Incidents of people on phones being attacked went on the rise in several cities across the country. They were punched, pushed, and in some cases, even stabbed or shot.
When Ed read about the first fatality, he was sick with guilt. He knew it wasn’t really his responsibility, but he’d started the trend. Some people even referred to the attacks on Smartphone users as “ripping an Ed.”
It only got worse during the summer. Drive-by shootings were reported, with phone users as the targets. Road rage against texting drivers turned even more lethal with the phone users getting shot at or run off the roads and highways.
Everyone seemed to blame the elusive, mysterious “Ed” for all the carnage. The Seattle Times reported that the police manhunt for him had intensified.
But no one was getting shocked anymore. They were getting killed.
Ed wanted to write another letter to the newspaper saying he’d stopped zapping phone-abusers months ago, and he disavowed all the violence. But he decided he was better off maintaining a low profile.
Meanwhile, it got so nobody felt safe using their phone in public anymore. Phone booths started popping up again in various cities, but now the glass was bulletproof.
By October, the violent aggression against phone users was on the wane. On the streets, in the stores, and on public transportation, people still weren’t using their phones. Instead, they talked to each other, read books or just seemed to notice things around them. Every once in a while, Ed would see someone furtively pulling out their phone in public, and they’d check something. Then, right away, the phone would go back in their pocket or their purse.
Ed still carried the Intruder around, like some people carry a rabbit’s foot. He had it with him a week before Halloween when he went downtown to Nordstrom to buy George a pair of sneakers for his birthday. But Ed had had too much coffee that morning, and before browsing Men’s Shoes, he ducked into the restroom. There was an open stall, and he grabbed it.
“You’re a two…you’re a four…you’re a six…” he murmured to himself as he stood in front of the toilet. Then he peed right on cue. He flushed the toilet and stepped out of the stall. He was about to wash his hands at the sink when another man stepped into the restroom.
What were the odds?
It was Rude Jason again, still sporting the backward baseball cap look, and once more, on his phone. “Yeah, yeah, I know. Well, he’s bluffing…” he said into his phone as he headed to the urinals. He unzipped with his free hand before he even reached his destination.
Agog, Ed stared at him. Despite everything that had transpired in the last ten months, this rude, self-important, phone-obsessed asshole was still a rude, self-important, phone-obsessed asshole.
Ed quickly washed and dried his hands. Then he reached into his pocket. He had to take the Intruder out of retirement just this once. He wasn’t even sure if the device still worked, it had been so long since he’d used it.
He stared at Rude Jason’s back while the guy continued his phone conversation at the urinal. With a smile, Ed pressed the Intruder button three times in rapid succession.
“Son of a bitch!” Rude Jason wailed. His voice echoed off the bathroom tiles. He dropped his phone in the urinal and staggered back. He was still peeing. The yellow stream shot around the men’s room—all over the floor. Ed almost got squirted.
Wincing, the guy crazily shook and waved his hand as if his sleeve was on fire. He finally turned to the urinal to finish peeing and then zipped up. But obviously, he was still frazzled. He kept wringing his hand as he stepped back from the urinal. Then he slipped in a puddle of his own urine.
Agog, Ed watched Rude Jason’s legs slip out from under him. He flipped back and landed on the floor. His head hit the tiles with a horrible crack.
His baseball cap askew, he was sprawled on the washroom floor, perfectly still. Beneath his head, a crimson pool began to bloom on the gray tiles.
“Oh, Jesus,” Ed murmured. He stuffed the Intruder back into his pocket, and quickly took out his cell phone. “Hang in there, buddy!” he called to the man, who didn’t respond at all.
Ed dialed 911. He kept thinking there might be a doctor somewhere in the store. With the phone to his ear, he hurried out of the men’s room. He almost ran into a short, pale man with a thin mustache. He wore an army camouflage jacket. The man glared at him.
“Nine-one-one,” Ed heard the operator answer. “What’s your emergency?”
But Ed didn’t reply. He froze in his tracks.
The man in front of him pulled a gun out from inside his camouflage jacket. “Cell phone scum!” he declared, raising the weapon.
The last thing Ed heard was the gunshot.
