Average Joe

by Peter Sargent

  “Don’t fight me.” She said. “Men like you can’t see beyond the habits of your thoughts, but you’ll see I’m right – when we’re done.”

  As the weeks after that stretched on, Hal realized that Clara Lane had made him her special project. Whenever he called her on her didilly shloop twaddle, it only made her more determined. This gave Hal an obvious motive for violence.

  Jenny Noyes gave him the opportunity.

  * * * *

  Hal stood outside the ladies’ room at the hospital and watched the janitor shove a bucket around the corner. When the man disappeared, Hal shoved the door, just as a startled woman was opening it from the other side.

  “You’re the only one left in there?” said Hal. “I mean, besides…” He nodded his head at a spot behind the woman. Faint sobs trickled through the air.

  “Yeah.”

  She almost said something else, but Hal pushed passed her and when he was behind her he grabbed her shoulder and whispered in her ear.

  “Look, it’s almost midnight. There’s no one here and I just need a minute or two.”

  The woman shrugged and left. Hal found Jenny leaning against a panel inside one of the stalls. There weren’t any tears. She just sniffled and moaned a few shapeless words in a low voice. She gripped her papers just as she had when Hal had found her. She didn’t look up at him when he spoke.

  “Is this how it is for you?” he said.

  “It’s tearing me to bits.” she said.

  “You were planning on stealing this stuff.” He held up the empty syringe. “Believe me, I understand addiction. So your doctors won’t prescribe you enough of your medicine to keep you cheery?”

  “Not enough to finish my work. I just need to do this one last thing. And the program director can’t know how far my disease has progressed.” Now she looked at him. “There’s just this one last thing, Hal. Then dump me in the river, if you like.”

  “I might do that. I don’t like you screwing with me. I mean, unless you’re actually screwing with me. But I’ll help you because if I left you here your father might hunt me down and eat me.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “I’m guessing you’re going to need a bit of a distraction, and it just so happens that I have one scheduled for about ten minutes from now. Her name’s Clara. What I need from you is pull-it-togetherness. And a way out of here after the mess is done.”

  “I can do that. I’ll still need your help after.”

  “Am I going to solve your problems?”

  “I think I left some of my things at the fifty. I’m not sure what; I just have this sense that I have to go back. And don’t ask me why I came out in the first place.”

  Of course, that wasn’t what Mr. N had asked for. And of course, Hal just didn’t give a shit.

  “Sure. We’re partners in crime.” said Hal. “We’ll make it work until it doesn’t.”

  She touched his hand and let her finger tips slide down it. That sent a chill along the hairs at the bottom of his arm.

  “Thank you.” she said. “And I’m sorry.”

  Hal almost told her not to bother, that everything that was about to happen had little to do with her. Instead, he smiled and left her alone.

  * * * *

  Hal went to the cafeteria in search of a knife. All he found were green plastic ones, so that would have to do. When Hal was about five, long before he’d assumed the identity of Henry J Tarrow, Inventor, he was playing on an old rocking horse in his Aunt Kay’s attic when a spring snapped and launched his face against an upturned nail. One thing he learned from that experience was that his forehead could gush a frightening amount of blood from a small wound.

  He went to the men’s room and pressed his palm against the mirror. He leaned over until his reflection blurred out, and then he dragged the knife’s plastic serrations against an inch of skin just below his hair line. As he did so, he forced down the grunts and hollers barking through his chest, forced them out the muscles in his arm and into his finger tips. They grew white against the glass and for a moment Hal thought he felt the glass starting to buckle. Then he saw red in the mirror and felt a bead of blood tickling his nose and gathering on the hump of his nostril. He pushed himself backward; his hand left a big sweaty print on the mirror.

  When Hal entered the waiting room, strutting like a magician on stage, he saw Clara facing the window. She didn’t see his reflection; she was focused on the movement outside. People started shouting. At first, Clara turned in the direction of the shouts, but then Hal called her name, softly. She spun and froze. He’d smeared blood across his face and up his arms, from his palms to the places on his forearms where he’d rolled up his sleeves. Clara didn’t shriek. Clara took a moment to spell it out to herself what was going on and what she was going to do about it. Then she took one big, deliberate step in Hal’s direction. Ladies and gentlemen, your savior has arrived.

