The End of Marking Time

by CJ West

  I might have been a bit emotional after Charlotte thrashed my pride, but I seriously considered staying inside the apartment forever. I wondered how long the government would keep paying. Would they kick me out if I didn’t show the potential to finish? The counselors and all the technology they used to watch me had to be expensive, but I never believed Wendell would throw me to the cat baggers.

  There was one thing I needed to do if I wanted to stay. I clicked the button on the remote control. The television lit up and Wendell appeared above the black box and chirped right into a lecture. “If you have any hope of finishing your GED you need to work much harder. You must spend at least five hours a day attending to your studies.”

  It was Blake talking through Wendell. After learning about the control room from Stephan, I guessed Blake had been downstairs waiting for me to begin a lesson so he could harass me.

  I chose to continue working on math.

  A long division problem popped on the screen. That wasn’t surprising in itself, but Blake was asking me to divide 6,809,775 by 735. The last time I used the program I was dividing even numbers by ten or twenty. I knew he was making it as difficult as possible for me, but I also knew I couldn’t afford to quit. I needed to show effort and that’s exactly what I did.

  I worked and worked at the problem, constantly multiplying 735 to try and find the right digits for my answer. I was getting close when Wendell popped up and said, “You’re out of time, Michael. You really need to try harder.” Blake was watching and making sure I didn’t finish.

  Nine more problems came, each one as difficult as the first. No matter how organized I got, I couldn’t finish the problems in time. I wasn’t sure if Blake was manipulating the clock, but I knew for sure he was watching me. If he could speed up the clock, he would.

  After the tenth problem, holographic Wendell returned.

  “You missed ten out of ten. You must do ten push-ups for each wrong answer.”

  He couldn’t make me do a hundred push-ups.

  “Spread the gray pads on the floor. One for each hand at shoulder width and one for your feet.”

  I tossed the pads on the floor.

  “Michael, you are five feet, eight inches tall. The pads are too close together for push-ups.”

  I arranged the pads appropriately and the machine instructed me to get into position. I held myself there and the machine ordered me to begin. I tried doing tiny push-ups and the wrist strap zapped me.

  “I can see you, Michael,” holographic Wendell said.

  I pressed out fifteen push-ups and my arms ached. Sixteen was a struggle. I managed to get to nineteen before I collapsed. My chest hit the floor and when it did, the strap zapped me again.

  It took me nearly an hour to finish the hundred push-ups because I needed to rest so long in between. My arms and shoulders ached. I was covered in sweat. As soon as I finished, another impossible long division problem appeared on the screen. The box didn’t even give me time to get to the couch.

  What I needed was a calculator and a way to hide it from the cameras. With that thought, I stood and started checking the walls and ceilings to see if I could find tiny lenses. I spent half an hour walking around the living room shaking my arms as if they hurt. It wasn’t acting because they did, but in all that time I couldn’t find a single camera.

  Little Wendell jabbered at me. He didn’t like the delay and like a fool, I put on the wrist strap and had another go at the problems. I did my best work and got two correct out of ten. Wendell ordered eighty push-ups and I spent the next hour completing them. After that there was no way I could do more math. My arms couldn’t hold me anymore and I couldn’t take the shocks when I rested.

  Blake had me in an impossible situation and he knew it. I had to keep studying or get thrown out of the program. The only other program that would take me was impossible to survive. At that moment I had a fleeting hope that Wendell would help me if he knew what Blake was doing, but who was Wendell going to believe, a relearner or his teacher?

  I decided to go outside and wait for Blake to leave the security room. Then I would try some of the other programs and see what I could learn when he wasn’t there to interfere. I needed to rest my arms and a walk outside was just the thing.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  The front of the building emptied onto a busy commercial street. At least it had been busy before the relearners moved in. There were a few shops still in business and plenty of cars parked along both sidewalks. I had no idea how far the cameras extended, so I walked to the donut shop and leaned against the bricks for a while. I wanted to wait long enough for Blake to lose interest and go home. What I forgot was that he could track me anywhere I went. He didn’t have to wonder where I was. He could find me electronically and so could anyone connected to Wendell or the police.

  I thought I was being smart walking the long way around two blocks and circling back to the control room from the opposite direction. Blake couldn’t know my intentions, only where I was at any particular moment, but I’d forgotten that. The street-side wall continued well past the rest of the building, forming a leg that jutted out. That leg housed the control room and also hid a fair-sized nook along the back wall where Blake parked his car. The men working for Wendell could bring things, or people, in and out of the building without being seen because the enclosed courtyard concentrated the relearners in the center of the building. Wendell kept us contained where he could monitor us easily without our knowing what he and his counselors were doing.

  The parking lot behind the building was home to cars with sagging tires, leaking fluids, and rusty panels. I settled low onto the curb where I could look past a fender and see the control room door while staying hidden.

  Sitting there on the granite curb, I felt my biceps and pecs tighten from the push-ups. Pretty soon my butt hurt from the granite and I pushed back onto the tiny strip of grass and stretched my legs out in front of me.

