by Nick Pirog
At 3:10, I hit pause, grab my iPhone and ear-buds and sprint out the door.
It’s the beginning of spring and the Alexandria air is cold. I wish I’d worn a beanie, but I don’t dare waste the time going to grab one. The streets are silent. Three in the morning must be the quietest time of the day. Even the nocturnal night people have turned in and the crazy, morning folk are still tucked away. But then again, I don’t have anything to compare it to. I just know the half hour I spend in the world, it might as well be on mute. I run under the streetlights, the closest thing I know to sunlight, and concentrate on every sensation. The burn in my thighs, the cold air as it travels through my nostrils and down into my lungs.
I force myself to stay in the moment. I don’t have time for the past or the future. My life is the present. For many years, I played the what if game. What if I had a normal life? Where would I be? Would I be married? Would I have kids? But then twenty or thirty minutes would be gone. Wasted. Thinking about things that I can’t change. That are unchangeable.
I listen to three songs by The Lumineers, my new favorite band, then five minutes of Feed the Pig, an investment podcast. It is two miles to the Potomac, a highway of water separating Virginia from Maryland, and I spend a perfect minute watching a trawler sucked downstream by the sweeping black current. I used to wonder what it would look like during the light of day, how the water would look under a burning sun and puffy white clouds, but day didn't exist in my world. Only night. Only darkness.
As I head back, I see a car turn onto the side street. This is the first car I’ve seen in six days. It is a Ford Focus. A new one. The Ford stock closed at 13.02. Just saying.
I do the four miles in just under twenty-eight minutes and when I reach my condo steps it is 3:38 a.m.
Twenty-two minutes left.
I do push-ups and sit-ups for three minutes.
I jerk off in two minutes.
I take a four minute shower.
When I pull on a clean set of nearly the same outfit and head back to the kitchen, it is 3:48.
Twelve minutes.
I pull a salad from the fridge: greens, carrots, tomatoes, quinoa, and chicken. Healthy stuff. I grab an apple, two chocolate chips cookies, and a big glass of milk. I sit down at the table and click on my Kindle. I’m reading Lone Survivor, about a Navy SEAL who survives a shootout against the Taliban in the Afghanistan mountains. Amazing stuff.
I eat slowly, soak up each word.
I take the last bite of my second chocolate chip cookie at 3:58.
I turn the Kindle off, stand up, and walk towards the bedroom.
I sit down on my bed at 3:59 a.m.
That’s when I hear the woman’s scream.
I stand up and run to the window. Directly across from my condo is a ranch style house with a gate. The Ford Focus I saw earlier is parked on the street directly in front. I have no idea who lives there. I’ve never seen them. That could be said for all my neighbors.
I know I should go back to my bed, that I am going to fall over any moment. But I can’t. I’m glued to the window. I might as well be stuck between the two panes. I tick off seconds.
The gate opens and a man walks briskly through.
As he opens the door to the Ford Focus, he walks directly under the streetlight. As if sensing my gaze, he turns, and looks up. We lock eyes. Then he gets in the car and drives off.
My last thought as my eyes close and I start falling is the chiseled features and piercing stare of the man.
The President of the United States.
~Two~
By the time I got to my feet, the first minute of my day had already come and gone. My neck was stiff, consequence of sleeping in such an awkward position, but I counted myself lucky. I hadn't hit my head on anything. No blood. No concussion.
I rub my neck as I peer out the window. An echo of the President's face plays over my eyes and I shake my head, eliciting a shooting pain through my sternocleidomastoideus - the long muscle running from the clavicle to just below the ear. Could that really have been him? But it was. There wasn't a shadow of a doubt that the man I'd seen was Connor Sullivan. The 44th President of the United States.
