by Sean Oliver
After it would dissipate, George could remember everything he did while in the arms of that warm feeling. It wasn’t often he was fully overtaken—he was able to grab control of his thoughts, focus intently on a task, and the Smoke would break up and fade.
He moved into the bathroom and filled a paper cup with sink water. That night had been rough. The Smoke kept coming in George’s sleep. The feeling that he was losing control would jar him awake, but when he’d drift off again, he felt it return to his back. His twilight sleep was filled with images of the Hacienda. Not dreams, exactly. Just fantasies of the unconscious.
In his mind he saw all the cabins in the woods, all six of them, spaced twenty or so yards apart. He saw steel lookout terraces high in the trees. Ladders were affixed to the trunks and about twenty feet up there was a platform with a railing. All around there was vast wilderness. He’d seen a clearing with water beyond the housing area. Might have been a lake, maybe something smaller.
Then he’d awaken. He made sure he woke himself up before he went fully into the Smoke. But then he kept falling back asleep, kept seeing the images, and kept having that feeling.
Ten minutes ago he got up and walked to the bathroom. While awake, he could fight it off. He filled a cup with more cold water and drank it slowly. He worked to further awaken himself, stepping off the rectangular carpet and onto the cold tile. Another cup of cold water.
The Smoke was calling, more and more each day. The intensity of the feeling grew as the calendar advanced. George fought hard. He didn’t know how long he’d be able to, but right there, in that bathroom, he’d beat it again. He wouldn’t sleep much that night, maybe head back and drift off for an hour or so. But he knew it would come again as his body relaxed and the mind released its defenses. If that happened, he’d get up again. He would do it as many times as it took. Rose slept like an overworked lumberjack and he could get up and down twenty times without stirring her.
But there was a reality to this; he was worn down.
In a strange way, one that George had mulled over and dismissed a thousand times, he knew he wouldn’t have still been alive at all had it not been for the Smoke. George stood in the bathroom and thought, yet again, about the afternoon two years ago when he’d walked in the house after work, barely able to breathe. He’d been winded before, but this was different. He couldn’t get up the stairs, not one. He was unable to bring his knee up high enough to drop his foot on a step. He stood in the foyer, leaning against the railing, his coat and bag still on his body. He saw sweat dripping from his face onto the cream-carpeted bottom step.
Rose called to him when she heard the door and walked to the top step when he didn’t respond. She saw his condition and instantly called 9-1-1. It saved his life and she’d not let that fact go unknown.
EMS had responded and he was stretchered into the ambulance, through the ER, into rooms for tests, and ultimately into surgery. Throughout the process he experienced all the numbness and tightness typically associated with such an episode, but also detected faint wafts of that weird smoky feeling that he’d had since he was a kid, up his spine. It was never anything significant enough to discuss with a parent or teacher. Everyone probably got weird sensations here and there.
But on that day in the ambulance—when he felt his jaw involuntarily clenching during a surge of breathlessness that made a machine above him go haywire and the put the paramedics into scramble-mode—that smoky feeling rolled in and filled him fully for the first time. It relaxed his muscles, his jaw. He drew steady breath for the first time in seven or eight minutes. It kept him going. He’d really felt himself fading, but after the Smoke he wasn’t scared. He wasn’t anything—he just watched everything happening around him.
A dye test showed a ninety-nine percent blockage in the left coronary artery, and blockages in the eightieth and ninetieth percentiles in three other arteries. Within a few hours, stents were in and opening George up. He was home in a couple of days, no doubt due to Rosemary’s instincts and a skilled surgeon. But George couldn’t fight off the notion that he was going south in the back of the ambulance until that feeling crept in. Had it not been a recognizable feeling from days past, he would have thought paramedics shot something potent in the IV. But they hadn’t.
So as he stood in the bathroom drinking cold water, awakened yet again, he couldn’t curse that feeling altogether. But it had been getting so much more intrusive in recent weeks.
He turned back to the bedroom. The sight of the big bed drew him in, but his feet didn’t move. He watched Rose, watched the moonlight drape itself across her and over to his empty side of the bed with the rumpled mountain of duvet. Sunlight wasn’t far away. He’d probably get back into a comfortable sleep only to have the alarm go off.
He left the bedroom and found his way down into his office in the basement of the split-level house. He paced the room, knowing full well he couldn’t wander the house for two hours. These nighttime battles usually carried him in and out of bed a few times, and when the encroachment was more severe, around the house. In the past two weeks he’d awoken on the couch, at the dining room table, and as he dropped into his leather office chair that night he knew he’d be adding this location to the list, as well.
He leaned back and the chair filled the empty room with a squeak. Moonlight spilled through the small, high windows on one side of the room. It touched the metal frames of some plaques on the wall above his desk. George could barely read any actual text in that silver light, but he had the inscriptions on all of them memorized. The light started at the highest, left-most award, which read, Teacher of the Year - 1984. Beside it, another one from 1988.