  Without removing her eyes from Hal, she called out to everyone around her.

  “Everyone remain calm. I’m his doctor. Please, just give us some space. And someone call the police.”

  As the room filled up, a ring formed around the two. Hal had lost a little of his strut when Clara mentioned the police, but what did he really think was going to happen here?

  “Hal?” said Clara. “Do you recognize me?”

  He nodded. She raised her hand and held it a few inches from his blood-smeared face.

  “Look me in the eye.” Her voice was soft. She leaned in and cupped his chin in her hand so that he couldn’t turn his face away. “Look at me.”

  Clara put her mouth close to his ear. Hal’s heart skipped a little faster. She whispered a single word:

  “Perestroika.”

  Hal closed his eyes and Clara stepped away.

  He imagined that she must’ve smiled just then. A few weeks ago, she’d added a glob of hypnotherapy to her stew of rhino linguistics and detoxing waters. What had astonished Hal was that she’d reached for the more conventional weapon in her arsenal last. But by then he’d already grown wise to her. Clara fancied herself a garage scientist, mixing up psychiatric gems that the big research houses just weren’t ready to put real money into. Centuries ago, the bodies of convicts who met with the noose wound up in some med school dissection theater, and from those theaters flowed rivers of knowledge about human anatomy. What was Hal to Clara but the latest in a steady stream of trifling middle class convicts sent her way for purposes of experimentation?

  “Perestroika” was the safe word. Upon hearing it, Hal was supposed to return to the hypnotic state she’d installed in his brain. But there was no hypnotic state, there never was. Hal closed his eyes and played along, counting the seconds. He heard Clara again, now several feet away from him. Her voice was just a mumble. She was speaking to someone else and he couldn’t make out the words over the hot air rushing from the vent just above him. But he was certain that she was ensuring that she got the credit she deserved.

  He heard brakes squealing outside and a flutter traveled through the crowd. The cops must’ve arrived. If they had, they were holding back. Hal felt a cold cloth pressed against his forehead. He could smell Clara’s lavender perfume, mixed with a trace of sweat.

  She pulled the cloth away and said, “When I count to three, you’ll open your eyes and all the anger will be gone.”

  She counted, and Hal opened his eyes. He tried to look calm; he actually felt calm. Clara smiled, stepped backward, and raised her palms a little, as if about to take a bow. Now she was the magician here, making her grand debut for the crowd and the cops and all the real doctors.

  As she floated to the back of her stage, Hal strolled toward her. He put a hand in his pocket and felt the plunger on the top of Jenny’s old syringe. Clara turned to face the police and Hal whipped out the needle and lanced it right through her sweater sleeve and felt it sink into the skin below. Her head snapped back and she fell over backward with a fantastic cawing shriek.

  No one caught he
r.

  The crowd parted from behind her, perhaps panicked that they might catch whatever Hal had given her. Hal felt fixed in a trance, as though the hypnosis were finally kicking in, but the sound of Clara’s tail bone cracking against one of those cheap plastic chairs snapped him out of it.

  He turned and bolted for the door, but he already knew it was too late. He ran right into the arms of a waiting cop. But so what? He’d exacted his revenge.

  As the blue suits dragged him away, he craned his head around to see Clara. She directed a dazed look at the needle. When she lifted her eyes to meet his, they were clear. He was near the big rotating door now, but somehow he could still hear her over the din.

  She said, “I’m sorry Hal. I’m sorry I failed you.”

  And the look in her eyes was like the look you get from a kid when you tell him that Santa’s just a fib.

  * * * *

  Hal awoke in the drunk tank. On the other side of the bars, there was a short hallway and a door with a tiny window. A bald cop sat at a desk behind the window. A shape emerged from the folds of darkness around the window. There was Jenny, standing with one uncertain foot perched a few inches behind the other and her hands pressed flat against her legs.

