Lost Friday

by Michael Bronte

  “Not that I know of,” I replied.

  “I think we should talk to the teachers as well,” Roy added. “We need to find out how they fit in to all this.”

  Romano said, “Get on it, Pappas. And get something in by four o’clock. We’ll have the presses waiting.”

 

  Chapter 8… The Intervention

  Dumbfounded as to what happened to an entire day of his life, Doctor Behari readily agreed to see me when I identified myself on the phone and told him I was investigating Lost Friday for the Press. He seemed normal enough, mid to late thirties, or so; had broken away from a large megapractice outside Atlantic City and moved into town about a year ago; wanted the quiet life; hung his own shingle. He lived in a small but fashionable two-bedroom bungalow on the swanky side of town. His wife greeted me at the door. She was tall and slender, with a glowing olive complexion and a long, elegant nose. Unexpected green eyes smoldered in their sockets. She could have been a model, I thought, no problem. I waited in the living room while she got coffee. Doctor Behari came in, mopping himself with a towel.

  “Sorry I’m late,” he said, shaking my hand. “I thought I had time to take a run before you got here.”

  Behari was wearing nylon jogging pants and a t-shirt, and was obviously in good shape. We talked about Lost Friday a bit, and I could see that he wasn’t at all comfortable with the subject.

  “I’m much like my patients,” he said, wiping the sweat off his forehead. “At first, I didn’t know what to make of it, but when I found out it was for real, the more I thought about it, the angrier I got. I mean, what right do these… whatever-they-are… have, coming in here and taking us against our will?”

  Behari spoke with a slight British accent, and I had the feeling he’d attended some schools where the tuition was close to the budget of a small country.

  “I can tell you that my patients are scared, Mister Pappas. More than a few of them said they’re arming themselves.” He looked at me seriously. “It could be dangerous out there.”

  A chill moved through me. I guess I’d been so close to Roy and the goings-on from that point of view that I hadn’t realized the psychological effect Lost Friday must have had on the general population. I suddenly pictured people hunkered down in their bungalows with assault weapons slung to their shoulders.

  “What made you decide to single me out?” Behari went on. “There are many other people who’ve had the same experience.”

  “Maybe not,” I said, hoping to intrigue him. I hadn’t said anything on the phone earlier about my real reason for wanting to talk to him. “As odd as it may sound,” I began, “I want to talk to you about your advertising?”

  “Advertising? I thought you were a reporter, Mister Pappas.”

  “I am a reporter, and call me Johnny.” I thought my smile would put Behari at ease, but it didn’t. “I want to talk to you about the ads you’re running in the Asbury Park Press. I’d like to know where you got your logo.”

  “What logo?” Behari asked. “I’ve been thinking about running some ads, but I haven’t started yet.”

  He seemed to be telling the truth. I had the page with his ad from the not-yet-printed newspaper tucked away in my folder.

  “Is something wrong?” he asked, seeing me ponder.

  I pulled the page and unfolded it carefully. I pointed to the logo of four diamonds within a diamond, the words honest, affordable, convenient, and professional printed within each diamond. “Have you ever seen this before?”

  Eyes narrow, Behari looked at it with interest. “That’s got my name on it all right, but I’ve never seen that ad before in my life.”

  “Are you using an advertising agency?”

  Behari smiled at that. “My wife is my advertising agency.”

  With that, his wife appeared from the kitchen, carrying a tray with three cups of coffee. “Did I just hear someone talking about me?” she asked lightly.

  Behari showed her the ad, and her eyes darted over the page. “This paper is dated a month from now,” she noted, a fact that Behari had failed to pick up.

  I nodded. “Have you ever seen that logo before?”

  Without responding, she walked to an English-style writing desk nearby, and retrieved a manila folder. Inside was a hand-drawn ad layout incorporating the logo almost exactly as it was shown in the newspaper. “I started designing it yesterday,” she said not so casually.

  * * * * *

  It was lunchtime by the time I got through with Doctor and Mrs. Behari—Robert and Anne—and I thought I’d stop by the diner and get some of Demetrius’s motor oil coffee and maybe some real food. I was already exhausted, and I’d barely eaten anything substantial in three days. The wedding, I thought once again as I took some time to catch up with myself. I hadn’t heard from Murph, and I imagined it might be because he was extraordinarily ticked off at me. Or, he could simply have been on his honeymoon with something else on his mind—or his face, hopefully. I wondered briefly if he’d heard about Lost Friday, but suddenly I didn’t have time to worry about it.

  As I headed toward the diner, I took a left onto Center Street and almost wet my pants as a parade of camouflaged Humvees approached on the other side of the street. There must have been twenty of them, some sporting machine guns on the back. Freaking machine guns! In Sea Beach! I pulled over and watched as they thundered past, noticing in my rearview that they went in opposite directions at the next intersection. I put the ’Vette into gear and continued down Center Street, noticing even more Humvees and groups of fully armed soldiers on every other street corner. Several of the news vans that had been so prominent around town for the last couple of days looked like they were leaving. I wondered if this was Roy’s handiwork.

