by Tim McBain
Chapter 13
I sit on the orange carpet between the bed and the wall. The shag feels all scratchy on my legs. The fibers remind me of that blue pube from the car floor that got caught in my teeth. The vent opens its mouth and breathes hot air on me.
I feel numb, physically and emotionally, like my nerves are severed. I can just faintly feel my hands and feet, more like icy tingles, muted, farther away than any normal sensation. My body as a whole seems cold and distant. My vision swims along the edges, little watery flutters that ripple when I turn my head. My arms flop when I move them, oddly limp. I still possess my motor skills but only in the broadest of senses. The precision of movement is gone. I go to pick up my beverage, and even employing two hands, I almost knock it over. Fists of ham, dude. Fists of honey-glazed ham.
Damn. I would eat that ham, too. But nope. Only egg salad in the bullshit machine. Whatever.
Argh. See? My thoughts dog paddle way out past the buoys, and I have to go out there and get them myself to avoid getting pulled out in the riptide for good.
I think I’m in shock. I think that’s what this feeling is, the severed nerves and all of that. I don’t know exactly what to do with this information, but there it is. If only I could say, “Stop being shocked,” and it would go away. That would be something.
I shift my weight and lean forward to stand on my knees. I take two knee steps toward the TV, but then it occurs to me that I can’t remember what I’m doing. Do I need to go to the bathroom? No. Not going for the beverage. My drink sits on the table in the opposite direction.
Hm...
I don’t know.
I sit back down, the carpet trying its best to exfoliate the skin off the backs of my thighs.
This guy is good. Farber, I mean. This whole thing with taking Babinaux hostage? Damn, dude. His plan looks to be a good one, and it makes me feel dumb. I was so stupid to not see Babinaux as the vulnerable point for us. She was never under threat before, and I took that for granted. Of course she would be the way to find me and the leverage to use against me. It’s so obvious in retrospect. She should have been in hiding with me.
I pound down the last few ounces of RC Cola, fully room temp now. I set the can on the nightstand, and I can’t help thinking about the gun sleeping inside, curled up in a dirty t-shirt blanket.
Shit.
Should I sleep? Would I even be able to?
I have a little over 72 hours to find a way out of this, out of a scenario that’s impossible to get out of. That’s not a lot of time. I think I’ll go with less sleep and more caffeine.
And I think I know one place I can look.
Chapter 14
I pilot the Taurus over the vacant highway. One extra large Tim Horton’s dark roast nestles between my thighs. The heat emanates off of the paper cup, right on the edge of scalding and dangerously close to my sack. This makes it difficult to sit still, so I squirm periodically. I think it feels even hotter since the night air is so crisp.
The other coffee dumps down my throat. I got them to put a couple of ice cubes in this one so I’d be able to chug it right away. Stick with me, dude. You’ll learn all kinds of tricks like this. I also got them to put a bunch of milk and sugar in there. I know a guy. Anyway, it so happens these things make coffee sweet, creamy, and delicious.
I like it.
The caffeine opens my eyes up all the way, makes everything clear and bright. Even the empty freeway looks less drab. It looks alive in its own way – the flickering streetlights, the way my headlights glare off of the signs for fast food and motels, the way the landscape seems to shift and morph along the side of the road, as though it’s moving rather than me.
The road is not truly empty, either, of course. I still see cars trickling by on the other side of the grass ditch, going the other way. I watch taillights zoom past in the left lane, the clouds of exhaust trailing behind them made bigger and fluffier in the cold.
It’s not like it is in the daytime, though. Even just a couple of hours ago when I was on my way home, the traffic flowed like a faucet on full blast. Lulls settle in between cars now. The empty spaces stretch on and on, and the drive takes on a desolate feeling, like maybe I’ll never run into anyone else again, maybe I’ve just driven into some empty version of the world, and I’ll be stuck there.