  “Takes one to know one.” She said. “You’re looking better.”

  Hal felt the bandage on his head. His arms were still soiled with dried blood. He held his face in his hands and the scenes rushed through him again. Clara couldn’t stand, but she could pull the needle out. She squeezed the liquid into her palm and tasted it, guessing correctly that it was just a saline solution, or what Hal called a Hail Mary placebo. Then Clara shouted something about her embarrassment and her refusal to press charges. Hal didn’t hold out hope. There were worse things Clara could do. She could retain him for experiments forever, or dump him on a judge with a diagnoses that would send him to the cellar where the keep the real crazy potatoes. That would be a more fitting revenge.

  Hal lifted his eyes to Jenny. “Jail break?”

  “I’ve got your car.” she said. “When I got here your girlfriend was telling that cop out there that she was your therapist. Is that true?”

  Hal showed her his arms.

  Jenny said, “I said I was your sister. I tried to kill myself and that’s what pulled you’re trigger. And can you believe it? Your girlfriend told the cop to leave in my care. Jesus, how did such a fruitcake get that kind of power? ‘Cause she’s got the authority, and now all you owe is five grand for bail.”

  “I don’t like thinking of you as a sister.”

  “Huh. You know, your girlfriend creeps me out. When I said I was your sister, she looked at me like she knew me and said that made sense. So do we know each other? I mean, recently?”

  “No. No we don’t. That’s a part of my problem.”

  “That’s right, you’ve got problems too.”

  “Look, Jenny. I’m not very smart or successful. I’d call myself below average. But you were the one person I knew in high school who’d made something of herself.”

  He showed her a crumpled piece of newspaper that came from his pocket. It bore a picture of the entire fifty-fifty staff standing in front of the hole’s spectrometer. Jenny stood on the far left.

  He said, “I showed Clara this picture and told her that you were the kind of person I wished I was.”

  Jenny smirked. “You’re pathetic, going on insane.” She put her finger tips on his hand, the way she had when they were in the ladies’ room. “Join the club, cowboy.”

  A few minutes later, the cop let him out and Hal retrieved his things from a locker room. He counted through the bills Mr. N. had handed him and found there were fifty exactly. He folded one into one pocket and slipped the other forty nine into the other pocket. Then he entered the bright little room with the bald cop and his desk. Jenny stood near the door.

  Hal said, “Could you wait for me outside? Please?”

  She turned and left. Hal dropped the money on the desk and the cop counted it. Hal stuck his hand out before the cop could speak.

  “I know I’m short.” said Hal. “You’re just going to get one more person whining to you. But it’s all I’ve got. All right?”

  The cop didn’t really say anything. He didn’t even ask where the cash came from; didn’t care much. He just sighed, stood up and showed Hal the door.

  * * * *

  They stopped on the road and Hal broke his remaining hundred for fuel – and at last, sweet Jesus and The Latter Day Saints, he got a pack of Marlboro Mediums. He pumped the tank full, smoked, and wondered if his mess had already made the news. The screen at the pump was still playing Orphan riot footage, but stunts like his didn’t happen in Bloomington and it was sure to make the local bleed feed. He was past the cops, but there was Jenny’s dad, the old boy, with his sledgehammer and fowling piece. Hal was going to need a plan.

  Ten minutes later they were clear of Bloomington and cruising toward the fifty-fifty. Jenny said she needed more papers from her office. The heavy snow was holding off, but flurries darted across the beams of the headlamps. Jenny turned the window crank on the old Plymouth, which made Hal shiver, but he didn’t complain. Not with a gaping hole in his pocket where once there was cash. After a long silence, Hal spoke to Jenny, trying to register her reaction from the corners of his eyes.

  “Have you heard about the riots?” he said.

  “In Bloomington?”

  “Not around here, no. You know about the Orphans? I don’t know how long you were in a daze, but it started about a week ago. I guess you don’t get a lot of news down there.”

  “Memory’s still not so good, remember?”

  Hal nodded. He tried not to smile.