Then…nothing.
The shooter was an unemployed thirty-seven-year-old named Ronald Jarvis Barr. A security guard at Nordstrom tackled him at the exit as he tried to flee the store. No one else was hurt.
Ed was rushed to Swedish Hospital—along with Turner Pollard, 34, who had been discovered in the men’s room. Turner had suffered a mild concussion, took four stitches in his head, and was released later that night.
Ed was lucky in many ways. The bullet that had passed through his gut didn’t hit any vital organs. Moreover, the police and paramedics didn’t make any connection between him and the notorious “Ed” who had started the anti-phone-abuse trend. Turner’s memory was blurry, and he didn’t recall getting shocked. His phone had been found in the urinal. The police assumed he’d panicked after dropping the mobile device and slipped on his own pee.
They also must have assumed the Intruder found in Ed’s pocket was the remote keyless device for his car.
Ed decided that once they released him and he got home, he’d destroy the Intruder. He never wanted to use it again.
Ed had to stay in the hospital a couple of nights. On his second day there, he was still unsteady on his feet. But he wanted some exercise, so they gave him a walker to get around. He made sure his gown was closed in back as he feebly hobbled down the hospital corridor with some help from the walker. His stomach felt like it was on fire. But the doctor had told him that was normal in his circumstances. Still, Ed stayed slightly hunched over as he navigated the hallway.
Just ahead, he saw a thirty-something woman leaning against the wall, her hip pressed against the handrail. Her back was to him. “Oh, I’ll be here again tomorrow—and probably the next couple of days,” she said—apparently to no one.
As Ed passed her, he saw she was talking on her Smartphone. He also saw, on the wall directly across from her, a sign with a cell phone inside a circle with a line through it and the words: NO CELL PHONES ALLOWED.
“I think I’m just going home and making an omelet,” she was saying into her phone. “Probably Tex-Mex…”
Ed stopped and stared at her until her eyes finally met his. “I hate people,” he whispered, smiling.
The woman gazed at him as if he were crazy.
Ed nodded, then turned and slowly shuffled down the hallway.
* * *
ALL ABOARD
HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN
The Orient Express it wasn’t. But I knew that when I’d booked my tickets on the sleeper car from my meeting in Chicago back home to Boston. It would be efficient, traveling overnight. A twenty-three hour adventure. A vacation. Sort of. My client was paying the fare, and they’d encouraged me to go for it. “All aboard,” my client had said.
The glossy online brochure for the trip on the Lake Shore Limited had looked cozy, if not glamorous, and the idea of a separate compartment, just for me, all private and serene, might even give me a chance to catch up on work without interruption. And, imagine, even get some sleep. And arrive in Boston ready to wrangle some new business.
Now, as I attempted to punch my pillow-ish thing back into some semblance of pillowness, I wondered why no one had told me about the downsides of an overnight train.
The sound of the clackety wheels over the speed rails, I knew I could get used to that, i
t was train white noise, I figured, and had—sort of—expected it. But my luxury bedroom was not honestly luxurious. It tried, but it was a train. Three stems of stubby alstroemeria were stuck into a tiny glass vase perched, precariously, on a narrow metal shelf next to a cello-wrapped chocolate. A chair like a train seat, nubby tweedy blue upholstery, which didn’t recline. My bed, a bunk, took up most of the cubicle. I’d chosen the lower out of the deep and powerful belief that anyone on top would certainly fall off and tumble to the floor. That floor was clammy, with carpet so thin you could feel the metal beneath it, and the shower was tiny, so tiny that I’d just wait until I got home, and the loo was in plain sight. No one was with me, but still, it felt—exposed. And speaking of exposed.
Although the porter had promised that the wide glass windows were one way, so that no matter what I was wearing in my sleeper compartment (or not wearing) no one in stations along the way could look in, I wasn’t completely sure I believed that. As I stared at the bottom of the bunk thing above me, all coiled springs and twisted wires, I still feared that when we stopped—at Utica or Schenectady or Elyria—curious passengers on the platform would peer in to observe my insomniac self. Like a caged zoo animal on display.
