Eleven Twenty-Three (25 page)

Looking back to the group for answers, I
receive only blank expressions from Tara and Hajime, Chloe in a
complete daze, and a cold accusing stare from Mitsuko, despite the
fresh cuts and swollen purple bruise on her face from an earlier
frenzy of her own.

I turn away and watch my mother’s home
die.

“When we got here to check on you, the place
was already going up,” Hajime says behind me. “I’m not sure how it
happened. But look, you can’t worry about that now—you have—”

My phone vibrates in my pocket again.

“Dude—your cell phone works?” he stammers.
“How is that possible?”

“It’s not,” I say, wiping the grit from my
face. I remove the phone from my pocket and open it.

I’ve received sixteen text messages since
11:23.

“Did you get another text from that guy?”
Hajime asks.

“Try sixteen.”

“What did he say?”

“The same thing over and over again,” I tell
myself as I scan the Inbox, leaving Hajime to ask me repeatedly
what the texts were.

I snap my phone shut and limp toward my car.
When I cough, smoke sputters from my mouth. My clothes are black
with soot. My right knee is bleeding somehow. I can’t breathe
through my nose.

The same hollow reassurance that it was not
my fault, it was not my fault, it wasn’t my fault, runs through my
conscience. Every time I notice the burns and soot and my tattered
clothes and the glow of the fire behind me, I realize how
meaningless that reassurance truly is.

When I get to my Accord, I open the trunk and
stare down at it: a black leather Schlesinger American Belting
attaché case, four-and-a-half inches deep,
eighteen-and-three-quarters by thirteen-and-one quarter inch in
size. A metal coil emerges seamlessly from the plating and leads up
to a single handcuff that has no key. I take the case out of the
trunk and gently place it on the roof of my car.

“Layne, maybe you need to take a minute to
rest,” Tara says.

“Make it five,” Mitsuko adds, rubbing her
temples.

“What did the text say?” Hajime asks while
cautiously approaching me like I’m still in an altered state.

Or maybe it’s the case that makes him—and
everyone else now—uneasy.

I flip open the handcuff and stare at the
three of them, who are watching me with morbid interest.

“I may have just killed my own mother. I may
have just killed her and set fire to her house. I may be
responsible for her death when that never had to happen.”

“Layne, I don’t know what you’re doing with
that case,” Tara says cautiously, “but if you trust that guy from
Shanghai, then you never came out of the psychosis.”

“This didn’t have to happen. He’s been
warning me all
day
, Tara. He told me to do this and I didn’t
listen.”

“Nor
should
you, Layne. Has it
occurred to you that he’s more than likely an integral part of
everything that’s happening here? Or the possibility that if you
put that god-damned thing on your wrist, you may be somehow playing
into the plot and inadvertently fucking
us
too?”

“There’s always an ‘us,’” I mutter
indifferently, running my fingertips along the smooth surface of
the case. “Well, she might be right, man,” Hajime says. “What did
the text message tell you?”

I take a deep breath and sigh, looking back
and forth between the briefcase and the fire engulfing the
apartment building behind us. When my fingers begin moving along
the coil toward the handcuff, the steel feels cold and I realize
how much the remainder of my life will change once I do this.

“What happened tonight will never happen to
me again,” I tell them. “That’s all there is to it. I may die like
everyone else. But I’m not going to kill anyone. And I’m sure as
hell not going to kill myself. If I do end up dead, it will be
someone else’s hands covered in blood in the aftermath. It won’t be
mine.”

With that, I place my right arm in the cuff
and clasp it shut around my wrist.

There are several tiny clicks as it locks
snuggly around my flesh, and I can hear a faint beeping sound from
the inside the case. I have a feeling that the case cannot come off
my hand now that it is locked; if it does, the contents inside will
become useless, whatever they are. I don’t
know
this to be
true, but I believe it, regardless.

I turn back to the four of them standing
there watching me in disbelief.

“Layne…what did he say?” Tara asks me.

I flip open the phone once more and re-read
the message:

Dont be responsible for + deaths –

attach the briefcase to your wrist.

