by Jude Hardin
“You’ve been watching too much television,” Mike said again, only this time he didn’t laugh.
This time he cried.
And Wahlman cried too.
Then Mike reached across the table and put his hand on Wahlman’s shoulder and started nudging him gently and telling him it was time to wake up.
Wahlman opened his eyes and saw Belinda standing there by the bed.
The clock on the wall said 6:47.
Which was wrong.
Wahlman knew it was wrong, because he always woke up at 5:27, no matter what time he went to bed—the result of setting an alarm clock for that time back when he was still in the navy. He didn’t know exactly what time it was right now, but he knew it wasn’t 6:47. He knew it was way earlier than that.
He didn’t say anything. Manipulation of the clock—and the participant’s perception of how much sleep he or she had gotten—was obviously part of the experiment, and he didn’t want to risk losing his payment by letting on that he’d figured it out.
“How do you feel?” Belinda asked.
“Fine. I could use some coffee.”
“I’ll get you some in a little while, but first I want you to go through the little test I told you about.”
“Okay.”
“I’m going to leave the room so you can get dressed. I’ll be right outside the door whenever you’re ready.”
Wahlman climbed out of bed and put his clothes on. He made a quick trip to the restroom, and then Belinda led him out of the sleep lab and over to one of the cubicles out in the office suite. She gave him a brief set of instructions, and then she left him there alone while he sat at the desk and worked on the test. He was to finish as much as he could in fifteen minutes. It was mostly about memory. Lists of random words and then questions to see how many of the words you could remember. Wahlman guessed they were trying to see if the participants who thought they had gotten eight hours of sleep performed as well or nearly as well as the participants who actually had gotten eight hours of sleep. He read through the lists of words and answered as many questions as he could as fast as he could.
Belinda brought a cup of coffee with her when she returned.
“Has it been fifteen minutes already?” Wahlman asked.
“Yes. Here’s a cup of coffee for you, and here’s your payment for participating in the study.”
She set the coffee and the money on the desk.
“Thank you,” Wahlman said. “Am I free to go now?”
“You are. But I need to tell you something first.”
“Okay.”
“You didn’t really sleep eight hours.”
“I didn’t?” Wahlman asked, playing along.
“You only slept two.”
“But the clock in the room—”
“It’s wrong. We intentionally misled you to believe that you got way more sleep than you actually did.”
“Amazing,” Wahlman said. “So what time is it?”
“Almost one-thirty. The purpose of the study is to see if the effects of sleep deprivation can be significantly altered by distorting one’s perception of how much sleep was gotten.”
“So how did I do on the test?”
“I’m not allowed to share those results with you. Sorry. How do you think you did?”
“I think I aced it,” Wahlman said. “And I didn’t even study.”
Belinda laughed. “I’ll get your things out of the storage room,” she said.
Wahlman folded the money and slid it into his pocket. Now he had two hundred and twelve dollars. Enough to live on for a few days.
He drank some of the coffee while he waited for Belinda to return. He stared at the blank computer screen and thought about Kasey, suddenly realizing that he didn’t even know her last name. And of course she didn’t know his real name. To her, he was Tom. He wondered if he would ever be able to trust anyone enough to divulge the facts pertaining to his past, and the total uncertainty of his future. He needed a friend. An ally. Hard to come by when you drifted around the country under an assumed name, traveling from town to town on buses and trains, staying at cheap hotels and eating cheap food, living out of a backpack and saving your quarters for the next depressing little coin laundry in the next depressing little strip mall. With a lifestyle like that, it was practically impossible to form bonds and establish trust.
But that was what Rock Wahlman needed. Maybe there was a way to have that with Kasey, he thought. He didn’t really know her, but she seemed smart and responsible and trustworthy and conscientious. Maybe he would tell her the truth someday. Maybe someday soon. Maybe he would tell her that he was the result of an experiment that started over a hundred years ago, an exact genetic duplicate of a man who lived back when Mars was a place that people only dreamed about going to, and maybe he would tell her that someone in the army was determined to make him disappear for some unknown reason.
And maybe she would even believe him.
Belinda was wearing a nylon ski jacket and a knit scarf when she carried his backpack and his other things into the cubicle.
“I was hoping you might let me go back to bed,” Wahlman said.
“Sorry. I need to lock everything up when I leave. I know it’s not the most convenient time to be going home, but—”
“Do the buses even run this late?”
“They run all night,” Belinda said. “I took a late one a while back when my car was being worked on. I was the only passenger for several miles. Just me and the driver. Which was kind of creepy, if you want to know the truth. Anyway, you don’t have to take the bus. I can give you a ride home if you want.”
Wahlman thought about that. There was no home, of course, and he didn’t want to spend money on a hotel room, not when checkout time would only be a few hours away. He couldn’t go to Kasey’s. Not that she would turn him away, but he didn’t want to impose, especially with her daughter there at the house. I don’t usually do the whole introduction thing unless it’s someone who might be around for a while.
