The last thing I remember h-1

by Andrew Klavan

  It went on like that as she took me out of the apartment, down the stairs again, back out into the street. A damp, bitter morning chill had settled over the city. It ate through the flannel of my work shirt and brought goose bumps out on my arms. Just as she had before, Jane took hold of my elbow and started walking along in that quick, choppy, squirrelly way of hers. Just as before, she kept talking as she walked.

  “Jane knows. Jane knows. They can’t fool Jane.”

  The city was still quiet. Cars went racing by on the all-but-empty streets. The few pedestrians we passed on the sidewalk were still night people, hunched and solitary. They paid no attention to us.

  The sky grew steadily brighter as we went, and the traffic grew heavier. But the sun still hadn’t come up over the horizon when we stopped on the sidewalk in the warehouse district where we’d met the night before.

  We were standing in front of a large, empty lot. It was big, nearly a city block wide and long. Maybe it had been a park once, or maybe there were buildings here and they’d been torn down or fallen down. Whatever the reason, there was nothing here now but an unbroken field of garbage and debris: piles of rubble, rebar, discarded appliances everywhere-and papers and coffee cups and fast-food boxes tumbling through it all, blown by the dawn wind.

  Jane let go of my arm. She worked her hand into the depths of her voluminous coat. When the hand came out again, she was holding two black plastic trash bags-the same kind as the ones lying around all over her apartment.

  “Cans,” she said, stretching out the word in that strange way of hers. “Caaaaans.”

  She handed one of the bags to me and walked into the empty lot, carrying the other one.

  At first, I couldn’t figure out why we were here or what she was doing. I just stood there, shivering in the cold, and watched as Jane moved into the empty lot, wading through the debris and garbage with her quick steps. Her chin was lowered almost to her chest, her head was down as she began to walk from one end of the lot to the other. Once or twice, I heard her murmur softly: “Caaaaans.”

  Then she picked one up. It had gotten brighter now, and I could see what it was from where I was standing: an aluminum soda can. Of course, then I understood. She was collecting cans so she could get the deposits. I used to do the same thing when I was little. When you buy a soda in our state, you pay a ten-cent deposit on the can. Then when you take the can back, they give you back the dime. It’s supposed to stop people from throwing the cans away and making a mess. But of course people are lazy and they throw the cans away anyway. If you go out and look around, you can collect them-a lot of them-enough to make some pretty good money. As always, Crazy Jane was not as crazy as she seemed.

  So I joined her. And as the day slowly broke, the two of us moved in concert over the field of garbage. She crossed one way and I crossed the other, searching the ground for cans. In the middle, we would pass each other and I would hear her murmuring, “Jane knows… the impulses can’t fool her… it’s mind control, that’s all… to take me back to the hospital… ” and other nutty stuff like that. Then I’d go past and she’d go past and we’d go on crisscrossing through the garbage, searching for cans.

  There were a lot of them. I guess Jane had some experience in this and knew all the best places to look. By the time the sun finally edged up over the railroad tracks across the street, her large black plastic bag was rattling with cans, and so was mine. By then, too, my back hurt something fierce, and I was tired. This was hard work, moving back and forth, bending over, scanning the ground. And the bag kept getting bulkier and bulkier as I added more and more cans, making it harder to work.

  We went on for what felt like a long time, at least an hour after the sunrise. After a while, I started thinking about that story in the newspaper. It said that Yarrow was arriving at eleven a.m. and would meet with the governor for an hour before traveling to the president’s house. That didn’t give me a lot of time to get back to Centerville, to find him, to warn him. But I couldn’t get back to Centerville without money. So I went on-back and forth across the field, wrestling cans out from the rebar and rubble and stuffing them in my bag.

  Finally, Jane stopped. She straightened. She stretched backward, her grimy, pocked face turned up to the morning sky. Her plastic bag sat on the ground beside her, bulging with cans.

  “That’s all,” she said.

  I looked around me. We were only about halfway over the field. “That’s all?” I said. “Are you sure?”