  He said, “All the Orphans need is a little direction. They don’t trust anyone and they don’t know what to do with themselves. Blank slates like that offer just a world of opportunity, don’t you think?”

  “I guess so.”

  After that Jenny was quiet for a long time, although Hal thought he saw her nodding her head and mumbling things to herself. That told Hal that she at least remembered some things.

  They passed the spot where he’d first found Jenny, and the car kicked up a sheet of paper from the road. It plastered itself to the windshield for a second before fluttering into the darkness of the soybean fields.

  “Stop the car!” Jenny said.

  He pulled over and Jenny leapt out. Deciding he liked the bitter chill, Hal left the window open. A few yards from the shoulder, Jenny gathered papers that must have fallen free from her envelope when she’d made her trek earlier. She wandered across the frozen clumps of dirt that pot marked the wide, flat expanse. With the clouds blotted in moonlight and the dead level horizon, Jenny looked like a widow’s ghost patrolling a grave site. But the thing buried under her feet was very alive.

  Hal gripped the key with his hand. The engine was still running. He considered his options. There was a good chance now to get out. Whatever Mr. N thought he knew, he wasn’t going to spring his plan until he had reason to believe something was wrong. If Hal lead footed the pedal now, how far could he get? And how long would it take Jenny to freeze to death? Would it happen before she reached town again? Would another car happen by? It was too late now. She didn’t stand a chance. The old boy wouldn’t know until morning.

  But Jenny was still the golden goose, and Hal concluded that he probably didn’t have enough to fulfill his plans for a post-employment, post-Clara future.

  Hal had a revelation. Sometimes, the answer is the opposite of what we think. Hal dialed Mr. Noyes and told him they were headed for the hole. After he hung up, Jenny returned and order Hal to mush.

  * * * *

  They turned off an exit. After a few miles, a chain link fence materialized from the gloom. It made a simple square around a two story concrete pyramid with the point sliced off. They pulled up to a guard booth and Jenny flashed an ID. Hal remembered that it had been hanging around her neck when he’d found her; it had bee
n perched in the V of her button shirt. The gate parted and they parked inside.

  Hal lit up and leaned against the car.

  “What are you doing?” said Jenny.

  “Can I smoke down there? I didn’t think so. Just give me a minute.”

  Jenny made herself busy with organizing her papers. She ordered them and put them all into a stack. Then she came around the car and held out a one by two inch card.

  “This yours?” she said.

  Hal smiled. It was his business card, a real one this time. It had the name of his ex-company in big letters at the top, and his own name and contact info in tiny type in a bottom corner.

  “Must’ve been stuck in the seat crack or something.” He said. “I thought I’d ditched all of these. You know I was fired, don’t you?”

  “I think I did. I don’t know how, but I seem to remember something.”

  Hal pushed the burning end of his cigarette against the edge of the card. A little ribbon of red rippled up the card, leaving air and a bit of ash in its wake. Hal let go and the card disappeared. Abracadabra.

  Jenny said, “We had our moment of silence; let’s go.”

  She dragged him up to a set of glass doors and they entered the stunted pyramid. As she led him down a hallway, Hal felt his phone buzzing in his pocket but didn’t dare reach for it. He glanced back and saw a pair of headlights advancing down that forlorn access road and stopping at the gate.

  Hal spun back around just in time for Jenny to shove him into an elevator, and down they went.

  * * * *

  Who would’ve known that the best view in Bloomington was underground? Hal sat in the office of Jon Bremmer, executive director of the fifty-fifty. Bremmer was diddling the keys on his computer, under a blue wall with big photos of himself sky diving and fire walking. Hal had rolled a chair up to the opposite wall, which was made entirely of glass and overlooked the spectrometer wheel. It was the same wheel pictured in the newspaper clipping he’d shown Jenny. It looked like a four storey spider web stretched between the walls of a bright, metal cavern. The web’s fibers were graphite scaffolds (which made him think of Clara), and the octagonal gaps between the scaffold legs glittered like a rhinestone jacket.

  “And what do you do?” said Bremmer, without turning from his screen,