See Cady Armistead in her traveling habitat, the sign on the outside of the train car might proclaim. “Will Cady succeed in the cutthroat world of public relations? Or will she get devoured by the bigger animals?”
Problem was, I thought, as I propped my head up on one elbow and watched the night go by, there was no way to tell how my life would go until the time came. Outside, the world was all in fast forward. It would have been fun to see in the daylight, maybe Ohio cornfields, if they had cornfields, or forests of upstate New York. At one point the dense darkness was slashed by bands of light; streetlights, I supposed. The train slowed, and I glimpsed a tiny town’s stoplights all go red, and lighted billboards that flashed by too quickly to read. Kind of like life, I thought, sometimes moments happen, but so quickly they’re uncapturable. My life as a public relations specialist—a fixer, as Hadley likes to call me—seemed to be rushing toward something, just like this train. But we can never know if the destinations we hope for will actually be on our life maps.
Or whatever. I just wanted to succeed. I’m good at fixing things, I do know that. Clients made miserable by snoopy and big-mouthed reporters, youthful indiscretions threatening to be headlines, time-bomb emails, college love affairs hanging like water balloons over a politician’s head. My job is to fend them off, calm the waters, soothe the savage whatevers, and let my clients succeed. All without anyone realizing I’d had a hand in it.
At least two CEOs and an internationally famed art dealer owe me their reputations, although I could never reveal who. One called me his hired gun. But there are never actual guns involved, of course. Power and money and control and reputation—and the potential loss of them—are equally effective weaponry. Anonymity, too, is a successful tool. My anonymity.
I flinched, startled, as another fast-moving train careened past us, whistle screaming, racing west. Our windows seemed so close. And yet, no way to see who was traveling the other way, speeding toward the unknown.
I’d indulged in a late night last-call glass of drinkable-enough cabernet from the café car, read toward the end of my novel, chomped the last of the Doritos, and felt, actually, proud of myself. Content. Safe. Burrowing down in my pillow now, I thought, well, okay. Time to sleep.
And then I heard the voice.
I sat up in bed, so quickly I almost bumped my head on the bunk above. The voice was as clear as if it had been in the next room, and I guess it was. I was in sleeper car “A” and, calculating, I figured the head of my little bunk was adjacent to the head of a similar bunk in sleeper car “B” next door. It had to be, because I was hearing as definitively as if I’d been using my earbuds to listen to a podcast on my iPhone. We might as well have been in the same room.
“Sweetie, sweetie,” the voice—a woman’s—was saying. “That’s cart before the horse. It was a real failure, right? I mean—three people in Sarasota?”
Horses? Sarasota? I admit I had a moment of trying to figure out what she might be talking about in that imperious voice, but it was now pushing 1:30 in the morning, and my get-some-rest efficiency was not being helped by the interruption. It was possible that my neighbor did not know how beautifully her voice carried. But this would be over soon. No one would be so rude as to continue a long conversation at this time of the night. Morning.
Wrong.
“My point is, there are no options,” she was saying now. “He is not a process guy. We need to focus our efforts on hitting goal, and not be distracted with noise.”
Not be distracted with noise? That was actually pretty funny. I leaped up, grabbed the pillow from the top bunk, slid myself back under the thin, pale blue blanket, and put the borrowed pillow over my face. Tried to block out the sound. That succeeded in making me unable to breathe. But not unable to hear.
“It’s gonna be fun,” I heard her say. “I’m telling me as much as I’m telling you. But I’m his right hand person at Rotherwood, so it’s so not a problem. Clear sailing. We’ll keep it clean. She’ll be done.”
Nice, I thought. Charming. And wondered who was on the other end. Whose right hand? Rotherwood, I knew, was a fancy prep school on Beacon Hill, a row of three story brownstones with historically genteel facades. What did they have to “keep clean?” As the CEO, and only O of Cady Armistead Enterprises, I was used to negotiations. Making things right, was how I explained what I did. Spinning my clients’ sides of the story. It was funny to think that I succeeded when someone else had a problem, but that’s how the world works. Checks and balances, all leading to equilibrium. I have to admit, as I listened, because how could I help it, to one end of the discussion-next-door, it sounded like someone indeed had a problem.