  She nodded. “Jane knows.”

  Once again, we went off together, she and I, walking down the street side by side, each of us now carrying a bag stuffed full of cans. Jane kept her free hand on my elbow as always and, as always, she kept up her murmuring, guiding me along with her quick steps.

  It was full morning now. The city was waking up. There were a lot more people around us. There was traffic on the broad avenues-cars, taxis maneuvering for space, and the occasional bus rumbling by. There were men and women hurrying past us on every side, more and more of them coming out of their apartment buildings, coming out of stores, heading for their cars or bus stops, heading for work. With every step we took, I felt more exposed. Here we were: a young guy and a muttering crazy lady carrying two huge plastic bags full of soda cans. We kind of stood out in the crowd, if you see what I mean. Any minute, I thought, someone would take a good look at us and recognize me. Or maybe a policeman would go by and spot me. Any minute, I thought I was going to have to drop my bag and run for it.

  But it didn’t happen. Because I think the truth is, in a funny way, we didn’t stand out at all, Jane and I. She with her grimy face and her big overcoat and her skin sores, and me with my bleary eyes and my two days’ growth of beard: we just looked like two crazy homeless people, wandering the streets with our bags. Instead of staring at us, people looked away from us on purpose. So they wouldn’t have to pay attention to us, you know, or think about us or stop and give us money. In a funny way, we were invisible.

  All the same, I was glad when we reached the supermarket. Whether it made sense or not, it felt safer, somehow, to be inside, off the street. The can-return machines were right near the glass doors. They were two big blue boxes with big round holes in the center of them and digital readouts off to the side. We set our bags down next to them and began reaching in and bringing out the cans, stuffing them into the holes in the machines. We could see the amounts of the deposits mounting up dime by dime on the readouts.

  I kept looking over my shoulder, afraid someone would recognize me. But the store was pretty empty, and anyway, like I said, we were just two homeless people bringing in our cans. No one paid us any mind.

  Finally, we were done. The digital readout on my machine was $9.50-nearly a hundred cans. Jane beat me, bringing in $12.70. We pressed the buttons marked End, and each machine spit out a receipt. I waited while Jane took the receipts over to the cash register. The lady there paid her the $22.20. Jane took it in her fist and stuffed it down deep into the pocket of her overcoat.

  Then she came back to where I was waiting at the machines. She took my arm, murmuring to herself. Murmuring to herself some more, she started walking with her quick steps. I let her take me back out onto the street.

  She didn’t stop there. She went on walking and talking.

  “They shouldn’t have tried it. They shouldn’t have tried their mind control on Jane. Now Jane knows. Jane is ready for them.”

  I went along with her, wondering where we were headed. About ten minutes later, I found out.

  We came to a busy corner closer to the center of town. There was a food market there and an old, rundown hotel. People were rushing by us on every side, even jostling us sometimes, but none of them paid us any attention. I looked around, trying to figure out why we had stopped. Then I saw the bus station.

  It was right across the street, a one-story building with large plate-glass windows. It was set near a parking lot, and the lot was full of buses. I knew there would be one ther
e that would take me back to Centerville. I had a strange feeling in my stomach, sort of like the one you get when an elevator drops too fast.

  I turned and looked down at Jane. She was peering up at me with that big round face and those big round eyes of hers. She let go of my elbow and took hold of my wrist. She lifted my hand and brought her fist out of her pocket. She was clutching the twenty-two dollars we’d gotten for our cans. She put the money into my hand.

  “No, wait,” I said. “Jane. You can’t give me all of it. You’ve got to keep some for yourself, for food and stuff. We both found the cans. We should split the money so you can get something to eat.”

  But all the while I was talking, she was going on in that dreamy murmur: “No, no, no, no, no, no, no.” Pressing the money against my palm, forcing my fingers closed around it.

  When she looked up at me again, my eyes went over her-over her filthy, matted dreadlocks and over the patches of dirt on her skin and over the broken sores where red showed through and finally back to those wide, strangely innocent eyes.