And Wahlman wasn’t a be around for a while kind of guy.
Not because he didn’t want to be.
Because he couldn’t be.
“Could you give me a ride to The Quick Street Inn?” he asked.
“I’m pretty sure that place is closed right now,” Belinda said.
“They open at six.”
“You’re going to wait that long?”
“I’m staying with a friend who lives over that way,” Wahlman said, hoping to avoid the need for any further explanation.
“Okay, then,” Belinda said. “Sure. I’ll give you a ride.”
Belinda switched the lights off on the way out of the office suite. Wahlman followed her down the stairs and into the atrium and out the door, and then he strolled along beside her on the sidewalk. The disheveled security guard gave them a little wave as they passed the Humanities building.
It had gotten colder outside and the wind had picked up.
Wahlman reached into his backpack and pulled out his watch cap.
Six o’clock suddenly seemed a long way off.
12
Wahlman sat on the bench outside the pharmacy. He’d decided to take the caboose job, and he wanted to talk to Greg about it as soon as the diner was open for business. He turned his collar up and pulled his cap down as far as it would go and closed his eyes.
Just four hours, he told himself. He actually had a fairly high tolerance for uncomfortable weather conditions. It was one of the skills he’d developed in the navy. Four hours was nothing. He’d spent four months in Alaska one time, out in the middle of nowhere, standing watches for sixteen hours at a time sometimes, in subzero temperatures. Four hours was a cakewalk. He could have done it standing on his head. He would have preferred to have been in a nice warm bed somewhere, of course, but it wasn’t that big of a deal.
Only it was that big of a deal. This was the first night he’d spent outside since he left his home in Florida. He didn’t want thi
s to be the new normal. He refused for it to be the new normal. This would be the one and only time, he told himself. From now on, he would find a decent place to sleep at night, no matter what.
He felt himself dozing off, and then he heard footsteps approaching.
More than one set.
He opened his eyes and glanced over toward the diner. It was the man in the red hat and his two friends. Wandering the streets at two o’clock in the morning. Wahlman wondered when they slept and what they did for money.
They walked over to the bench and stood there and stared down at him, the man in the red hat flanked by the other two guys. The other two hadn’t been wearing hats earlier, but they were now. The guy on the left was wearing a white one, and the guy on the right was wearing a blue one. Red, White, and Blue. The colors of our great nation, Wahlman thought. The colors he’d spent twenty years of his life defending. It didn’t seem quite right for these punks to be wearing them.
“Why are you still here?” Red asked.
“It’s a free country,” Wahlman said.
“The bus depot’s right up the road. Go exercise your constitutional rights somewhere else.”
Silence for a few beats, and then the guy in the white hat spoke up.
“This is our spot,” he said.
“I don’t see your name on it,” Wahlman said.
“We always sit here. It’s our spot.”
“We could make you get up,” Blue said.
“You could try,” Wahlman said.
The three of them moved in closer. Wahlman took a deep breath, and then he rammed the bottom of his right boot into Red’s solar plexus. As Red was stumbling backwards and gasping for breath, Wahlman stood and clocked White in the jaw with a left hook. It was a vicious blow, one that landed squarely, one that immediately put White out of commission for the rest of the morning.
Or maybe for longer than the rest of the morning.
Wahlman didn’t want to kill these guys, but he wasn’t going to pull any punches. Not when it was three against one. Not when at least one of the three was carrying a deadly weapon. The pearl-handled pocketknife Wahlman had seen yesterday morning at the diner. The switchblade. Which Red produced a couple of seconds after White collapsed on the sidewalk. He came at Wahlman with the knife, charging toward him recklessly, swinging the blade in a figure-eight, nostrils flared, breath steaming, eyes as red as his hat. As he moved in with the knife, Blue stepped behind Wahlman and clouted him in the back of the head with something that felt like the butt of a pistol or a baseball bat. Everything went black for a second and Wahlman’s knees got weak and the next thing he knew Blue was holding him from behind and Red was pressing the blade against the side of his throat.
“You’re not so big and tough now, are you?” Red said.
“Do it,” Blue said. “Cut him.”
Wahlman didn’t want to kill these guys, but they weren’t giving him much of a choice. He spun away from Red and backed Blue into the parking meter at the edge of the curb. Blue grunted loudly as the mechanical knob on the front of the meter dug into the flesh on his back. When his grip loosened, Wahlman turned and brought an elbow down on the top of his nose. There was a crisp snap as bone met bone, a sound something like that of a pencil being broken in half, followed by copious streams of bright red blood from both nostrils.
While Blue was staggering across Main Street, maybe trying to escape from the pain and the dizziness and the bitter taste of blood and defeat, maybe trying to remember his own name, Wahlman squared off against Red, who was still holding the knife.
“You should back off now, while you still have a chance,” Wahlman said. “You should help your friends. They’re in desperate need of medical attention.”
