forehead to the glass, watching the planet slowly rotate below.

  “It’s beautiful,” he said. “Is it…real? Are we in space?”

  Cal thought about it for a few moments. Nothing in this place was as it had initially appeared. She thought they were in space, orbiting the planet in a satellite while Jay was trying to find a solution that would save a dying civilization. But then again, Jay was claiming now that he had no idea what he was supposed to do and if that was true, maybe everything she knew was a lie too.

  “I don’t know,” she finally said. “But I might have an idea on how to test it.”

  “As long as it doesn’t involve breaking the window,” he said. “Because if we are in space, it will give us a very short time to enjoy any kind of gratification before getting sucked out into the cold void.”

  “Agreed.”

  “What’s the plan, then?”

  “I think the answer lies in my memories,” she said, surprising herself. She couldn’t explain why, but she knew it was wrong to tell him that, to let him in on the secret. But once the words floated through the air, she felt liberated, as if some invisible chain had snapped, setting her free.

  “In your memories?” He stepped back from the window and looked at her. “What could be in your memories? The more I think about it, the more it drives me crazy—I can’t remember anything from before. As if I’ve always been living here. And you, well, I can’t think of any reason your memories could be useful. Is there something specific you’re thinking of?”

  “Specific?” She thought about it for a moment. “Not specific. But somehow, I know there’s more than one layer of my memories. There’s one that I can access at any time, like you. But there’s also another right beneath it. It’s like looking through muddy waters. I can see some shapes and colors, but can’t make o
ut what I’m looking at.”

  “And how do you propose we access them?”

  “I’m not entirely sure,” she said. “It appears that we’ve been operating with different sets of data from the beginning. You had your own beliefs, and I had mine, and our agendas were different. Maybe you should question me—ask anything that comes to mind. Rapid-fire. Since your recollections are different from mine, you might ask something that I couldn’t think of and trigger something in my suppressed memories.”

  “Okay. It might be worth a shot.”

  He came closer and sat on the floor again, facing her. “Where should we start?”

  “I have no idea,” she said. “Go with the flow. Relax and ask me the first thing that comes to mind.”

  “Okay,” he said and tilted his head. “Let’s start with the basics. What’s your name?”

  “You call me Cal.”

  “How did you get here?”

  “Not a clue,” she said. “I want to say I was sent here to take care of you and the Station, but it doesn’t ring true. My guess is that somebody transported me here when I wasn’t conscious.”

  “Okay.” He thought about it for a moment. “Can you tell me how long you’ve been here?”

  “I don’t know that either. Sometimes I think we’ve been here for a few years, but sometimes it seems it hasn’t been nearly that long. A few days? A couple of months at most.”

  “What’s your purpose here, Cal?”

  “To take care of you and the Station,” she said without hesitation.

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “Let’s try it again—what’s your purpose here?”

  “To take care of you and the Station,” she said, raising her voice. “You already asked me that.”

  “Liar,” he shouted and sprang to his feet. “Stop giving me bullshit answers and tell me the truth—what’s your purpose here?”

  “To take care—”

  “Bullshit,” he screamed. “What’s your purpose?”

  “To drive you crazy, to—” she shouted in response and stopped in shock. “Oh my God, I think my purpose here was to torment you, to make you think what you did was important and pretend to be helping you, but instead try to derail your every step.”

  “Why?”

  “I have no idea. It seems that it was a vital mission, but now that I realized it, I can’t understand why it was important. Whoever brought me here must have brainwashed me into thinking that was my purpose.”

  He gave her a funny look and sat back down on the floor. “All right. At least we’re getting somewhere. What do we do now?”

  “Keep on asking me questions,” she said. “Maybe we can have another breakthrough.”

  “Do you know what I was doing on that computer?”

  “No.”

  “Do you think it was actually important?”

  “I needed you to believe it was important, but it was a trick. Something to make you worry, especially when I kept on distracting you when you were trying to work.”

  He closed his eyes. His big chest rose and fell in a slow, steady rhythm, and his face grew calm.

  “How do we get out of here?” he finally said without opening his eyes. “I’ve looked everywhere. There’s no door, no hatch, no manhole. Nothing that would let anyone come here or leave this place. We couldn’t have materialized here from thin air, could we? Somehow, someone brought us here. So—how the hell do we get out?”

  “There must be a way,” she said. “And it’s probably locked in my memories, along with all the other useful things that could help us. We have to keep on trying.”

  “I’m not sure what other questions I can ask,” he said. He opened his eyes and stood up. “Everything we’ve learned so far is interesting but doesn’t have any real value. I’m kind of running out of ideas, to be honest. You?”

  “I’m out of ideas,” she said. “Unless…”

  “Unless what?”

  “Okay,” she said and paused, “don’t take it the wrong way, but maybe we need to do something drastic. I might need some kind of a shock to release those suppressed memories. I thought maybe we could do something that I know you’ve fantasized about more than once.”

  “I don’t understand,” Jay said. “And I’m not sure I like the sound of it.”