Then another car comes along, and the spell is broken, and I think, “What could this jerkoff possibly be doing out at this hour? Me? I’m just working on saving lives. That’s all. No big deal. These perverts blowing past my Taurus on the other hand? Probably looking for a place to dump a dead body.”
I shake my head in disbelief at these perverts. What are you going to do, though?
It’s like I always say: Perverts. Can’t live with ‘em. Could pretty easily live without ‘em.
While I waited in the drive-thru at Tim Horton’s, I did the math. I have 77 hours and 13 minutes until the deadline. Wow. I never thought about how brutal the term deadline is until just now. What else could I call it? Lifeline? No. Appointment? I don’t know. Forget it.
I finish the first coffee, pitch the empty cup onto the floor in front of the passenger seat. I pry the second coffee from between my legs. The cup is hot enough to the touch to sting my fingertips. I peel open the little mouth hole. I know I shouldn’t drink it yet, but I’ll just let it breathe some.
Steam coils out of the opening and hangs in the air. It smells so good. No milk or sugar this time. Just delicious black coffee, and somehow that smells much better than the diluted version right now. I hold the cup in my right hand, watching through the hole as the black liquid lurches and sways along with the bumps on the road.
I know I shouldn’t drink it. I know I shouldn’t drink it. I know I shouldn’t drink it.
I drink it.
The magma pours out of the cup and melts all of the soft tissue in my mouth into a pink goo. So yeah, it smarts a little. I’d say this is probably what it would feel like to be cremated by hot liquid. Or maybe like that scene in Game of Thrones when they dump the molten gold onto that guy’s head. Like that for the mouth.
I could spit it out, spraying liquid fire all over my car, but... No. I swallow. It scalds all the way down, like a reverse version of that carnival strength game where you smash a sensor with a huge hammer, and the ascending lights on the pole connected to it indicate how hard you hit it. In this case, I feel the lights flick on all the way down. A bell should ring when it hits my stomach. And another one should ring when it successfully burns a hole through my stomach.
I will say this, though:
From what I can taste with my charred taste buds, it seems like pretty good coffee.
Chapter 15
The empty coffee cups rattle against each other as I pull the Taurus into Glenn’s driveway. I kill the engine. It suddenly seems very quiet here. The cell phone says it’s 3:36 AM.
Maybe I’m just super wired from chugging 48 ounces of black gold, but I feel tense.
I open the door, and the dome light comes on. It makes me feel even more vulnerable somehow. Exposed. I ease out of the car and close the door behind me. I’m so in a hurry to extinguish the light, I slam the door, and the sound echoes forever--like the crack of gunfire and the rumble of thunder and the high-pitched sound of metal striking metal, like a sledgehammer bashing down a railroad spike--all of these sounds rolled into one. Loud as hell.
I want to dive into the bushes, blanket myself in dead leaves, and hunker down like that until morning, but I don’t. Instead I just stand there, lips parted, eyes dancing from house to house in the neighborhood to see if any lights come on in the windows, if any drapes part to get a peek at what the criminal element is up to out here, being all suspicious and noisy in the middle of the night.
No lights. No curtain movements. I’m in the clear, I think. Still, what a stupid shit I am.
I walk to the yard and round the corner toward the back of the house. The car door slam-crack plays in my memory, and I cringe, shoulders j
erking.
I reach the back of the house and find it dark as hell. Now, I expected a certain lack of light, but right in the shadow of the house, it’s about as dark as it gets.
I raise my arms in front of me like a mummy and stride into the black, inching forward, bracing for my hands to hit the vinyl siding. I slide my feet forward, skittering steps in the soft dirt back here where the grass won’t grow. I can’t see it, but I know from experience that little gray clouds of dust kick up with each skitter step.
There.
My fingers brush the siding. The feeling reorients me, restoring some sense of where I am in the world. It’s a weird feeling, like my imagination jumps me to a new point, updates its internal GPS data.