  If I was smarter, I would have realized Blake was probably in the control room watching my little dot on a screen somewhere. As I waited and waited for him to finish, he was probably waiting for me to get sick of sitting outside and come back in where he could torment me. Eventually it got dark and Blake waddled to his BMW and drove away.

  I laid flat and waited for the car to disappear. I didn’t move even after it was gone in case he could track me from his car. I gave him almost five minutes and then I stood up to go back inside.

  I hadn’t heard a single movement around me. I made a living by knowing my surroundings and blending in, but that night in the dark I allowed myself to focus only on the door, the car, and Blake.

  Nick sprung up when I reached the hood of the rusty Chevy. He cornered me at the worst possible time. My arms were sore from all the push-ups and Nick outweighed me by fifty pounds. My hiding place among the old cars was good because almost no one came back here. That meant no one was coming to my aid either. Nick, on the other hand, was ready. Tight leather gloves covered his fists. Long sleeves protected his arms as he grimly blocked the path back to my apartment.

  I thought about running, but my legs were stiff from sitting on the granite. I had a better chance to talk my way free than to outrun the brute.

  “What do you want?”

  “What do you think I want, moron?” Nick growled.

  He wanted my son. There were so many things I could have said to put him over the edge. I’d gotten to Kathleen first. Jonathan was my son and he couldn’t have him without my permission. But I didn’t feel powerful in the narrow space between the cars. I could have threatened never to give up my rights if he touched me, but I kept quiet. Nick was beyond negotiation. He was ready to force his will, and Kathleen wasn’t here to reign him in. I wondered what would happen if we went to the police. Was my word as valuable as Nick’s?

  If I reported this encounter and the last, maybe I’d have some credibility, but after being arrested three times, I was a bit short.

  Nick tired of the l
ong silence. He poked me in the chest and said, “Sign the damn papers.”

  “You can’t force me to give you my son.” Honestly I hadn’t thought about the papers since Charlotte left. I didn’t know what was holding me back. I didn’t know Jonathan. I hadn’t intended for him to be born, but it felt wrong leaving him and it felt wrong for him to be stripped away like this.

  Nick twisted a handful of my T-shirt and lifted hard enough to prove he could hold me in the air with one hand and pummel me with the other. “I’m done waiting,” he snarled.

  When I didn’t answer, he said, “I work inside Govbank. I can make things miserable for you in a thousand ways. I can make it look like you’re stealing credits one day, selling them to foreigners the next, and I can bankrupt you the next. No one will ever know what I’ve done.”

  The threat took me by surprise. Could Nick really be that powerful? I’d grown up surrounded by angry faces. Reading people saved me hundreds of times. Nick wasn’t bluffing. He worked in the bank and he believed he could ruin me.

  “We both know where you’ll end up then,” he said.

  “What?”

  He couldn’t know about the horrors Blake had shown me. Impossible. But he didn’t mean reeducation. My mouth hung open and he backed away knowing his point was made.

  “Sign,” he said.

  He rounded the Chevy, stopped, and turned to meow in my direction. I was stunned to be at the mercy of yet another man. I couldn’t look back into my past and ask myself where I’d gone wrong because I’d never really been on the right track.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  The ceiling barely faded from sight that long night in my apartment. Wendell, Blake, Charlotte, and now Nick were all pressuring me to be something I wasn’t. Every move I made, they were there. It seemed they were inside my head, reading my thoughts before I had them. How could they know what I’d do, where I’d go, and which tests I’d fail? They had dealt with hundreds of relearners before. They knew everything about me. Maybe from behind a video monitor it was easy to know what my options were and which one I’d choose. It wasn’t emotional for them. The choice to give up Jonathan or build a relationship with the boy and his mother was a checkbox on their list. To me it meant passing judgment on how I was raised and whether I was able to become something more than my father had been.

  For a while I felt like they were all, every one of them, herding me toward destruction. Wendell was responsible for everything that happened. Blake wanted blowjobs and who knew what else. If he couldn’t get what he wanted, he’d gladly flunk me and move on to the next relearner. Charlotte seemed too cold for someone so beautiful. I had no idea what she was capable of. Nick wanted his boy and he wanted to cleanse any memory of a relearner sleeping with his wife.

  I watched the slow march through the numbers on the clock radio until the morning light prompted me to get up. Showering was painful. I couldn’t reach my back and I knew the next day would be even worse.

  Pulling on my jeans and sneakers, I thought about signing the papers to get Nick and Charlotte off my back. She might force me to see my mother, but that was an argument I could handle. Blake was a nightmare. Just thinking about what he did made me sick to my stomach. There was only one person who could help me with him. My biggest problem was finding him.

  I felt a little guilty heading for the donut shop after Joel’s grocery shopping lecture, but it was easier to buy my coffee than to make it myself. My coffee wasn’t terrible. I needed the caffeine in the morning and I wasn’t looking for much more than that, but the donuts were much better fresh even if they did cost double.

  I didn’t even give the black box a second look on my way out the door. The gray pads seemed harmless at first, but I knew why Charlotte looked so grim when she saw them. They were the beginning of the end. No one could satisfy Blake’s ridiculous demands for problem solving speed, and the push-ups made it impossible to work very long. If things didn’t change, I would never complete another lesson.