Whoever was about to be “done.” Whatever that meant. “Done” didn’t sound good, but it was none of my business.
My cell phone glowed on the floor, since I needed it near me, sadly, in case a client had an emergency. Damn it. Damn my curiosity. I grabbed up the phone, googled Rotherwood, looked up “contact us.” Clicked. Contact at Rotherwood dot edu, so went the address. I clicked on “Our Staff.” An array of women and men, diverse and professional in gray lapels and appropriate jewelry. I picked one at random. The email ended with Rotherwood dot edu.
We’ll keep it clean, she’d said. Keep what clean?
But again, none of my business, and I would never know. I clicked off my phone, trying to quiet my inquisitive brain. The woman’s voice had softened to a murmur, and for a moment I felt a twinge of disappointment. Something was going on in her world, and part of my job—and my passion, I admit—was to be curious. So I kind of wanted to hear the rest. But sleep was more important. I heard the loo flush in her room, had a moment of realization that if I could hear hers, she could hear mine. Then I heard water gushing in her aluminum sink. Mine was aluminum at least.
Mumble mumble, I heard. Time for me to sleep.
Outside the world was impenetrable, a dense July night, and staring, sleepless, out the window into nothingness, I imagined all the invisible dramas underway out there. The overnight hours, the time so many of us spend in suspension, our bodies recharging and our brains at rest. Or busy only in dreams. But there are those who are awake and active during that span of quiet. And some people live in different time zones, I reminded myself, so who even knew who Ms. Chit-chat next door was talking to. Still talking to.
“I’ll shoot off an email to Shay,” the woman was saying. “She’s the one who got the directive. I’ll cc you. But you minimize your contact, and then I’ll swoop in.”
Shay? I thought. Or Shea? Or Shaie? Ms. Shay? Mrs. Shay? Directive? Swoop?
Swoop?
My phone was a tempting rectangular glow on the thin gray carpet. No, I ordered myself. Go to sleep.
It only took me about four seconds to search Rothe
rwood for Shay. And Shea. And for good measure, Gray. And Bray. But nothing.
“Sweetie…sweetie, sweetie.” The woman was now obviously cajoling someone. I envisioned those cartoons my sister and I used to watch on Saturday mornings, where some animated character would hold a wineglass against the wall to eavesdrop on the animated character next door. Nina and I had tried it, and it didn’t work, we couldn’t hear a thing, and decided it only worked in cartoons. But what I was hearing was as clear as it had been in Looney Tunes. And maybe just as looney.
“The board has no idea, you know that. He’s a lush, a total lush. The wife’s a basket case,” the woman pronounced. “Ellen has disappointed me from the outset, so we can’t rely on her at all. Its two t’s right, in Pattillo? But if someone wants to commit career suicide, sweetie, who are we to stand in the way? Ha, ha, I mean.”
I clutched my phone to my chest. Even in bed I was still wearing my little navy jersey travel bathrobe, and socks. The socks because the floor was iffy, and the robe in case the porter had been lying about the windows. I thought about the people who’d shared the train with me before we all went off to our separate little compartments. You can’t really look at your fellow passengers, even as you stagger down the aisle to the bathroom or the café car and back, balancing your wine or soda against the lurching train. That would be rude. And replaying the faces of my travelling companions only offered me half-memories of newspaper barriers, and earbuds, eyes focused on glowing screens, on a man with his head plastered against the wide glass window, dead asleep. A woman with a—I stared at the bunk above me, as if the video of the train car was replaying. A woman with steely hair, with sunglasses on her head, and earrings. Big earrings. Was she the one plotting something in the room next door?
Since Ms. Chit-chat was in a sleeper car, she’d boarded the train with me in Chicago, at the lofty-arched and elegant Union Station, where the roasty smell of the Nuts on Clark mixed with fragrant coffee and wafts of yeast-pungent beer from happy travelers in the Great Hall. We’d all trooped down the chilly dank platform, pulling our black roller bags and tote bags. A few travelers had been lugging pillows, which I had thought, at the time, was odd. Now I know why they had them. Which passenger was in the room beside mine? Our heads together, Pyramus and Thisbe, without her knowing?
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