I kneel and feel along the ground, fingers prodding at the dirt, sinking knuckle-deep into the sandy soil in little bursts as the search continues. I squat-walk forward, feeling along the earth all the while. The silence surrounds me entirely now, shrouds me in awkward energy that makes me want to hold my breath.
Finally my hands descend upon something new, not dirt but something hard and round and smooth, cool to the touch. And then another something that’s almost identical to the first, and then another one and another. A bunch of them form a little circle, maybe 12 or so total.
One of these somethings is not like the other, however, and I need to figure out which one it is. By touch alone, they seem close enough. Most are smooth while a couple have rough textures, but I don’t know which of those I’m looking for, so it’s not much use.
I lift one, cradling it in my left palm, trying to get a sense of its heft in my hand. I put it down and try another. Hm... It seems about the same. I try a third and a fourth without learning anything of value.
The fifth rock seems lighter, though. It can’t be as dense as the others. I give it a shake and something moves within. Ah, yes. Hollowed out with a prize inside, just like I hoped all along. Bumps dimple the exterior, so I should remember that in case I ever need to do this again. I guess I won’t, though.
I tote the object in my left hand and let my right glide along the siding so I can feel my way back the way I came. When I hit the corner of the house, enough light glints between the pine branches that I can make out the darker shapes that comprise bushes and the birdbath and avoid running into them. Full light returns as I get to the front of the house.
I stop in the driveway, feet planted inches from the front bumper of the Taurus. I turn the fake rock in my hands, fingernails scratching around the damn thing, hoping to find a seam or something.
Nothing.
What the hell?
I shake the rock again. Something small and metal rattles around in there. So yeah, this is definitely the fake rock, and there’s definitely a key inside of it.
I hold the thing up so the streetlight hits it directly. It looks very fake when you look at it closely, though I suppose there’s not much reason to do that. The top tapers to a point, and the bottom is flat. Ah. Maybe that’s the secret.
I flip the rock over, so the bottom faces me. Looks normal. Instead of scraping, I jab my finger along the surface. Toward the middle, something gives. Here we go. There’s a circle that can be pressed into the chamber of secrets. I depress it with both thumbs, turn it over and shake it.
The key tumbles out and jangles on the concrete. I lose sight of it for a split second, but my eyes dart back a beat and find it. I smile as I kneel down and pluck the metal piece from the ground. I look on it for a second and close it in my fist. It’s cold in my palm and small and precious.
I stand and move to the front door.
I step through the doorway into the darkness. Seems like I’m doing that a lot lately. This time I find the light switch quickly and flip it on. Ah, yes. Sweet, sweet illumination.
I give some thought to keeping the lights off, or at least keeping them to a minimum, so as to avoid arousing suspicion among the neighbors. I dismiss this motion out of hand. Being unable to see would render the trip useless. Plus, the neighbors are sleeping.
So I light it up in here. I spread additional brightness everywhere I go. Kitchen? The light over the snackbar will do nicely. Living room? Lamp on the end table. Hallway? That weird dangling glass ball light will do the trick there. Library? I consider the halogen lamp for additional brightness, but I opt for the lamp with the compact fluorescent that is quite a bit less likely to burn the place to the ground. Safety first. It’s the Grobnagger way.
And this is the room where it hits me. Glenn’s absence suddenly becomes real, tangible, a missing piece in this room. I can feel it, and a fist in my gut clenches.
This is all so strange, lighting up Glenn’s house in the middle of the night, walking past all of his stuff that’s laid out just the same as always, like nothing has changed a bit. Actually, I guess I should say that it was his stuff. Now it’s just stuff.
Just stuff. Things. Objects. Some valuable. Some junk. All pretty well meaningless to Glenn now, right? Even if he is somewhere else, this pile of things he’s acquired doesn’t mean anything to him.
I pace the floor of the room, taking it all in for a moment.