  On the sidewalk I had a whim to go buy paper and pencils so I could make up my own problems. Practice might help me get better, but beating the machine was hopeless. I plodded along with my eyes on the concrete until a black blur in the street came even with me and stopped short. I was thinking about pencils and how I’d sharpen them when I turned and saw a long Lincoln blocking traffic. The window buzzed down and the wide black mouth of a twelve gauge poked out. I immediately dropped to the concrete behind a neon blue fender and a new-looking tire.

  The gun blared.

  Glass shattered and a few pellets ricocheted back and smacked against the car not far from my head.

  The pump worked back and forward to chamber another round.

  The gun blared again. This time the pellets hit the car I was hiding behind, deflected over my head, and crashed into the lower part of the window. The car took the worst of the second blast. Stray pellets cracked the glass in a dozen places but it didn’t shatter.

  The car door creaked. The shooter came out after me.

  I jumped up and ran past the donut shop, against the flow of traffic. The Lincoln couldn’t back up through the cars stopped behind it. I crossed into the street and the gun boomed again. I couldn’t tell what they hit. I heard glass and metal banging all around me, but none of the pellets hit home.

  I kept going full out for three blocks. When I couldn’t run anymore I caught a taxi and headed north toward the city. I’d never heard three shotgun blasts since I moved to town, never mind during the morning rush on a crowded street. The gunman didn’t care about witnesses. There must have been forty people in cars or on the sidewalk. He could have killed any one of them with a ricochet.

  I was in more trouble than I imagined.

  The cab dropped me at a grocery store. I went in and stayed near the back where I couldn’t be seen from the street. I hadn’t gotten a good look at the guy with the twelve gauge or the driver. My first suspect was Nick, but Blake could have hired someone just as easily.

  There was only one person who didn’t pop up on my list of suspects. He was the only one I could trust and right then I decided how I was going to save myself. I did a little shopping, ducked into an Internet cafe nearby, and hurried home.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  I dumped the packets of popcorn all over the counter and found the camera at the bottom of the box where I’d left it. I slipped it into my pocket, grabbed the shopping bag from the table, and rushed out the door before anyone could stop me. Instead of going right to my destination, I made a quick stop in the park near my old place on Dent Street. The basketball game had grown considerably in the five years I’d been gone. It seemed lots of people had free time on their hands during the week. Men in shorts lined both sides of the court waiting for the next game to start.

  The man with the gym bag was in the same place by half court. “Got any percs?” I asked.

  “I could use a new iPod. A red one,” he answered and pointed to a store across the street. I went over and paid for it by scanning my thumb. They had dozens of them in the glass case and I was pretty sure this was another currency that had replaced cash.

  Back across the street, I traded the iPod for my purchase and hopped back in the cab. I wasn’t sure I needed the pills, but the man I wanted to visit discouraged unexpected company. I stopped the cab two blocks from the house and when I saw the place I knew I had made the right choice.

  An eight-foot concrete wall rose up from just off the sidewalk to surround the entire property. It was still early, so climbing the wall anywhere along the front was out. I walked past a few times, then crossed the street and checked out the house from there. Someone with huge money had built this place a hundred years ago. It was six thousand square feet. Three floors with a slate roof. I didn’t see any people, but I did see three Rottweilers roaming inside the wall. I’d done this hundreds of times. I never would have picked this house because of the dogs, but I didn’t have a choice. I needed to see Wendell. I could have gone to
the front gate and pressed the buzzer, but he would have sent me away and things would have been even worse. I decided not to ask permission.

  I walked around the block, cut through a yard that looked like no one was home, and climbed a tree that leaned near the wall. My sore arms struggled to lift me and the three pounds of hot dogs stuffed down my shirt, but I pulled myself up and crossed from a heavy branch to the top of the wall. When I ripped open the first package and started breaking the hot dogs into chunks, the dogs came running. I poked a Percocet into the center of each chunk and tossed them on the ground. I kept breaking, poking, and tossing and the dogs gobbled down the pieces greedily. When they had eaten five pieces each, I stopped adding the pills and used the meat to entertain them, hoping they would pass out. I threw the pieces left and right, letting the dogs chase after them and fight over each morsel. I broke smaller and smaller chunks as I ran low, but the dogs showed no sign of tiring. When I finally ran out, the dogs looked up at me cockeyed. There were enough trees to hide me from the house, but that wouldn’t matter if the dogs started barking.

  I waited and waited, expecting them to tip over, but they didn’t. They looked woozy, but stood firm. Finally, I got impatient, reached out for a branch, and climbed down a tree inside the wall. The dogs watched like toddlers entranced by a television program. Their limbs were too uncoordinated to move aggressively. I stepped away from the tree nervously, but the dogs didn’t follow. They tilted their heads and took a few longing steps then laid down in the grass.

  It probably wasn’t smart to walk past the dogs smelling so strongly of meat. If there was another dog inside, it would have torn me apart, but I wasn’t thinking of that as I trotted across the lawn toward the back corner of the house. I didn’t stop until I was inside the overgrown rhododendrons. From there I was sure I was safe from the cameras, and I took my time inspecting the lower windows that led down into the basement.