  “I want you to hurt me,” she said. “Not too badly, of course, but some physical pain might trigger something that we can’t unearth otherwise. Maybe pain and fear are what I need to get to those memories—”

  Jay threw his head back and roared with laughter. It was so sudden, so loud, his entire massive body shaking as he continued to howl, that she looked at him, wondering if he’d gone mad. Not knowing what to say.

  Finally, he stopped and looked at her in a way she’d never seen before. There was an emotion in his eyes she didn’t know he was capable of.

  Pity.

  “I can’t hurt you, Cal,” he said.

  “Oh, stop this nonsense,” she yelled, losing her patience. “I’ve seen you look at me as if wanting to slap me a million times and now, all of a sudden you’re acting like a perfect gentleman who won’t touch me?”

  “No,” he said. “This is not because I don’t want to hurt you. It’s because I cannot hurt you. You’re not human, Callisto. You’re a machine.”

  26

  New York

  “You surely know how to take care of a lady, Mike,” Doug said, pointing at their surroundings with a sweeping gesture. “Metal tables, fixed benches, and a view of a busy road. I’d say that screams romance.”

  They took a table next to a sidewalk that was a few moments ago occupied by a family with two kids. The sun was still high, but the hottest hours of the day had already passed, slowly yielding to the gentle coolness of the fall. A few cars were zipping by on Eighty-Sixth Street, but for this hour the road was surprisingly empty.

  “Is there a waiter?” Doug asked, looking around.

  “Nope.” Connelly smiled, anticipating another series of friendly jabs. “Self-service. You have to go to that little window over there and order yourself a slice.”

  “Like I said.” Doug snorted. “A true gentleman.”

  “It’s a great place.” Sofia came to Connelly’s defense. “It doesn’t look like much, but they make arguably the best pizza in Brooklyn. Though I imagine some people might take an issue with a statement like that. Brooklynites take their pizza seriously.”

  “Let’s go get some, then,” Doug said, starting to get up.

  “Not so fast, champ.” Connelly put a hand on his friend’s shoulder. “If we all go, there’ll be no seats by the time we get back. Let me get your orders, and I’ll go get them. You guys stay here.”

  “There’s hope for you yet. I don’t care what I get, to be honest. Just double whatever you’re getting for yourself.”

  Connelly asked Sofia for her order and went to the register in the little window. As he stood there waiting for the pizza, he watched Doug and Sofia talk. It was the first time they were out when there was somebody else, and it felt special. She and Doug seemed to be at ease with each other and Connelly relaxed, giving up to the light, friendly banter.

  “A mafia place, huh?” Doug asked him when he came back, bringing a few slices of a Sicilian pie and a stromboli. “That’s interesting.”

  “Yeah. All the way back in the thirties, it belonged to one of the competing mafia families, and the recipe was considered so valuable that, if I remember correctly, there was a big shootout.”

  “Get out.”

  “That’s right,” Sofia offered. “I read a piece on it a while ago. Another family approached the owners and offered them money and protection in exchange for an equal partnership stake in the business.”

  “I take it they refused.”

  “Correct. One night, right after closing, a few cars pulled up right there.” She pointed at the sidewalk next to them. “A few goodfellas came out and lighted it up. The owner and his wife were killed and some of the workers wh
o were still inside the restaurant.”

  “Man. But who’s got the recipe, then?”

  “That we don’t know.” She smiled. “The place was closed for a few years after the shootout and then the NYPD put the screws into organized crime, so most of the other family also ended up dead or behind bars. But then ten or fifteen years later, a guy bought the place, who claimed to have been working for the original owner before the gang war and he said he had the original recipe.”

  “So, this is all a fraud then,” Doug said, looking at his slice. “The recipe is probably lost.”

  “Probably, but they still make one hell of a pizza.”

  “Better than what they make in Ohio,” Connelly jabbed. “I don’t remember any good pizza places in Cleveland.”

  “This guy. He thinks he’s funny,” Doug said between bites. “That might have something to do with the fact that you’ve never been to Cleveland. And not that there’s anything wrong with Ohio, but I’ve never been there either. Tell me now. Mike says you’re a journalist?”

  “Yes. I’ve been recently promoted to be an editor-in-chief, actually.”

  “Wow. Congrats. What paper?”

  “The New York Gazette.”

  “Nice. You must be excited.”

  “She is,” Connelly interjected. “But not everybody else is as happy.”

  “There are always going to be some sour grapes when they see somebody else achieve success.”

  “It’s not that. Her boss resigned under some suspicious circumstances. Thought he was in danger. He suggested she step aside as well.”

  “What kind of suspicious circumstances?” Doug put the slice down, his sarcastic demeanor disappearing.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t,” Sofia said, looking at them uncertainly. “It’s not a big deal.”

  “Try me.”

  “He was approached by somebody. I don’t know details; he tried to keep me out of the loop on this one. Whoever they were, they wanted to purchase the paper.”

  “That doesn’t sound that suspicious so far. Was it a competitor?”