I walk to the kitchen and sit down in front of the laptop. After a short couple seconds I have pulled up the bio of Connor Sullivan on Wikipedia. The once three-term governor of Virginia has dark brown hair parted on the left and gray-green eyes that aren't unlike my own. But that's where the similarities begin and end. Sullivan is the tallest president, dwarfing Lincoln by three inches and Madison by nearly fifteen. He is a head taller than me, which would put me eye-level with the most famous chin dimple in the free world. It only added to his allure that he was an All-American small forward at Dayton.
I thought about adding a quick update to his long and tedious Wikipedia page: April 18th – murders woman in Alexandria, VA.
On this note, I search the local news outlets for an attack or murder, but come up empty.
My cellphone chirps and I quickly respond to my father's “are-you-still-alive” texts and know that he will finally be able to sleep knowing his baby boy is alive and well. My mother left when I was four, unable to cope with my disease, leaving my father to care for me. He worked two jobs, sixteen hour days, but he was there every night I woke up at 3 a.m. He tried to make my life as normal as possible. When I was young, I had twenty minutes of school each morning with Professor Bins. Math, science, spelling – he covered everything. My father was adamant I develop social skills and would pay parents, literally pay them, to get their kids to come play video games or tag or ping-pong with me for a half-hour. (I actually still keep in touch with a couple of them on Facebook.) My dad would call in favors, or shell out grand sums of money for establishments to make special arrangements for me. On my tenth birthday, I woke up at an amusement park. For an hour, the two of us had the whole park to ourselves. When I was 18, he set up a prom for me. The girl was the daughter of a woman he worked with, and she wasn't all that cute, but it had been exciting nonetheless and I did get a quick kiss out of it. He administered my SATs to me over the course of ten nights, standing over me with a stopwatch. (I got a 1420 by the way.) On my 21st birthday, I woke up and my dad had turned the house into a bar and it was full of coeds. I later found out he paid a University of Virginia sorority a couple thousand dollars to pack the place.
I contemplate calling him and telling him about his favorite President, but my father would bury me in a thousand questions and my hour would dissolve like sugar in water.
I grab a sandwich from the fridge and try to shake last night from my mind. Last night was the past. I don't deal in the past. I deal in the present. And presently, I'd wasted eighteen minutes of my day.
I turn Game of Thrones back on and watch as Jon Snow performs fellatio on a redhead Wildling. I feel a sensation in my pants, but decide that with my limited supply of time, masturbation isn't going to make the cut.
I grab my phone, slip on my Asics, remember to grab a beanie, and run out the door.
It is 3:26 a.m.
I will have to cut my run short. I do a seven-minute mile out, then a six-minute mile back. By the time I stand beneath the streetlight, the same streetlight Connor Sullivan parked his car under a day earlier, it is 3:39.
Twenty-one minutes.
I turn and face the house. It is silent, as if the wrought iron gate surrounding it protects it from all threats, even sound. I pull my hand into my shirt and fiddle with the lock atop the gate. It unlatches and the gate swings open with a soft creak. I know what I'm about to do is wrong, both ethically and legally, but what if there is a woman in the house that needs help? It had been nearly twenty-four hours since the scream; she could feasibly still be alive. Right? Either way, you might be asking yourself, why wasn't I calling the police to come check it out?
Simple.
This was the most exciting thing to happen in my 14,000 hours of being awake.
I slide through the opening in the gate, then tiptoe
up the steps. There are two narrow panes of glass running vertically along the door and I lean forward and peer into the house. My eyes are still pinging with the light from the streetlamp and I can't make out a single shape. I lift my hand, still covered by my shirt – I have no plans of leaving any fingerprints – and push down on the wrought iron handle. It gives and the door pushes inward.
I wiggle my foot in the space and push inward until I can fully slip my body through. The door eases shut behind me. I pull out my cellphone and click on the flashlight app. The room brightens.
Breaking and entering. Check and check.
From the shape of the house, I know the garage is left and the kitchen, living room, and bedrooms are to the right. I take a deep breath and whisper, “Hello.”
No one answers.
