Exit

by Thomas Davidson

  The jovial crowd inside O'Henry's now looked like a lynch mob.

  Tim lowered his head, retreated a step from the doorway. If only he had a hat to hide his blond hair. It was hard to miss the radioactive glow of yellow hair.

  He backpedaled right through the door and onto the sidewalk.

  He sprinted across the street and turned left, heading toward the Gateway. He almost dropped his phone when he pulled it out of his pocket. His thumb danced across the plastic numbers as he kept his eyes straight ahead. The word police came to mind. The word arrest came to mind. The phrase mutilated by a mob came to mind.

  For God's sake, Rayne, pick up. It’s me, the fugitive, pick the hell up.

  His thumb hit the last button.

  Tim's scanned the street, alert for the sounds of an angry mob spilling out of the bar behind him, pitchforks in hand. All he wanted was a familiar voice.

  His wish came true.

  "We're sorry. The number you have reached is not…"

  He dumped the phone into his pocket, picked up his pace. He sprinted along the sidewalk and circled back to where it began. The theater. The damned theater. Or the theater of the damned. He would somehow turn back the clock, turn back the night's events, return to square one.

  First, he noticed the white marquee. Conspicuously blank. Gone was gone. No coming attractions. His knees nearly buckled. He staggered up and rested his head against the cold, box office window, seeing an empty booth on the other side of the grimy glass. Beyond the theater doors, the dark foyer was deserted. The theater looked abandoned. A cardboard sign was taped to the box office glass. He squinted in the dark and read:

  "Closed until further notice."

  Crowe struggled for breath as he leaned forward. The palms of his hands slid down the dirty glass, his sweaty skin squeaking on the smooth surface. His head bowed as if in supplication, a desperate prayer to the nonexistent cashier—this ticket admits one into the theater where you can resume your previous life—until he collapsed onto the cold concrete. But only for moment, just enough time to catch his breath, to regroup. He flashed on the TV reporter's face and knew he had to keep moving. It wasn't safe here. Not in the middle of Harvard Square, even at this hour.

  He stood. The plan: take the side streets, move through the shadows, and get to Rayne's. Once there, he'd be safe for a while. At least until someone put a name on his televised face.

  He glanced once more at the taped sign. How could that be? How could the theater appear so different over the course of an evening? The answer to that would have to wait.

  He cut across Mass Avenue, ducked through a nearly empty Harvard Yard, and began snaking his way through side streets. At one point, off in the distance, he spotted what appeared to be a large winged creature floating over trees and rooftops, like an angel from hell, then it merged with the night and drifted out of view.

  "Rayne," he whispered along the way.

  He arrived at her address at about 11 o'clock. Her windows on the second floor were dark. He couldn't find her Buick on the street or parked in the rear of the building. Strange. She should have been home long ago. He knew it was probably useless, but he thumbed her number again, and quickly disconnected when he heard the Stepford Wife.

  Something else bothered him. He looked up at her windows from the sidewalk. There was virtually no light where he stood; the nearest streetlamp stood eight houses down the block, partially obscured by trees. Still, the curtain in Rayne's window looked different from how he remembered. The color was too pale. In the moonlight it looked gray instead of blue. And once again he felt that dark certainty, that burgeoning dread of having, hands down, the absolute worst night of his life. And craziest of all, he didn't know why.

  Maybe his damaged vision was playing tricks on him.

  He studied the window curtain as he reached for his key ring. His fingers identified Rayne's key. He ran his thumb along the serrated edge until a sound broke the silence. An unfamiliar woman wearing red horn rimmed glasses came downstairs and entered the foyer. She glanced at the mail rack, picked up a large envelope with two fingers and dangled it as if it were a smelly fish, dropped it, then stepped outside. Tim pretended to be waiting for someone, having a cigarette on the street. After the tenant drove away, Tim hustled into the foyer and inserted his key into the inner door.