  “Jane… ” I said.

  “Take the money, Charlie,” she said to me. “Take the bus. Stop them. Stop Orton.”

  “But Jane, listen…”

  Her long, serious mouth curved upward at one side in a faint hint of a smile. “Don’t you worry. They can’t get Jane… they try and try, but Jane knows. Electricity is the secret. Mind control.”

  “You have to have money, though…”

  “Jane is ready for them. Jane goes on.” She forced my fist back toward me with the money held tight inside. “Charlie isn’t one of them. Charlie stopped the knifeman.”

  I nodded. “That’s right.”

  “Charlie’s my friend.”

  “That’s right,” I told her. “I’m your friend, Jane.”

  She pressed her lips together. Her big eyes filled up with tears. “Take the bus. Stop Orton, Charlie.” She gave my fist a final pat and let it go and said, “Think about Jane.”

  “I will,” I told her. “I will.”

  She turned and started to walk away from me with her quick, clipped steps. For another moment or two, I could hear her murmuring, “Charlie will stop Orton. Charlie stopped the knife-man. Charlie is my friend. Jane knows.”

  Then, as I stood there watching, she disappeared into the hurrying crowd.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Beth My mom called me and I woke up, my face pressed deep into the soft pillow. Her voice came again, drifting to me from the bottom of the stairs. I was so tired I didn’t want to get up. It was so sweet here, so comfortable and warm under the covers of my bed. But my mom kept calling, and I was desperate to go to her. I wanted so much to see her face again, to hear her voice saying, “Don’t get too close to the hot stove. You’ll burn yourself.” I wanted to see my father reading his newspaper at the breakfast table. I even wanted to hear my sister, Amy, screaming in wild panic over the fact that her new jeans had been left in the washing machine overnight. I’d been away from them all such a long time.

  As my mother called to me again, I became afraid- afraid that she would lose her patience and stop waiting for me. I became worried that when I got out of bed and went to the top of the stairs, she would be gone and my father would be gone and Amy, too, and the house would be empty and I would be alone.

  It was that fear that woke me up-that fear and the voice of the bus driver coming over the loudspeaker to announce that we had reached Cale’s Station, ten miles south of Centerville.

  I sat up and looked around. My heart sank as I realized that my mother’s voice, my soft pillow, my warm bed-it had all been a dream, just a dream. I was alone again, on the run, here in the cramped seat of this bus heading toward an appointment with an assassin.

  The bus came to a stop, and the hydraulics hissed as the door came open. Two or three of the other passengers got up and shuffled down the aisle toward the exit. I slid out of my seat and shuffled after them.

  This was my stop, Cale’s Station, a small village surrounded by forested hills. I had bought a ticket all the way to Centerville. It had cost me eighteen dollars. With some of the bills I had left, I had bought myself a detailed map of the area. Reading the map on the bus, I had noticed something. If I went the full distance into Centerville, it would be almost impossible for me to get to Indian Canyon Bridge, where I thought Richard Yarrow was going to be murdered. With Highway 153 blocked off for security reasons, there was no other passage to the spot. But the bus traveled on the interstate, which ran almost parallel to 153, separated from it only by the woods. Cale’s Station was directly opposite the bridge. If I could get over the hill, I could come down the far side and maybe put myself in the way of Yarrow’s motorcade and stop it before it reached the bridge. That would at least be dramatic enough to put the Secret Service on alert. Then, if I could point them to Orton, maybe I could convince them to question him. Or something like that.

  It wasn’t much of a plan, I guess. Even if it worked, there would be one big drawback to it. Maybe I could stop the motorcade, maybe I could convince the Secret Service that Yarrow was in danger, maybe I could even save the secretary’s life-but the police were sure to arrest me. I would be taken back to prison for good. I figured it was possible that my actions in saving Yarrow would be taken into consideration. I had a daydream that the president came to see me and said, Well, Charlie, my boy, I don’t know what all this fuss is about you murdering Alex Hauser, but to thank you for your service, I’m giving you a full pardon.

