No Sleep till Wonderland

by Paul Tremblay

  I take a few steps away from the center of the room, toward the hallway door that leads to another, unchartered part of the building. My left leg is asleep and fills with pins and needles, voicing its displeasure at being woken up.

  Voice mail. Ekat says, “Hi, Mark. Just checking in, seeing how you’re doing, seeing if you heard anything or learned anything more.” (I like how she leaves that open-ended, like I’m some half-assed student of what’s-going-on?)

  “I’m at the gym and going straight into work again, but let’s meet for lunch at the L Street Diner tomorrow at twelve. Okay? Aw, shit, my phone’s dying. I’ll see you tomorrow. Noon! Okay? Bye!”

  Maybe it just feels like everything has changed because of my afternoon with Jody and what she said about Gus, but Ekat sounded measured, rehearsed. A bad actor on a worse soap opera.

  I call her back, and her voice mail picks up after four rings. I leave a message: “We need to talk. Preferably before noon tomorrow.”

  I call her bar, the Pour House. I tell the hostess a quick and hokey sob story. I’m Ekat’s brother, back in town for a couple of days, and I want to surprise her tonight. I’m so caring and fun. I ask what shift she’s working, and I ask her to keep my arrival hush-hush. The hostess has a voice filled with helium. She laughs and says that she didn’t know Ekat had a brother. I tell her I know, people are funny with the secrets they keep. She goes away, then comes back quickly and tells me that Ekat isn’t scheduled to work tonight and doesn’t think she switched with anyone as the downstairs bar is already covered. I thank her and hang up.

  Behind me, Dr. Who takes my old chair. I think of it as mine although I can make no proprietary claim on it. My chair is the last one to be placed and stacked with the others, up against the far wall.

  Dr. Who surveys his chair monument and claps his hands. Another job well done. He turns to me and says, “So, Mark, I’m probably not going to see you next week, am I?”

  I have to hand it to him. He’s a perceptive son of a bitch. I pull out a cigarette and put the stick in my mouth, between my teeth like it’s a cigar, only it’s not a cigar.

  I fade across the room to the front door, thinking my broken-glass smile is enough of an answer for him. But then I stop at the door. I do have something to say to Dr. Who, even if all the words aren’t really meant for him. I need the practice, because I’m so far from perfect.

  “This isn’t your fault, doc.” I’m careful to enunciate and project. We all want to be so goddamned dramatic and important. We all want the long, slow goodbyes. “It was my fault. I am sorry. Thank you. Goodbye.” I don’t stumble over any of the words, but I sound like I’m reading unpleasant news.

  Twenty-Five

  I leave the Wellness Center with a false sense of dignity and hangover intact. I apply inhaled tobacco and feel worse, but at least I’m feeling something. A dying bumblebee of a taxi stops for my flailing hand, the hand with a plan: home and then to Ekat’s. The cab sulks down D Street, quick detour onto West Second, then onto Broadway and to my building, where it abandons me.

  I’m not on speaking terms with my office, and I head directly upstairs. The walk through my living room is a horror movie, and I watch it through my fingers, hiding my eyes from the scary and icky scenes. The kitchen isn’t any better, but I’m hungry, and I eat a can of beef ravioli. The pasta pockets of processed meat taste like cigarettes.

  I add the red-stained bowl to the slag heap in the sink. Tomorrow, I promise myself, there’ll be a big clean. Or maybe the day after tomorrow. It’ll get done someday. Procrastination is a form of optimism. That’s me, Mr. Sunshine and Lollypops.

  This is only supposed to be a pit stop, but I’m winding down, Pavlov’s reaction to my environment. Turning on the TV and getting lost on my couch is a concept rapidly gaining appeal. I can’t let that happen. I flee into the bathroom and shut the door. The couch is the real boogeyman in my living room.

  I peel out of my clothes, the scrub pants sticking to hair and other more fleshy parts of my lower half. I shower with the water scalding hot. Hot enough to melt the layers of sweat and stink off me, too hot to just stand there and fall asleep. Postshower, the razor sprints a few laps around my neck, tripping when I nod out for a microsecond and cutting the skin on the lower left side of my Adam’s apple. Blood bullies through the toilet paper patch, but I’ll live.