I begin moving slowly through the house. It is bigger than it appears from the outside, stretching back nearly double what I would have predicted. The house smells clean and tidy and it is. The kitchen is spotless, save for two dishes in the sink, which I deduce once held grilled cheese and tomato soup. The refrigerator is full. Some healthy items. Some not so. There is a large sectional in the living room adjacent to a flat screen TV that I assume, by the 3D glasses next to the remote, is one of the newer models. There are two small bedrooms and one master. The master is the only one that appears lived in. Trinkets, mostly of elephants, fill every imaginable surface.
The bed is made. The pillows perfectly plump and arranged.
My phone vibrates and I realize it is the alarm I set. Knowing full well there was a good chance I might end up inside the house next door, I'd set the alarm to go off at 3:50.
I start back towards the front door and pull it open. Giving the foyer one last survey, I decide that if Connor Sullivan had in fact hurt the woman – who might or might not be the owner of the house – then she wasn't here. So, he'd either come back to clean up his mess, or there had never been a mess to start with, ergo, the woman wasn't hurt. Regardless if it was A, B, C, or otherwise, she wasn't here.
A shadow.
I flick my head around, which sends a bolt of lightning through my neck. The two Advil and the IcyHot I applied had markedly alleviated the pain, but the wrenching of my neck has overpowered the drugs.
I groan at the cat.
He is tan and black and his eyes are orange against the light from my cellphone. He comes forward and rubs against my leg.
“Hey cat.”
He doesn't respond.
I reach down to pet him, but before I touch him, he darts away and slinks down the hallway. I shine my light after him. He meows at a door. I walk toward him and pull the door open.
The smell is overpowering.
I can smell it in my eyes.
I can hear the smell.
The woman is on the hood of the car. She's wearing a blue tank top and plaid pajama bottoms. The woman's neck is swollen and is a tie-dye of red, purple, and blue. IcyHot and Advil will not help this woman.
The cat bounces up and begins meowing at the woman. Below the neck, the woman's body is drained of color, a pastel white. The cat curls up on the woman's chest and lies down.
I take a couple steps forward. By my best guess the woman is in her early twenties. Blond hair and petite. Eyes that were once electric blue are dull and rimmed in blood. She’s still attractive in death and I wonder how many necks she’d turned in life.
There is a chiming and I look down at my phone. I've been standing over the woman's body for seven minutes.
Shit.
As I turn to leave, I realize the sound isn't coming from my phone. It is coming from another phone. Possibly the woman's. The phone rings a third time. It is under the car. I get down on my hands and knees. I drop to my belly. I army crawl until my torso is halfway beneath the low hanging Audi. My fingers touch the outside of the phone's pink casing. I groan, edge forward, try and flip the phone back over on itself. It takes me seven tries. I grab the phone, push myself painfully from beneath the car and get to my feet.
I am huffing and puffing.
I look down at the phone. It is a white Samsung Galaxy S4 in a pink case. The call has expired. The time is 3:59.
I sprint out of the garage and to the front door. Can I get home in time? It's a hundred yards then up three flights of stairs. What if I fall over in the middle of the road? What if I only make it to the front yard? What if someone finds me, then comes and finds the woman's body?
I will wake up in jail.
I decide there's no way I can make it.
I have to hide.
I run to one of the small bedrooms, open the closet, and lay down. I'm still looking for a way to extend my legs when I fall asleep.
~Three~
He's on my stomach. The cat.
“Yo.”
Cat lifts his head, stares at me with his orange eyes, then rests his head back down on my chest. The events of the past night come flooding back. The woman's body. The phone under the car. The fact I am hiding in a closet with a cat on my chest.
I push myself up on my haunches, sending Cat fleeing to places unknown. This time it isn't my neck, it's my back. It is screaming. I run my hand over my lower oblique and feel a quarter-inch depression that is sore to the touch. Gentle moonlight cascades through an open window, softly illuminating the plastic hanger I have slept on.
Ugh.
Once on my feet, I find my phone.
It is 3:02 a.m.