  Yeah, right. Like that would happen. It’d probably be more like, Well, Charlie, my boy, thanks for your help. Be sure to look me up in twenty-five years to life when you get out.

  I climbed down off the bus. I shivered as the air hit me. We were up in the hills here. It was colder than the city, and all I had to wear were the jeans and flannel work shirt I’d gotten from Mrs. Simmons.

  I found myself standing in front of the Cale’s Station bus depot. It was a small box of a building at the very edge of a short, rural main street. I headed for the door. I knew I had to get moving, start hiking over the hill. It was already after eleven. In less than an hour, Richard Yarrow’s motorcade would start traveling over the highway toward the canyon bridge. Even if I started right now, I was going to have to hike fast to cut him off.

  All the same, before I started, there was one more thing I had to do.

  There wasn’t much inside the depot. A ticket window with no one behind it. A couple of benches against the wall. An old pay phone.

  I went to the phone. Like I said, I figured when this was over, I would be going back to prison. That’s if I was lucky. If I wasn’t lucky, I might just get myself killed. In either case, I wanted one last chance to say good-bye.

  I picked up the handset and pressed zero for the operator, then I dialed the number. It was the number Beth Summers had written on my arm. I had read it over so many times that I knew it by heart. I’d forgotten the whole year of my life that followed that moment, but I remembered the number.

  The operator came on. I told her I was placing a collect call to Beth from Charlie. As I waited, listening to the phone ring, I looked over my shoulder to make sure no one recognized me. The place was empty.

  “Hello?”

  The sound of her voice sent an ache through me. It was the same kind of ache I’d felt on the bus when I woke up and realized my mom wasn’t really calling me, that it was just a dream. It was that yearning to be back home again, back in school, talking to my friends and trying to figure out calculus and asking Beth to go to the movies. It was an ache to be normal and have my life back and have everything be all right.

  I opened my mouth to talk to her, but the operator cut me off.

  “Will you accept a collect call from Charlie?” she said.

  I heard a little sound far away over the line, a little intake of breath. There was a silence after that. Then, in a weak voice, Beth said, “Charlie?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Will you accept the ch
arges?”

  “Yes. Yes, I will.”

  I licked my lips. My throat suddenly felt dry, almost too dry for me to speak.

  “Charlie?” came Beth’s voice over the line.

  “Hi, Beth,” I said. “It’s me.”

  “Oh…” There was another silence, another breath, and when she spoke again I could tell she was crying. “Charlie… are you all right? Are you hurt or anything?”

  For a minute I couldn’t answer. I didn’t know what to say. I mean, no-no, I wasn’t all right. I was lost and alone and afraid. Everything I loved, everything I knew, was gone. Terrorists were trying to kill me. The police were trying to arrest me. I was setting off to do something that seemed almost impossible, and even if I succeeded I’d kprobably end up in prison or dead. No. No, I would have to say I was very much not all right.

  “Charlie?” said Beth again, crying.

  “Yeah. Yeah,” I said. “I’m okay, Beth. I’m fine. I just wanted… I just wanted to hear your voice. I needed to hear your voice, that’s all.”

  “Charlie, what are you doing? They’re hunting for you everywhere. Your picture’s on TV. You’ve got to turn yourself in. You could be shot. You could be killed.”

  I nodded, but for a second or two I couldn’t answer her. Finally, I got the words out. “Listen, Beth. Before I can turn myself in, there’s something I have to do. But the thing is, it’s kind of dangerous.”

  “Charlie…”

  “Listen to me, Beth. You have to listen and you have to tell my mom and dad what I say too. Okay?”

  “What? What is it?”

  Her voice was so sad, so tearful-there was so much emotion in it-that I wanted to reach out over the distance between us and wrap my arms around her and hold her close and tell her it was going to be all right.

  But all I could do was say: “I don’t know what’s happened. About Alex and everything… I always tried to be a good person…”