George’s head rested against the tuft of leather-clad cushion at the top of the chair as his eyes rolled across the wall—administrative accolades from the Carson Public School District; a Best Faculty Attendance award; a posed handshake moment with New Jersey’s last governor; a proclamation from the mayor of Carson in 2002 for the school’s service during the days after 9/11, just across the river. They smelled the smoke for weeks and they saw it from the windows in the school. Not long after that award, George met Alan.
Two years after the national tragedy, P.S. 21 got a new teacher as a direct result of the attack on America. Alan Sweeney, seventh-grade math teacher, won’t talk about his prior career at the world’s second largest investment firm. He wasn’t ashamed of it. It was actually exciting, especially for a twenty-four-year-old associate working in downtown Manhattan. Expense-account dinners at Balthazar and late nights with deafening dance music at Webster Hall were standard fare in the rocking and rolling world of late 90s high finance.
Alan was reserved and erudite when he first sat before George at his interview, looking for his first job in education. He answered all the standard questions about college credits and his education license via the alternate route program, which allowed for a more expedited path to a teaching certificate. George just couldn’t figure out why this guy was leaving finance to make half the salary and get half the respect.
Alan looked at George and asked if he’d every carried a dead body down sixty-six flights of stairs. Alan assured him that he should have been dead himself when the second plane hit, but he’d just happened to make it to the stairwell seconds beforehand. The young lady who stumbled out of her floor, burned and unable to breathe, was not as lucky. He’d grabbed her and tried to get her down in time as the stairwell flooded with workers, piling in from the dozens of floors below him.
“How awful,” George had told him. “But also how fortunate.”
“Just had a feeling,” Alan said.
George turned from his wall of awards and closed his eyes, having grown more tired recounting the story of another staff member who probably should have been dead.
FORTY
DEANNA SLID OUT of bed and went straight down the hallway. She’d been laying awake for hours debating whether or not to actually get up. Her mind was ablaze since the violation of her home earl
ier. She’d been pretty disturbed by the people at work, then downright distraught after discovering the laptop in George’s office. Then the car accident.
Now her mind raced. She was hellfire angry—not only was her friend gone, but the people responsible had crossed a transom into her very own home. More and more disorder was yielding less and less insight. Each time she’d seen O’Malley he had more questions than answers. What the hell were these cops doing?
More disheartening was the fact that the more aggressive staff had shown clean records when O’Malley ran everyone. She knew that put to rest any credibility in her statements about them. The detective probably spoke to them, as he promised he would when she’d visited on her lunch hour. They would have been polite, would have expressed confusion about the conflict of which he was speaking. They would have said they liked Trisha very much, would not have really had a chance to get to know her yet, but she seemed nice.
Deanna pulled the bedroom door closed on her way out. She crept down the hallway and slid open the closet that held the couple’s assorted coats and outerwear. The top shelf, running across the entire length of closet, held Deanna’s bags. She pushed aside a couple of smart Kate Spade purses and grabbed a wide bag near the back. She took it down and walked to the living room.
She sat on the couch and forced herself not to look at the clock display on the cable box. She kept the lights off, but there was enough residual city light coming through the windows and bouncing off the ceiling to see what she was doing.
She opened the bag and slid Trisha’s laptop out. George had never mentioned it—neither the theft nor finding of it. Deanna took it that day in his office, and waited—there had to be an explanation. But none came from her father.
She powered it on and cringed when it sang its jingle upon boot up. Jared was just a silent room away and she didn’t want him awake, asking about the laptop or talking about anything. She wasn’t even sure she had good reason to have taken it. She’d done it on instinct, reaching out and snatching a piece of her best friend.
Deanna gently stroked the surface of the keyboard, running her fingertips across the curves of the keys. Both hands tickled the computer in slow, smooth strokes. She then held it by its sides and slid it along her thighs, closer to her body, coming to rest against her belly.
Trisha was perfect. She was never competitive with Deanna, and Deanna never had to look over her shoulder. Trisha answered every text sent to her from Deanna, within seconds. She listened. And listened. Trisha was never too busy for her. She was a friend she could count on at all times.
Never too busy. Never really busy at all.
Deanna sat in the glow of the laptop’s screen and thought about it all. She held the computer as the desktop icons came to life. Trisha was probably the last one to see that very screen. The icons were probably arranged to her liking. Behind each one lay her last interaction with the individual programs, etched into this world with the click of Save File. A most unfeeling, mechanical device felt suddenly so human.
Deanna didn’t want to disturb a single thing on the computer, but she wanted to use it. She needed to. She launched the Internet browser and went to the Carson Public School District website. She wasn’t sure she’d remember how to use what she’d been shown, but she would give it a shot. It was all she could think about in bed—the one advantage, however illegal, she had over the cops.
She put the computer on the coffee table and walked to the closet door. She squatted and unzipped Jared’s computer bag. She stuck her hand in, fished around, and pulled out a wireless mouse, a couple of cables, and eventually the flash drive.
She was back on the couch with Trisha’s laptop and Jared’s flash drive in her hand. She looked to the bedroom door. Still shut, still quiet. She slid the flash drive into the USB slot and clicked on “Glitchy.exe.” Four windows appeared on the screen, just like the time Jared used it on the Carson Public Schools site, and that’s exactly where she was heading herself.