  I stopped at the next intersection, and almost ran into a soldier who’d managed to sneak in front of the ’Vette. Startled, I saw his eyes drop as he gave the car a once over. Slowly, he made his way to my window, and I noticed that his finger was resting on the trigger of the meanest-looking motherfucker of a gun I’d ever seen in my life. He motioned for me to lower the window.

  “Are you Johnny Pappas?” he asked, his voice Rambo-like.

  I was almost afraid to tell the truth. “Yeah.”

  “Sir, you need to come with me.” His finger stayed tight against the trigger. “Leave the car where it is.”

  “No way. I’m not leaving this car—”

  “Sir, leave the car where it is. We’ll make sure it stays safe.” He held out his hand for the keys.

  His tone made my blood cold. I’d barely opened the door when a Humvee rolled up with two soldiers in front, and one on the back manning what I think was an antiaircraft gun, or something. The damned thing looked like it could have blasted a space ship out of the sky. The soldiers made room for me, and we got underway without so much as a, “Hey, how about those Red Sox?” who were fighting for the American League pennant. In the distance, I noticed formations of black helicopters above the horizon line. We tooled down Center Street and pulled up in front of the old, white-clapboard town hall, which was across the street from the police station. It too was surrounded by armed Humvees, and I thought: this was some serious shit happening.

  The soldiers escorted me to the front doors, and I was turned over to a couple of lunkers that looked like linebackers stuffed into J.C. Penney suits. Both of them sported earpieces and sunglasses. They also didn’t bother to ask if I was hungry, or how I was feeling, or anything. I was shoved along until we reached the hearing room where we’d held the press conference the day before. The door closed behind me, and I spotted Roy sitting alone and to one side, not looking like a happy camper. I heard someone say, “Mister President, he’s here.”

  Guess how I felt when the president of the United States turned to me, and said, “Hello, Johnny.”

  * * * * *

  Now I’m pretty skilled at weaseling information from people who have no i
dea I’m even doing it, but in this case, I was the weaselee instead of the weaseler, and it wasn’t so subtle. This was one of those times when I wondered, first, how my dad would have handled the situation, and, second, what would have come out on paper afterwards that would leave readers mesmerized and wanting to read more. It was the mark of a great reporter that people would come back to his byline, and if I had any doubts as to my ability to put a story together that way, they certainly surfaced as I sat there next to Roy while the president was busy leading the country.

  It reoccurred to me that this was probably the biggest story of my life—hell, the thought was nagging at me—and I couldn’t settle on the structure of how I would relay the events. Sure, I would be able to tell who, what, where, when, and possibly how, but I had my doubts as to whether I’d be able to tell why. Relaying the why question in a news story was the mark of a great story: a word here, a phrase there, unobtrusive, yet all-descriptive as to the emotions, motivations, and determination of the main protagonists in the story. Writing a good story was almost like writing fiction, and a good writer was able to move outside the events themselves, and make a story a story so that it flowed and took the reader with it. I thought of the Pulitzers hanging over my mom’s fireplace.

  While I was waiting for the president, I answered a lot of questions from some dork with bad breath, and Roy didn’t say a word the whole time. I figured he’d already been through the drill. I answered everything honestly, getting no indication from Roy to do otherwise—no winks, no headshakes, nothing; the man was a stone. I figured: if the leader of the free world was here, it was no time to worry about how Roy wanted to handle the situation. I understood that in the beginning he’d wanted to keep things low key and under control in order to prevent panic, but the Humvees and machine guns had pretty much demolished that perspective. Speaking for myself, this was just getting bigger, and bigger, and each bigger was bigger than I could have possibly imagined. It was time to join the cluster-fuck. After about fifteen minutes of watching the president huddle with various people, some in uniform, some not, I saw him look our way and point somewhere through the walls of the hearing room. All the suits and uniforms scattered like leaves in the breeze, and suddenly we were alone in the room: me, Roy, and the president of the freakin’ United States.

  President Richardson turned to us and said, “We’ve been contacted by futuristic terrorists.”

  Hello? I wrote the story. Not trying to be at all snotty, I glanced at Roy, and said, “We know that, Mister President.”

  “Yes, I suppose you do, but what you don’t know is that two of our brightest scientists at NASA were abducted last week.”

  I about choked. This certainly changed my whole perspective, as if the first perspective wasn’t serious enough. I saw Roy’s eyes come up, and he stirred in his seat.

  “Have they communicated with you?” he asked.

  “Several times,” the president answered. “But there’s been no dialogue. So far, all we’ve received are demands, similar in format to the ones you found in David Robelle’s room. We’ve not found a way to communicate in return.”

  Roy cut right to the chase. He sat up and gave the president the eyeball as if he were grilling some high school kid for stealing a street sign. “Why are you here, Mister President? Whatever we’re talking about right now could be conveyed by a lot of people. It doesn’t take the president of the United States to find out what we know.”

  The president seemed to appreciate the opportunity to talk turkey. “Those scientists have been missing since last week. We thought we had the situation under wraps, but now it’s out and we need to avoid widespread panic.”

  Gee, I thought. That sounded exactly like Roy twenty-four hours ago.