  He wasn’t surprised when the key didn’t fit. Tonight was a nasty collision of bad luck on several fronts. Bumper-to-bumper bullshit. He returned to the shadows outside. He had to concentrate, think this through, a Wizard of Oz moment where Dorothy turns to Toto and admits: "We're not in Kansas anymore."

  No shit?

  His number-one problem? His picture on TV.

  He needed an answer, a clue, a sense of direction. In the meantime, he couldn’t risk exposure without more information. Standing outside her building looked too suspicious. He didn't need to see a police car rushing up the street, and a paranoid tenant pointing at him through an open window.

  He began walking along the street, a physical act that helped him concentrate. Where to begin? Soon he had an idea and returned to Harvard Yard. He cut through the quad, passed the statue of John Harvard in the center of the campus, but stopped on the walkway about twenty feet farther on. The unsettling image of the Gateway Theater being closed and looking vacant or abandoned came to mind. How could that have happened so suddenly? The answer: it couldn't. Same for his apartment key that didn't fit Rayne's lock. So, he wondered, what else was skewed? He turned around and looked at the dark statue, the esteemed founder of Harvard University sitting in his metal chair, overseeing the campus. Tim backtracked and leaned down by the front of the base below the statue. He squinted in the dark, reading the name etched in stone: Nathaniel Harvard.

  He traced a fingertip over the engraved letters N-a-t-h-a-n-i-e-l as if it were Braille, just to be sure. This exercise underscored his growing suspicions. His hypothesis could be easily tested. He went to the iron fence that bordered Mass Ave and looked at the line of shops and stores. Only some storefronts looked familiar with recognizable names in the streetlight. Directly across from where he stood was a restaurant, closed for the night. The sign overhead read: Green Castle. He'd been inside that address many times; it was, or had been, a used bookstore called The BookCase. This city, this area, was both familiar and strange—and utterly bizarre.

  After a moment he shook off that line of thought. He concentrated on why he had returned to Harvard Yard. He followed the fence until he saw a trash barrel across the street in front of a closed store. He slipped through the nearest gate, hustled over to the barrel, and fished out a discarded newspaper. He darted back across Mass Ave and into the Yard. He moved toward the outer edge of the campus, got onto an asphalt path, and found a spot by a campus building that had a security light.

  He stopped there and looked at his scavenged paper, a tabloid. The Boston Herald. Then he remembered to take his second drug. He took out his vial of Atropine and shook a couple of drops into his left eye. His vision blurred as the liquid ran down his cheek.

  Of all the times to have a detached retina. Blurred vision, perfect!

  The night was getting chilly. He hunkered down over a metal grille covering a duct that emitted heat, and recapped the vial. If anyone spotted him, student or campus cop, he'd pretend to be homeless. They'd take one look at his red, watery eye and assume he was loaded, then tell him to move on. This was Harvard, the home of humanitarians. How badly could they possibly treat a pitiful vagrant? He flattened the wrinkled paper on the grating, seeing spilled coffee on the front page. Damn, what luck. He squinted while skimming the page in the dim light, bracing himself, wondering how he ended up in the Land of Freaking Oz. Dominating the page was an aerial photo of a man on the street, caught in mid-stride, looking up from his hoodie.

  A moment later Tim saw the headline as something inside him turn to ash.

  Gotcha!

  "Third Illegal Alien Captured in Cambridge is a member of the notoriousl
y violent Mad Doctors Without Borders. Story on page 2."

  With a shaky hand, Tim turned over the wet page, which ripped, and held his breath. His life was blowing up like a mushroom cloud. On page two:

  "For the third time in a week, our drone protectors captured an alien terrorist, a 'jumper from the other side.' According to the report released by the DR1 Corporation security team, the jumper was initiating a horrific citywide medical experiment by unleashing a…"

  The spilled coffee soaked and shredded the rest of the story. On the opposite page, Tim read this fragment:

  "General Panek from DR1 told The Boston Herald: “This jumper is a vicious and violent individual. Anyone capable of such a horrid and senseless act cannot be allowed to participate in society and must be captured before he has the chance to infect more innocent people.”