But nothing was happening. She clicked refresh on the browser and then as the school website rebuilt, the Glitchy windows suddenly became populated with information, including the list of logins and passwords used on that site recently. She scanned names, looking for someone with a high level of clearance to personnel information.
Where was that HR guy? There.
Dmitri Tavares was a pretty reliable human resources employee, as he’d logged in last at 10:34 p.m. that night. And unbeknownst to Mr. Tavares, he logged in again right then and there, from Deanna’s living room, sitting on the down-filled, linen couch.
In seconds, Deanna was viewing the personnel files. She sorted them by schools and scrolled to the P.S. 21 staff. She clicked on Arlene first, wicked bitch cousin number one. Had to be something suspicious in her file, some kind of disciplinary history. Deanna clicked through Arlene’s evaluation scores, assignments, personal info, birthdate, hire date, insurance carrier, salary—nothing. Record was totally clean.
She clicked over to Mary Edison. That weirdo had to have been institutionalized at some point, standing on windowsills in teachers’ lounges and whatnot. Probably wouldn’t say that, but it would certainly indicate a medical leave if she had ever been on one, which Deanna soon learned she hadn’t. She did share a birthday with Jared, though—April 5th. Actually, Jared and her father. They’d always been stupid about it, joking about the unimpressive feat of having been born on the same day as an in-law. Now Mary could get in on the joke.
Grace Pappas, Trisha’s grade-level partner, wasn’t beyond suspicion either. She was part of the teachers’ room chorus of weirdos. Deanna found her name and clicked on it next. She’d transferred in just three years ago from outside of the district. Not really significant. But what was most curious was April 5th being listed as her birthdate, as well. There had to be some crazy glitch in the site, or in the board’s records, defaulting all birthdates to April 5th.
Deanna clicked on her own name and opened the personal info tab. Her birthday, July 30th, was listed correctly. She clicked the name just below hers—Willie, the janitor.
April 5th.
Arlene again. April 5th.
The next ten names.
April 5th, all of them.
Deanna slid back on the couch, gliding away from the laptop’s light. It was ridiculous. These staff members weren’t all the same age. Is that what the birthdates on the site said? She leaned back into the laptop and clicked into the names she’d checked and noticed that though they all had the day April 5th listed, each person had a different year in which they were born.
Trisha. What about Trisha? Deanna scrolled to her name and clicked it.
June 19th. Correct.
She kept clicking, rather quickly suspecting the outcome toward which she was headed. She scrolled down to the next school in the sort, P.S. 22. She clicked random names and was met with random birthdates, none of them April 5th.
P.S. 23. Four names, four different birthdates. Back to P.S. 21.
She poked into every name listed beside P.S. 21. After just a few minutes she’d seen what she knew she would—Deanna and Trisha were the only two regular staff members in the school building not born on April 5th.
FORTY-ONE
“GEORGE?”
She was up about a half hour before she usually got out of bed to put on George’s coffee. Rosemary no doubt rolled over to an empty bed, thus the investigation.
“Bathroom,” he replied. Sunlight was just beginning to win its daily fight. He hadn’t gone back to bed since waking a few hours earlier. He’d dozed for a few minutes downstairs in his office chair, but that position was not conducive to staying relaxed for long, much less asleep. So he’d gone in the shower, having started the morning with a stiff neck an hour before he even needed to be awake.
He noted the pronounced bags under his eyes as he watched himself button his shirt in the mirror. The coffee would get him going.
“Up early, huh?” Rose asked from the bedroom. George retu
rned something guttural, just short of a word. Rose usually didn’t require the other end of a conversation, so any utterance was sufficient. He listened from the bathroom as she headed out of the bedroom and down the hallway, discussing the temperature of the house with herself.
George began to put on his necktie, still looking into the mirror. As often as he averted his eyes from the thick scab on his finger, it was always there. Like now—twisting and looping the tie flap, the cut dancing its grotesque existence across George’s mirror and his mind.
He kept tying. The Smoke would not envelop him. His actions during these past weeks would not define him.
But April was coming and there would be still more questions about his roster. Albrecht, Calhoun, and some of the others with the balls to question a principal would do so, and with increased frequency and a growing desperation.
He shook himself from a stare that derailed him completely. The sleeplessness was becoming burdensome and he could feel himself slowing down. Once he was out of the bathroom, George walked to his nightstand and unplugged his cell phone. There was already a missed call and a voice mail from the City of Carson. Must’ve just come in.
George made it into the kitchen, fully dressed, before the coffee finished brewing. Rose was preparing toast.
“You should grab something before you go,” she said. “You going in now? It’s so early.”
“I’m up. I’ll get a head start.”
“Making toast. Jelly? Butter?”
George’s mouth was gelatin. He wasn’t up for the struggle of having to form words. “Uh-uh,” was all he managed. Didn’t need his mouth for that. He sat at the table watching the coffee stream into the pot, taking note of how long it seemed to be taking.
“Got fruit, George. I can cut up those strawberries. We got bananas, too.”