Red didn’t say anything. And he didn’t back off. He was hyped up on something. Some kind of drug. Wahlman could see it in his eyes. Crystal meth, maybe. Or something similar. Which meant that he wasn’t thinking clearly. Which made him twice as dangerous as someone who was. He started doing the figure-eight thing again, slashing the air with the shiny steel blade as he slowly moved closer to where Wahlman was standing. There was no real defense against such a maneuver, other than running away or obtaining a superior weapon. A gun would have been nice. Or a sword. Or even a two-by-four. But Wahlman didn’t have any of those things. The only thing in reach was the bench he’d been sitting on. It was six feet long. Solid oak slats on a steel frame. It probably weighed two hundred pounds. Or more. Wahlman reached around and picked it up and advance toward Red in a single relentless forward motion, like a locomotive pulling out of the station, driving Red backwards into the same parking meter his friend had been slammed against a couple of minutes earlier.
If the meter had been a brick wall, Red would have been crushed against it. From the weight of the bench, and from Wahlman’s forward momentum. Broken ribs, massive bruising, internal bleeding. Death, maybe. Hospitalization for sure. But the meter wasn’t a brick wall. It was a coin-operated steel and glass timing mechanism called the head mounted onto a steel pipe called the stem. A long time ago, insurance lobbyists had convinced lawmakers that the pipes should be designed to break at the base if hit with enough force, thereby avoiding the potential vehicular damage and personal injury that might result otherwise. It was a lot cheaper to replace a parking meter than it was to replace a car, and nearly everyone agreed that the infrastructural makeover was a good idea as far as public safety was concerned—and a good talking point for when election year came around. So it became a law, and every parking meter in the country was fitted with a shiny new breakaway stem, including the one the guy in the red hat was being backed into on this chilly January night in Barstow, California.
There was only one problem. The lawmakers who had mandated the nationwide change in parking meter stems hadn’t anticipated the high consumer demand for electric vehicles that had occurred during the energy crisis of the mid-2080s. There was no way for them to know that by 2090 one in three American automobiles—one in three of the everyday passenger vehicles parked along the thoroughfares in the business districts of cities large and small coast-to-coast—would be powered solely by batteries. And since they didn’t know that, there was no way for them to know that approximately one third of their ingenious new parking meter stems would be retrofitted with ingenious new charging ports.
The subject of parking meter safety was once again being discussed in Washington, and a bill had been drafted that would require expensive underground motion-sensitive circuit breakers to be installed at every charging port—digital ground fault interruption modules to augment the mechanical ones already in place, which had been shown to be ineffective under certain conditions.
But the law hadn’t been passed yet.
Which meant that a fancy new circuit breaker hadn’t been installed under the meter that the man in the red hat was being backed into.
The stem broke at the base, just as it was designed to do, and the weight of the bench came down hard on the man in the red hat, trapping him against the pavement. The power cables attached to the charging port were uprooted, and apparently the jagged end of the pipe sliced through the insulation enclosing one of them. The live wire started dancing around at the edge of the curb, humming its high voltage tune and showering the area with bright orange sparks.
“Get this thing off of me,” Red said, referring to the heavy steel and wood bench parked on his chest.
“Don’t move,” Wahlman said. “There’s a hot power line about six inches away from your left foot.”
Red didn’t listen. He moved. And it wasn’t the fearful kind of movement you make when you’re trying to wriggle away from certain death. It was the aggressive kind of movement you make when you’re still determined to win.
Somehow, he’d managed to hold onto the switchblade. As a young master at arms pulling shore patrol duty from time to time, Wahlman had seen his share of them. The ones he’d confiscated were cheap and ugly and sharp as a razor. Good for street braw
ls and not much else.
But then Red probably wasn’t planning on peeling an apple.
He propped himself up on his left elbow, reared back and threw the knife overhand, whizzed it through the air with perfect aim, the blade and the handle whirring end-over-end directly toward Wahlman’s heart.
Instinctively, Wahlman raised his elbows and closed them together at the front of his core, using his upper extremities as sort of a shield, his massive forearms pressed together like two books on a shelf. The knife could have thudded into his lower abdomen, or his thighs, or the muscles in his arms, but it didn’t. It bounced off his left sleeve and skittered harmlessly into the gutter.
Harmlessly for Wahlman.
Not for the man in the red hat.
As it turned out, the open knife, which happened to be just long enough to span the area between the sparking wire and the man’s left foot, was an excellent conductor of electrical current.
Wahlman couldn’t watch. And he couldn’t wait around for the police to show up. Which meant that he couldn’t wait around for The Quick Street Inn to open. Which, among other things, meant that he couldn’t even tell Kasey goodbye.
He turned and started walking east on Main, toward the bus station.
Eight blocks, if he remembered correctly.
13
Mr. Tyler was having a very good dream when his bedside alarm clock started wailing. He briefly considered hitting the snooze button and trying to go back to sleep, but he didn’t. He had work to do.