Ill get you out of this.

“He told me that this is all my fault,” I
reply, shaking uncontrollably in the cold. I get in my car and wait
to leave.

Just before we go, the wind builds up again
and the leaves come tumbling off the trees, raining down on us and
blanketing the ground in lifeless russets and rotting browns. I
shut the driver side door and stare at the concrete, at everything
falling and skittering along the ground, at the ashes and tattered
scraps of paper and leaves and soda cans and empty water bottles
and a lone bit of yellow fabric from a man’s t-shirt. Everything
dances away in the gust. Like everyone and everything before them,
it’s all here and gone and immediately forgotten when the next wind
comes.

Document Three

“The ghosts of Lilly’s End die in droves. The
past becomes an indictment. Escape plans are conceived, abandoned.
There’s nothing on TV.”

Lilly’s End, Florida

Population at 3:14 AM EST on Sunday, December
9, 2007: 2,584

“Neither kind advice nor reason can gain the
ear of one possessed by the God of Death…but no matter how far we
walk, there will never be a spot marked ‘For Suicides.’ So let us
kill ourselves here.”

- Chikamatsu Monzaemon,
The Love Suicides
at Amijima

“I am leaving this place forever, without
thoughts, without hope, without work, alone in the dark of night.
The snow will cover my footsteps.”

- Anonymous note found in the exile of
Siberia, Russia

[
Third highest suicide rate in the
world
]

“His soul had approached the region where
dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could
not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own
identity was fading out into a gray impalpable world: the solid
world itself which these dead had one time reared and lived in was
dissolving and dwindling.”

- James Joyce, “The Dead”

PARENTHESIS

It was somewhere near the still point when I
lost my faith—in God, myself, the Dream, America—and I foresaw only
the bottom of an incarnadine abyss for all four.

After years of relative job security, an
elusive retirement fund, summers off, an iota of respect in the
teacher’s lounge, a car with less than 75,000 miles on the
odometer, a second-floor apartment, a dyed-hair girlfriend that
seemed to love me, and a complacent position within my Lilly’s End
comfort zone—it was all, in an instant, gone. I was facing what I
thought was the final chain of cliché events that would lead me to
my own imminent death. Once Olivia Glatz had finished off my
career, the debt took care of my remains. Almost instantaneously,
there were mounting bills on the kitchen counter. A notice on my
front door for May's rent. Menacing messages from snippy female
collectors on my cell phone.

Everything falls apart quickly when your
entire existence was never constructed of anything more than shoddy
laziness and twenty-something American apathy.

About a month after Kennedy High School
assassinated my future, I landed a job as a waiter at a chain
restaurant only a block up the street from the chain restaurant I
worked at during college. It was the beginning of summer and the
season was over, so I was bringing home paltry handfuls of
one-dollar bills each night. Most of this was spent on late-night
Taco Bell and Crystal, two-pack deals on cigarettes, and cases of
Milwaukee’s Best. Tara began paying my cell phone bill. I accepted
a hundred dollars from my mom one Sunday evening so I would have
enough to make rent for June. It quickly occurred to me that the
only times I could make any money at Applebee’s were when I closed
and could finagle excessive tips from drunken college kids and
fellow waiters from other restaurants, so I began trading out
shifts and requesting late nights.

Routinely thereafter, I would shuffle out of
the To-Go entrance around three in the morning, drive through a
sleepy End, and ooze back up to my apartment to half-watch shows
about aliens and skunk apes on History Channel, chain-smoke, and
poke through the blinds to watch the sun barely rise each morning.
Then I would pass out into a nightmarish daytime repose riddled
with terrible flashbacks, images of Olivia, and novel approaches to
murder-suicide.