I look up and down his bookshelves that go from floor to ceiling, sorted into paperback and hardcover with each respective group alphabetized. I see the puzzle sphere serving as a bookend among the last row of hardcovers, propping up a Roger Zelazny short story collection called The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth. I spot the gigantic war tome squatting on the little table next to his chair with his reading glasses folded on top of it. Looks like he only made it a little over halfway.
It’s been weeks since his funeral. Thankfully he left his house to Amity, so it’ll be a while before the vultures can swoop in and pick his things apart. More paperwork. I don’t even know what all would be involved. Would they need to get Amity declared legally dead or something? Would they go through with something like that to be able to auction off Glenn’s things and his house?
I move from the library, walking down the hall. I guess searching the place is what I came here to do, so I should get on with it in earnest rather than dallying in a nostalgia-laced version of the task. That leads to my big problem, though.
See, I know that what I need is here. All of the pieces, the ingredients, reside here in Glenn’s house. I just don’t know exactly what I need.
Chapter 16
I pick through boxes of random stuff in the garage, old clothes, old board games, one of those ab belts that is supposed to electrically shock your muscles to tone you up. I can’t help but imagine Glenn strapping this thing to his flabby gut, writhing in pain each time a pulse of electricity jolts his core. Man, I hope he never actually did that. Because it sure didn’t work if he did.
I have my suspicions that what I need is out here in the garage, and from what I know about Glenn’s style, I would guess it to be tucked away in a little hiding place. After poking around, though, I don’t see any natural hiding spots. That’s why I’m digging in the boxes. They’re kind of a “hiding in plain sight” type spot, right?
The florescent light flickers above me. I watch the gleam flash and shimmy on the concrete floor, reflecting off of the layer of glossy gray paint. It smells like wd-40 and dust in this room, and the boxes each puff their own twist of mustiness into the odor assortment when I open them.
One box sports a small hole in the cardboard. Inside rests a fatally wounded Christmas sweater that a rat shredded up to make a nest out of before it moved on to someone else’s house. And yeah, there’s a decent amount of rat shit throughout the boxes, little pellets of feces sprinkled on all of Glenn’s things like cocoa nibs.
Truth is, most of this stuff should have been thrown out. Why are we so attached to garbage? Why do we want to keep it all in boxes and clutter things up?
It’s silly to dig through a dead man’s garbage. You would think death would add some gravity to the experience, would add some inherent layer of curiosity to the process of looking through these thing
s, would make every item seem like a fossil that indicated some interesting story we could never know, but it really doesn’t. At least, not here, not these things.
It’s junk.
I’m left to wonder why Glenn needed to keep his beta max player, why he owned a pair of oversized cowboy hats and why he couldn’t let them go. These items hint less at life as some grand narrative, some deep mystery to piece together, and more at life as a series of moments spent wasting time, episodes of novelty that string one after the other and add up to nothing.
Not that I’m judging Glenn, of course. I liked the man a great deal. I just don’t find intrigue in these objects. I find meaninglessness. I find reminders of how unprepared everyone is for the end. How you put these things aside like you might get back to them someday, and they pile up and up, and the time dries out, and all of the hours blow away, and here’s what you’ve got. A house full of crap with boxes of more crap stacked in garages and attics. A million clues leftover to hint at who you were, and none of them lead to anything.
And I have no time. No time. I need to find this stuff. Need it. Need it. Need it. Life and goddamn death type shit, and I’m looking at shredded sweaters and ab shockers and a stack of beta max tapes.
I pop the lid off of a Rubbermaid bin to find three pairs of bowling shoes and some yellowing newspapers. Bowling shoes?
I close my eyes. I grit my teeth. Rage heats my blood and flushes my face with it. I want to yell and scream and explode, but there’s nothing to say.
What the hell am I doing?
Stupid shit.
I stand up and jump, really slamming my feet into the concrete. The soles of my shoes slap against the floor. My body clenches up and my arms fling up and down once, and I realize how much physical expressions of frustration resemble physical expressions of celebration. And they both kind of resemble ape moves.