  Included were a few comments from people interviewed on the street. Most were pithy. For example: "This maggot should be executed." But one citizen waxed poetic: "Scum like this should be tied down with razor wire and have their nuts slashed with a broken bottle by a blind epileptic during a grand mal seizure."

  Tim pictured getting a vasectomy via a smashed beer bottle. He imagined himself in a bizarre reality TV show gone full throttle, no restraint. He was kneeling on the grate, wondering what to do, when a green wine bottle hit the metal grille and exploded.

  The noise made him jerk. He lost his grip on the little vial of Atropine, which fell through the grille's slats.

  Shit!

  One medication down, two to go.

  A voice from above shattered the silence. "Sir, are you houseless? An urban outdoorsman? A non-addressed individual? Alas, that's not a bed-and-breakfast down there. Move it."

  Tim looked up, forgetting to hide his face. A scowling young man in a baseball cap glared down from an open window on the third floor, presumably a student. He looked drunk.

  The young scholar added, "Translation: Get lost, piss-pants, or I'll call security."

  Tim watched the scholar lean even further out the window, unzipping his pants. The lad urinated into the air. Perhaps the ivy on the brick wall needed watering.

  Under other circumstances, Tim Crowe would have gleefully tomahawked a bottle back through the third-floor window, then invited the urologist to step outside for a debate. But not tonight. Not the worst night of his life. He rose to his feet and sprinted away from the light as quickly as possible.

  He wandered without direction through the campus, the terms echoing in his head: illegal aliens, and jumpers from the other side. It would be midnight soon. The later the hour, the more noticeable he would be on a campus with dwindling foot traffic. Same for the city streets. He needed to hide and rest for a while. He scanned the campus from memory, and recalled a possible spot. He went to the back of the law library. There was a small, concrete pit, about six feet deep that was dug outside of a basement window. The cavity allowed sunlight to angle into the basement. A metal railing bordered the pit, serving as a fence. After scanning the area for onlookers, Tim climbed over the waist-high railing, then climbed down a metal ladder attached to the concrete wall. The hollow space provided a six-by-four-foot rectangle, deep enough to keep him out of sight.

  He winced as he whispered, "Home, sweet home."

  He needed to get off his feet, regroup. Beyond the cold panes of the windows, the library's basement was dark. He zipped his army jacket all the way, and upturned the collar to protect against the chill air. Sitting on the cold ground, he leaned his back against the window, which retained some heat from the interior and was warmer than the surrounding stone wall. He couldn't risk breaking into the basement and setting off an alarm.

  So he stayed down in his little foxhole, compliments of Harvard. For a while he just stared up at the sky, seeing a white slice of moon dangling in the distance above the Charles River. He wondered, how did things get so crazy? How did he fall through a trapdoor and arrive here?

  He recalled the sequence of events, starting with the costumed cashier inside the box office, to the handful of customers inside the theater, fans of dark fantasy and twisted thrillers. For the first time, now, he wished he hadn’t been so distracted and paid more attention to the movie.

  Gone. His heart raced when he thought about the bleak storyline concerning an alternate or parallel world that nearly mirrored his own. But the mirror, he realized now, was a piece of cracked glass. The mirror showed a warped reflection of his world. He thought of his damaged retina.

  Parallel worlds were the intellectual realm of theoretical physicists. Not he and Rayne, a substitute teacher and a waitress, working on a screenplay. Still, the very concept left him on edge. The coincidence of the occurrence. He had been sitting in a theater watching Gone, and then…

  He recalled the sound unbidden. The heavy metal door thudding shut behind him.

  Exit. The red EXIT sign above the door.

  Parallel world.

  He closed his eyes. His world spun and he felt sick to his stomach—a child stumbling off an amusement park ride, ready to chuck his Cheerios.

  EXIT.

  He recalled a radio interview he had heard last year. A physicist spoke of the possibility of parallel universes, and boiled it down to two scenarios. The universe might be big, but finite. However, if it's infinitely big, there were only so many ways matter could arrange itself within that infinite universe. Eventually, matter would repeat itself and arrange itself in similar ways. So if the universe were infinitely large, that included infinite parallel universes.