  I dig out a mostly clean set of shirt/pant/tie combo. I cut off my hospital bracelet but leave on the rubber band Ekat gave me. I don’t usually accessorize. I’m all dressed up with nowhere to go, and it’s dark outside, darker than I expected.

  Before leaving I do stop in my office. In the top drawer of my desk is the gun-shaped cigarette lighter. Now that it has long outlived my friend George’s gag, and George himself, the novelty gun doesn’t seem so funny. It’s ugly and dangerous even if it isn’t the real thing. But Eddie’s attack leaves me feeling like I need some form of protection, even if it’s a placebo.

  I jump into another cab for a quick ride to Ekat’s. The cabbie is in no rush. I’m anxious because I’m running out of time. He drives and talks and breathes slowly, a tree sloth with a license. It gets worse with buses beaching themselves in our path and people dripping off curbs and wandering into the street like some mutant breed of pedestrian lemmings. It’s a goddamn animal kingdom out here when I just want to go five quick blocks. Everyone needs to be faster and more efficient. Don’t they realize we’re all running out of time?

  After the epic half mile, I get out on the corner of I and Fifth. It’s considerably cooler out, but I’m still sweating. I limp to Ekat’s building. Her lights are on. Front windows are open and the blinds down. She must be home.

  If nothing else, I have a new apartment to haunt. My cell phone is a dead weight in my jacket pocket. Instead of being the someone knocking at the door, I crouch under her front window and call her cell. It rings from somewhere inside her apartment, and she’s not answering it.

  Soon after her phone quits its digitized blats, there’s a rush of commotion, focused and ambitious footsteps and the jingle of a fistful of keys. Her soundtrack moves toward the front window, toward me, and mixes with the opening and closing of her interior door.

  I back away from her window and duck into the alley. Not a very good hiding spot if she happens to walk in this direction. Someone flip a coin. The front door closes, and the aural specter of her footsteps float up I Street, away from me. I’ve always been lucky.

  I poke my head out of the alley and watch her walk away. Ekat wears tight jeans with an iPod tucked into her back pocket, a dark (maybe black) T-shirt, and a baseball hat. Her wooden-heeled shoes clack against the pavement. She has a large black bag slung over her shoulder.

  I stretch out the rubber band on my wrist, momentarily savoring and teasing a memory that I know isn’t real. Then I follow her.

  She walks like she doesn’t want to look back, only forward, so I’m not too concerned about being spotted. She won’t hear me with those earphones taking root. Despite my earlier success with tracking Jody, walking in pursuit of someone isn’t exactly my forte. Walking isn’t my forte. The thing is, I’m still sore all over, one big bruise, grinding through every step.

  I push my pace to where it can go, which isn’t very far. I’ve dropped back more than a block now. Slow and steady won’t win this race. My knees are swelling, and tight bands of pain constrict and squeeze, yielding less flexibility. The popping noises don’t fill me with confidence either.

  Maybe the Pour House hostess was wrong about tonight’s work schedule. Maybe Ekat forgot something at home, didn’t have time to answer her phone, and is going to catch the 9 bus and head into work. The unlikely scenario becomes less likely as she hits the corner of I and East Broadway. Instead of waiting at the bus stop, she takes a right and disappears.

  I’m light-years behind her, warpless, and without any worm-holes or loose change in my pockets. This is a mistake. I should’ve knocked on her door, confronted her. If she jumps in
to a cab or ducks into a store while I’m still stuck snail-trailing toward Broadway, I’ll have no idea where she went or whom she’s meeting. All I know is that I have the not-so-subtle feeling our cute lunch-to-be at the L Street Diner is a fantasy, one that was supposed to be easy for me to believe.

  I climb Kilimanjaro, and I’m finally around the corner onto Broadway. I turn right at the Hub and try to see everything at once but see nothing instead. Too many cars and people and buildings. I get a touch of vertigo, which is enough to twist my feet and spiral my head. I stumble into a parked car, then lean against it with my head covered like I’m counting in a game of hide-and-seek. It’s so easy to get lost in the great wide open.