  The president continued. “We don’t know why the people who’ve been abducted were chosen, and we don’t know if they will be returned. We don’t even know if they are still alive. Your entire town was taken somewhere for a day, and no one seems to have the slightest recollection of where they went, or what they did. The magnitude of that power is mind-boggling, gentlemen, physical and psychological control. Hostage-taking is something we can’t condone, and while there have been no threats beyond requiring our cooperation, terrorists are terrorists and we have to assume that, sooner or later, they’ll up the ante and people will turn up dead. We can’t take that chance. What’s to prevent them from doing the same thing to any of us, or all of us? I’m here because I’m going on TV from this little town to try and be honest with the American people. This is a threat to our way of life, no different than airplanes flying into the World Trade Center. We can’t let that happen. We need to cooperate with their demands.”

  Cooperate? With a threat to our very way of life? I thought: what the fuck was that?

  “We’re at a bit of a disadvantage,” Roy rebutted. “We can’t negotiate with people we can’t talk to, or can’t see.”

  “Can you see any terrorist attack coming?” the president shot back. “David Robelle’s parents may never see David again. That’s worse than knowing he’s dead. What kind of physical and mental pain is he going through? We have to assume the worst, gentlemen. They took our people without asking, somehow stripping them of all memory of the experience. How can that be good? We might as well be slaves.”

  “Do you think they’re among us?” Roy asked.

  “We don’t know,” the president responded calmly. “We do know when they’ve been here, though. The frozen helium?”

  Roy and I both nodded.

  “We’ve come across it before, but we never knew what it was.”

  “Aren’t you taking a chance coming here?” I asked, wondering if it would be bad form if I whipped out my notepad.

  “If they wanted to take me, they would have already done it. Besides, I’m the president. I can’t hide like a sniveling coward.” The president looked at Roy, and said, “Screw ’em.”

  Normally, Roy would have appreciated such candor, but I knew body language and I could tell he was wary. I, too, thought it sounded contrived, like a planned sound bite. Something wasn’t sitting right with this little chat.

  Roy said, “And we’re here because…?”

  “Whoever these people are—we’re still assuming they’re people—they’ve not revealed their objective. I don’t want to risk any more lives until we find out what that objective is.”

  I thought: what lives was he talking about? So far, I hadn’t heard of anyone dying. And, what was with the cooperation angle? Like, were we going to invite them in for cocktails and hors d’oeuvres?

  There was a knock on the big double doors to the hearing room. Some blonde chick poked her head in, and said, “Mister President, it’s almost time for your address to the nation.”

  “I’ll be there in a minute.” Turning back to us, he said, “Chief Mulroney, we’re going to shut down this town, and conduct interviews with everyone who was abducted. I need your cooperation in making that happen.” Roy just sat there stoically, and the president went on. “We know you were trying to get a grip on things, but we’re past that. The people of this town will cooperate with us if you lead the way.”

  Roy said, “Do I have a choice?”

  “Not if you want a say in what’s going to happen anyway.”

  That was the president flexing his muscles. He turned to me and said, “As for you…. One of the things they like to do is drop issues of future newspapers on us, just to let us know they’re aware of how things will turn out. We think it’s to scare us into a course of action. In other words, do what we say, or else. We can’t afford to get to or else.”

  Like Roy, I just sat there listening.

  “We’d like you to not write anything inflammatory.”

  “How am I going to do that?” I asked sincerely. “And what about the other reporters and media people? They’re all over the place.”

  “Don’t worry about them,” the
president responded. “We’re good at putting a spin on things.” Roy chuckled sarcastically, and the president’s eyebrows arched instantly. Turning back to me, he said, “I want you to put something out there that will make them think we’re cooperating. If you have any questions about that, you can talk to my press secretary directly. Right now, gentlemen, I have a country to put at ease.”

  After the president left the room, I looked at Roy and asked, “What do you think is going on here?”

  Roy didn’t answer the question. Instead, he said, “They don’t know about the last newspaper. So far, the only people who know about that are still only you, me, and Doctor Behari.”

  I reminded Roy that Paul Romano was also a member of our elite club, and I went on to describe that it wasn’t Robert Behari that came up with the doodle, but his wife. “Except that, in her case, it wasn’t a doodle,” I said. “It’s a shape for an advertising logo.”

  “It still came from in here,” Roy said, tapping his head. “I’m no psychologist, but the fact that three of us drew essentially the same thing tells me it’s no coincidence.”

  Roy looked haggard, to say the least. I figured he hadn’t gotten much sleep over the last couple of days. “Any ideas?”

  Roy’s eyes narrowed, and the crow’s feet at his temples deepened into troughs. “The entire population of Sea Beach was abducted for a day, and no one has any recollection whatsoever of what happened. Obviously, the memory of that event was wiped out in some way.”

  I wondered where Roy was going. “We’ve already covered that.”

  “What do you remember about the doodle?”

  “Remember? About a doodle? I was just doodling, Roy. I had no thought about it whatsoever. It just came out.”

  Roy grinned. “That’s right, same with me. It just came out. What about with Mrs. Behari?”