  The interview had been fascinating. Also, abstract theory could always be set aside in time for lunch. Now the abstract had become concrete. A concrete pit. Pondering parallel worlds while hiding in a chilly pit by a library window was both depressing and weird—in the extreme. But the concept fit his singular situation; he could easily imagine the exit door as a portal to a parallel world. If so, the movie itself had served as a kind of warning, as did the preview of coming attractions. It was darkly funny, in a ghastly sort of way. He had been forewarned of what lay beyond the door. This realization made him both frightened and angry. He ran a hand through his hair, furious at whoever had set him up, and furious at himself for not seeing and deciphering the clues, for being so woefully imprudent. Looking back, it all seemed so obvious now that the theater had a precarious air.

  Precarious. What an understatement. Tim thought of the cashier sitting in the box office with—are you kidding—tarot cards and a candle? Donations only? He had gone inside and walked through an empty foyer with an abandoned concession stand. No ushers? No problem. He had watched a bizarre movie, followed by cryptic coming attractions. Did that tip off Tim Crowe? Negative. Every show in America operates that way. And then the exit sign lights up, daring him to step over and open the door. Does he, the bright and clever screenwriter, take the bait?

  No problem.

  He turned his attention to the picture of his face on TV, mostly a headshot. The photo had him looking upward, against a dark background. Then he understood. EXIT. He remembered looking up at the EXIT sign just before he stepped forward, pushed the crash bar, and opened the door. A camera could have been on the other side of the glowing sign.

  EXIT.

  Whoever went through that door was photographed.

  Smile. Say 'cheese.' Click.

  The story in the Herald came to mind: "For the third time in a week, the DR1 Corporation captured an alien terrorist, a 'jumper from the other side.' So, he thought, the jumper from the other side went to the show, then passed through the rear exit. End of story. End of normal life. In the span of one evening, the hapless movie fan became an alien terrorist.

  Tim Crowe now wondered how many jumpers were trapped here and on the run. Why were they hunted? And what happened after their capture? Detention? Death?

  Tim thought bitterly: Maybe they get jumper probation.

  At that instant he remembered something and jumped up. "Damn!" he said, and hoped no one was nearby. He f
ingered his jacket pocket and plucked out his vial of Prednisolone, steroids to prevent inflammation.

  "Sonofabitch," he said, angry at himself. How could he be so stupid?

  He shook the vial, uncapped it, and tipped his head back. Holding down his lower eyelid with a fingertip, he aimed a drop over his open eye. He missed, and the white drop rolled down his cheek. He stifled the urge to curse, and tilted his head again. A drop stung his eye on the second attempt. He closed the eyelid, capped the vial, and sat again by the window. He wondered if anyone had heard him? He stood again and climbed three steps on the ladder, raised his head, his eyes level with the ground. He scanned the yard for movement.

  He pictured the Harvard police surrounding his foxhole, guns drawn, demanding that he put his "…weapons down and step out of the foxhole." Suddenly two plastic vials of eye drops would fly out of the foxhole and land on the grass. Thump, thump. Then Tim Crowe would slowly emerge from underground, expensive Vigamox pouring out of his eyelid, hands in the air, pleading, "Don't shoot. I'm unarmed and my vision is blurred."

  Fortunately he saw no one, nor heard a sound. He climbed back down and sat by the window. Then he recalled dropping his vial of Atropine through the grille. Maybe, just maybe, that was the least important of his three drugs. Could he count on that? Could he possibly be that lucky? Or would the lack of Atropine result in his eyeball exploding? Perhaps he needed an additional drug to quiet his imagination. A heroin overdose, for instance. He pictured the campus police discovering a corpse, a Mad Doctor Without Borders with rigor mortis, pressed against the Harvard Law Library window, a blue gas bubble in his eye, a cell phone in his hand, mouthing the word Rayne. They could pull him out by the ankles. He'd be stiff as cardboard…

  No, this has to stop. Please, please, please focus.