  Ready or not, I pick up my too-heavy head and push off the car, leaving handprints on the roof. Mark was here. And Ekat’s still there, walking down East Broadway, only half a block away. I didn’t lose her, not yet. She has slowed from her previous Olympic record pace, floating along, looking left, toward the street or across the street. I look too, although I won’t know what it is when I’ll see it.

  Ekat stops and turns around. I keep walking, but my heart loses its rhythm, switching to some experimental beat John Cage might dig. Ekat jogs quickly up the sidewalk but isn’t looking ahead, isn’t looking at me. Her view is fixed low and toward the street. Did she drop something?

  She stops and opens a door belonging to a car that I can’t see because it’s just one of a long line of parked cars, each bumper growing and attaching to the next, a segmented snake of chrome and glass. Ekat disappears into the snake.

  The car she climbs into has its lights on and attempts to break free from the curb and pull out onto East Broadway. I can’t tell the make. It’s a sedan, maybe Japanese. I step off the sidewalk and detour between the parked cars.

  The traffic light behind me is a confident and regimented green. A steady stream of cars splits the rows of brownstones and spills downhill, through the I Street intersection. The collected wattage of the passing headlights only illuminates the rears of other cars and leaves me in the dark.

  Whoever is driving Ekat won’t be able to pull out and join the club right away, but they won’t be stuck there forever. I need a ride.

  I’m in the street now, walking along the row of parked cars, heading back toward the intersection and away from Ekat, hoping she or her driver doesn’t see me. My big paw is out and up, begging for one more cab ride. I try to watch her car inching out of its spot and the passing traffic at the same time. I can’t lose sight of either. Two days later a cab pulls over for me. I crash-land into its backseat. The cab rocks and sways with my aftershocks.

  “Easy, fella,” the cabbie says, and he’s the same mound of polyester who dropped me off on I Street ten minutes ago. He doesn’t say anything, is too polite to point it out. I’m sure he’s happy to see me.

  I say, “Follow that car.”

  “I’m not supposed to do that.” His voice is small and light, coming through too many soft filters. He talks like he’s talking to himself. Maybe he is.

  “I’m a private investigator and follow that car,” I say, mustering as much authority as I can. The baggage of the line’s history weighs me down.

  He sighs. I’ve ruined his evening. “What car? There’re millions of them out here.”

  I’ve lost sight of Ekat’s ride. I didn’t see it pull out. Shit. I jam my head, shoulder, and arm through the opening in the Plexiglas partition that separates the front seat from the back. Through his scratched and dirty windshield is a night sky of brake lights, the red refracting through the imperfect glass, twinkling auras that aren’t really there.

  There’s the empty spot in the row of parked cars. Then, up ahead, one-two-three four cars away is the sedan. I think that’s it. It is. It has to be.

  I say, “That car! The Lexus. It just pulled out. See it?”

  He turns his head left, away from the jackpot car, and says, “I see it. I see it.”

  “Tell me: which car am I talking about? I want to make sure you and me are crystal, as in clear.”

  He says, “That one,” and waves his hand noncommittally at the windshield. Of course, it’s that one. “Sit down, now, please. Sit down.”

  I don’t know if he’s following the right car, but I don’t want to press my luck so hard that I stub it out in the ashtray. I give up on further verification attempts. As recompense, there are complications. I might be stuck here, in the Plexiglas partition. Actually, there’s no might-be about it.

  “You sit back down, or I’m stopping this cab.” He rapidly repeats the sentence under his breath. Everything needs to be said twice.

  “I’m stuck, chief, but I’ll get out. You just keep watch on that car.” I pull back, and there’s no budging. The partition framing is wedged under a shoulder blade on one side and a sore rib on the other. I lean forward, bury my palm in the marsh of the front bench seat, push, and sink up to my wrist in damp pleather and foam. With what little leverage I can manage, I twist my head and shoulder, adding some torque. Torque is good until the pressure on my neck and across my shoulders rapidly climbs into a shrieking-pain range, but then I pop out and land on the backseat.

  He says, “Stop doing that! Stop moving around!”

  I say, “It’s okay. I’m all right.”

  The cabbie waves me off again, then his hand panics and quickly returns to a ten o’clock position on the steering wheel. He says something else, out of one of the sides of his mouth, but I don’t hear it.