I let my beard go. My hair was scraggly. At
work my smile was inauthentic and my sharp glances SOS’d “give me
the gun” to anyone audacious enough to sit in my section. In the
fitful moments when I could actually spend time with her, Tara’s
eyes were downcast with concerned girlfriend anxiety, but she would
never broach the topic and instead always suggest watching movies
from my collection that used to make me laugh, or the old
fail-safe: sex. Tara’s college education was coming to an end and
she was facing the same real world that had left me for dead. I
tried to reassure her that things would be okay for her, even if
they never would for me, but inevitably I would lose my words and
tell insignificant stories about unruly customers at the
restaurant.

After a while, I stopped pretending to laugh
at the movies Tara and I picked and they’d sit unfinished in the
DVD player. Our sex became sporadic, short-lived, and Victorian in
its utilitarianism. It was around that time that I began spending a
lot of time in the bathroom with the door shut and locked, not
wanting to see anything outside the off-white walls and cool
linoleum tile beneath my slip-resistant work boots.

It was Monday, July 2, two days before
America celebrated its now-hazy and ancient independence, when some
students sat down in my section. This was not the first time
someone school-related had come into the restaurant. Before that
night, I had already sank into the deep throes of depression after
several parents, fellow teachers, a freshman that I would have had
the following semester, and various other Kennedy haunts showed up
to eat and ask me questions regarding why I was no longer teaching.
As if they didn’t already know.

But this was different. This was a situation
involving four students, under no supervision, without a single
trace of couth between them. It would turn out badly.

I had already gotten to their table,
introduced myself, and begun my spiel about the $15 three-course
meal deal before I ever looked up from the floor. It was Randal,
TJ, Gwen, and Marcus. The only one I knew well was Marcus, since he
was failing my second block government/economics class before I was
fired. The others I only knew from the hallways as Marcus’s fellow
no-futures.

“Hey, Mr. Prescott,” Marcus said.

“Oh,” I stammered. “Hello there. How are you
doing, Marcus?”

“Good. I passed Economics.”

“That’s awesome to hear. I’m glad you got
that together. It would be a shame for you to fail a class like
that your senior year.”

“Yeah,” he said, glancing at his friends and
stifling a giggle.

“So…can I bring you kids something to drink?”
I asked, looking at a lone speck of garlic mashed potato on the
tile by my shoe. “How about an appetizer?”

“That sounds great, actually,” Gwen said,
stroking TJ’s arm and biting at her upper lip with slightly bucked
teeth. “Can we get an order of the fried mozzarella?”

“No problem,” I said, noticing one of my
other table patrons motioning for another Mojito. “What about to
drink, guys?”

“I’ll have a Long Island,” TJ stuttered.

“Me too,” Randal grunted. “And a water.”

“I’ll have a Long Island Iced Tea, too,” Gwen
said, scanning the drink menu.

“Just bring me a Bud Light,” Marcus chuckled.
“They’re two-for-one, right?”

I slipped my pad into my front pocket and
stared the group down, attempting to recreate the facial expression
I made the day I caught three of my juniors attempting to download
bestiality videos on the student computers. My stomach was sinking
into my feet and the restaurant was surging with red.

“They
are
two-for-one, actually, but
that’s not the point,” I said carefully. “Come on, guys. You know I
can’t sell you alcohol. How about something else? We have Coke,
sweet tea, Sprite—”

“Um…could you just bring us the drinks we
already asked for?” TJ interrupted. “It doesn’t matter. You won’t
get in trouble or anything. We drink here all the time.”

“Please?” Gwen said, smiling sweetly.

“I can’t do that,” I told the group. “I’m
sorry.”

“We’ll leave you extra tip,” Marcus said.
“How about it,
Layne
?”

“I—I could get fired for that, guys. I’m
sorry. Just order something else, okay?”

“Whoa, wait. You’re worried about getting
fired
?” Marcus said. “I don’t get it, Mr. Prescott. Didn’t
you already get fired from Kennedy for boning that Olivia
girl?”

“That’s what
I
heard,” Randal said. “I
heard they were doing it during his planning period and sometimes
people saw them leave school together.”

“That’s so
hot
,” Gwen said, looking me
up and down. “I’ve also heard she was pregnant. It’s not yours, is
it, Mr. Prescott?”