I feel around in my opposite pocket and find the other phone. The pink Samsung. A picture, a narrow white obelisk, the Washington Monument, fills the screen. The woman has been dead for going on forty-eight hours and I expect to see a barrage of texts, but there is only the missed call from the night before. Did this woman have any friends? Co-workers? Did anyone even know she was missing? I want to see what the number was that called, but the four boxes centering the phone lead me to believe the phone is locked. It is. I try 1234, but surprisingly it doesn't work. I make a mental note to put the Samsung back under the car for the police to find. I wipe any prints I might have left on the phone with my sleeve and put it in the pocket of my sweat pants.
As for the police, obviously, they hadn't come in the last day, or if they had, they were a shoddy bunch. I'd been asleep in an open closet. Surely, they would have stumbled upon me and I would have awoken in jail, possibly already having undergone my first round of sodomy. So, I wasn't altogether surprised to find the woman in the same place I'd last seen her. As for the state of her, that was an entirely different story. The condition of the body was a far cry from what I'd seen just a day earlier. Beneath a steady swarm of insects, the woman's body is decomposing. It smells of sulfur and it is intolerable. The smell twenty-four hours earlier was of fresh linen comparatively.
I gag and retreat back into the main house.
It is 3:04.
I make my way into the kitchen and once again slink my hand into my sweatshirt and open the refrigerator. Grabbing two string cheeses, I open one, and slowly begin checking drawers. I am looking for mail. Or something with the woman's name on it. But there are no electric bills, no catalogs, not a single trace of her identity. No wallet, no White House press pass, no steamy letters from Connor Sullivan.
I spend another five minutes poking around, then decide I've already pushed my luck and head for the front door. Thinking better of it, I make my way through the living room and to a sliding glass door that leads to a small back patio. Sliding the door closed, I give one last glance behind me.
Cat is staring at me through the glass door.
Meow.
"What?"
Meow.
"Sorry, I'm more of dog guy."
Meow.
"I don't know, go drink out of the toilet."
Meow.
"There's plenty of string cheese in the fridge."
Meow.
"Fine."
I quickly open the door and Cat jumps into my arms.
It is 3:13 when we get back to my place.<
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I am just as thirsty as Cat and I drink three glasses of water. I grab a sandwich and shake for me and open a can of tuna for Cat. He takes another couple laps of water from the bowl I set down, then makes his way to the food and starts lick eating it, like they do. I lean down and check his neck, but he doesn't have a collar.
"Well, I can't be calling you Cat, now can I?"
I think back to how he'd directed me to the garage door and said, "Just like when Timmy fell in the well."
Lassie.
He looks up and nods, almost if to say, works for me.
"Well, Lassie, I hate to tell you this because I know you are a staunch, right wing conservative, but your mom was killed by the President of the United States. This is what happens when we elect Republicans."
He licks himself in response.
I toss my clothes on the couch and take a two-minute shower. After rubbing IcyHot into my lower back, I throw on some fresh sweats, a fresh hoody, wrangle my cell out of the pocket of my sweat pants on the couch and look at the time.
3:22 a.m.
I have a lot to accomplish in thirty-eight minutes.
Fifteen minutes later, I am holding the pay phone in my hand. It is the only pay phone I know of and happens to be at Summer Park. I'm not overly concerned with anyone seeing me, but I pull the beanie down and flap up the hood of my sweatshirt, which I'm guessing makes me look all that more suspicious. The 911 call is simple and short, there is a dead woman at 1561 Sycamore.
There is a squad car parked in front of the house when I return and I take the back entrance to my condo.
Peeking through the curtains, Lassie on my lap, busily licking his hind paws, I watch as three more squad cars arrive, followed fittingly by a van with Alexandria Crime Scene Unit inscribed on the side.
With one minute left, I give one last glance out the window at the dancing red and blue lights, then lie down on my pillow. Lassie snuggles up next to me.
After sleeping on the ground two nights in a row, I'm quite happy to have made it back to my bed, but as I close my eyes, I can't shake the feeling I've forgotten something.