  I say, “So what’s your name?”

  The cabbie grunts, but I don’t hear a name. He keeps it to himself, hoards it like his name is the last piece of gum in the pack.

  My vantage point sunk down in the backseat is terrible, and I can’t really see anything out of that windshield. I don’t see Ekat’s car, assuming the car I pointed out is hers. We turn left down L Street and head toward the waterfront area.

  He says, “Do you know where they’re going?”

  “If I knew that—”

  He interrupts, his voice as shrill as a whistling teakettle. “I know that. I mean, do you know if they’re going far?”

  I say, “Not far,” although it should be clear to all involved that I have no idea.

  I sit back. Fatigue rushes in. It’s a gas that forever expands and fills my vacuum. I think the sleeps have been occurring more frequently today because of the beating I took the other night. My body is pleading with me to stop, to reboot, to heel, to quit, to do the time warp again.

  The cabbie says, “I’m not supposed to leave Boston.”

  I look out my window, and I’m not on L Street anymore. I must’ve winked out like the flickering light in the dashboard. He’s about to pay a toll at the Ted Williams Tunnel. The tunnel mouth is up ahead, bright, open wide, and no cavities. Is Ekat going to Logan Airport? East Boston?

  I say, “I’ve got enough cash on me to make it worth your while. I promise.”

  The cabbie talks under his breath again, running through his personal list of worst-case scenarios: I’m a psycho or a stalker and I’m going to kill everyone, or I am who I say I am and I’m following the psycho stalker who is going to kill everyone, or me and the folks in the other car are all psychos and we’re going to make him pull over in some secret lair of psychos and we’ll all kill him over and over again. He fixates on this last possibility. He doesn’t feel very safe.

  And I agree, he shouldn’t be feeling safe. Safety is the big lie. I’m not going to tell him that, though. Instead, in an effort to alleviate some of his agita, I pull out my PI license and drop it onto the front seat.

  I say, “You’ll be fine, pal. I think.” I have to laugh at that. He doesn’t, so I continue, veering into cab-as-confessional mode. “Now, listen. I have narcolepsy, which means I can fall asleep at any moment and usually do. It’s generally a given that I’ll nod off in a car. Just wake me up when we get there, all right? I won’t be cranky, I promise.”

  While waiting for his response, I lean ba
ck on the seat and imagine all manner of drivers for Ekat’s mystery ride. Every mystery driver has Gus’s face.

  While waiting for his response, I lean back on the seat, and the passing tunnel lights strobe across my face, push against my closed eyelids. I’m in and out of the light and dark so quickly I wonder if I look different, if I change under the passing lights. I need to change.

  While waiting for his response, I lean back on the seat and notice that the cab is stopped. I look out the windows. A mostly flat and empty space with some scattered tall and skinny poles dangling weak dewdrop lights. There are no buildings because they uprooted and left, running away with someone, maybe even the spoon. Never did like the spoon. Always doing shit behind my back.

  Wait, wait. I shake my head, yawn, and scratch my beard. Sometimes waking is as complex as a Rube Goldberg machine, one with too many unpredictable and moving parts, and a mousetrap that never seems to work. I press my forehead against the cool glass of the cab window and look outside again. Upon further inspection, I realize we’re idling in a sprawling parking lot that has more white lines and empty spaces than cars. It doesn’t look like a Logan Airport lot or terminal.

  I say, “Where the hell are we?”

  “Wonderland.”

  He says it again, presumably to ensure that at least one of us is listening.

  Twenty-Six

  Wonderland. I’m a dreaming and damaged Alice and the Mad Hatter at the same time. Off with my head, please.

  I roll down my window, smell a different-yet-familiar mix of low tide and exhaust, and I believe the cabbie. We’re at Wonderland, the dog-racing track in Revere. A couple hundred or so feet away is the red, white, and blue club house signage for the track, with its sleek, muscular, and muzzled dog floodlit and flanked by American flags.

  Wonderland’s days are numbered, just like its dogs. The voters of Massachusetts passed a referendum banning greyhound racing. The track is in its seventy-fifth and final season of operation.