Eleven Twenty-Three (39 page)

Tyson was absolutely devastated. After
Lillian’s end, Olivia went back up north to their home in Virginia
and disappeared into the ashes of history, but surprisingly, the
father stayed in Florida. The independently wealthy scientist
immediately had a house built on stilts just up the beach from
where his daughter died. He gave up on his research and instead
took on the role of entrepreneur, dumping large sums of money into
erecting a lighthouse on the squat outcrop of beach protruding from
the center of the local coastline. He opened up the first public
school in the area and laid the foundation for six new beach
houses. No one understood why he did it, but by the time the
Spanish American War had ended, the population had gone from just
over three hundred to nearly a thousand.

It was April 1897 when Abraham Tyson
officially named the town in eternal memoriam to his past-tense
daughter. I’ve always suspected, however, that he planned on this
eponymous moniker from the very beginning, from the moment he
arrived with his still-breathing progeny. Somehow he
always
knew this place was where his seashell would end up, much like I do
now. His daughter’s premature demise was nothing more than a red
herring, something to put down on paper as the catalyst for the
town’s existence. The death of the girl and the birth of the town
were simply ships that passed in the night.

Anyway, not long after the last of the houses
was completed and the lighthouse was shining its useless beacon out
to sea, Mr. Tyson made a final voyage, this one to study the
sturgeon in the Black Sea. In 1899, the last of the century, Abe
was seen attempting to charter a boat out of Kerch. He never
returned to America. The accepted scenarios usually involved
thieves or just another band of Ukrainian ruffians, though no one
ever knew for sure. Tyson’s body was never recovered, either.
Another family record written in beach sand.

The town he built in honor of his dead little
girl, however, lived on. Lilly’s End reached capacity quickly. In
the beginning of the Florida real estate boom in the Fifties, new
homes were purchased before the foundation had even been laid, and
any land high enough above sea level and not cluttered with
impossible mangrove roots was quickly whipped into a complex of
condominiums or grocer or beach shop soon after. Tyson’s house was
eventually torn down and replaced by a seafood restaurant that was
also torn down and replaced by a Tiki lounge.

As time passed, however, many residents grew
weary of the geographic isolation and incessant boredom of the End,
which seemed doomed to mediocrity and reserve long before it was
ever given a proper title. Tempted by the whorish perfume of more
exciting, in-touch beach communities like Daytona and New Smyrna
and St. Augustine, residents began to evacuate Lilly’s End in the
1970s, and only the diehard residents, the ones with perpetually
shifty eyes and a reason to avoid the world at large, remained. Our
tourism industry dwindled and to this day, we are the only coastal
community in Florida that continues to lose citizens with each
passing year. If the trend continues, the End will wind up a ghost
town.

At around ten-fifteen, the townsfolk start to
get antsy in anticipation of the eleven twenty-three, and several
of them attempt to climb aboard the military vehicles. The soldiers
drag each of them out and give them a hard shove back toward their
fate, but this minor show of force doesn’t always work, and so Tara
and I watch helplessly at one point when the troops gun down three
locals, one of whom I think is the Kennedy High School janitor.
Only then do the residents catch their ride out of here.

By ten-thirty, the work isn’t done yet and
there are still countless piles of meat decked out in front of
practically every home in the End, but the teams evacuate anyway,
heading toward the largest of the barricade lines at the northern
rim of town. I follow them in my car for a while before the trucks
disappear behind a little community of tents erected along the edge
of the quarantine. It looks like a post-Millennium Hooverville.
Townspeople drink rancid black coffee and tend to little campfires
and speak absently to their traumatized kids, who never stop
believing that their iPods and PSPs will make it all okay again.
Every once in a while the adults look over their shoulders at the
Marines and helicopters and mysterious suited men in surgical masks
looming behind them, but they do nothing. Everyone carries on.

“Why are they camped here?” Tara asks,
disgusted.

“Because they still think they’re going to be
rescued, and they want to be first in line when it happens.”

“So the trucks all went behind the barricade
line. What do you think they’ll do with the bodies?”

I peer through the binoculars. The dump
trucks full of corpses are gone, hidden behind military command
centers and state-of-the-art medical tents and dozens upon dozens
of faceless men in gas masks.

“Probably burn them,” I say. “Maybe ship them
out of town for study. Bury them in a mass grave somewhere. I’m not
sure. We need to find out though. That may be our ticket out of
here.”

“I already told you, Layne. I’m not doing
that. It wouldn’t work anyway. You see how heavily guarded the area
is. We won’t get five feet from the truck once it’s past the
barricade line, even if we do manage to get thrown in the back and
carried out of town.”

“We’ll see,” I tell her, still surveying the
scene. “Let’s see how they do things tomorrow morning before we
make any final decisions. We need to take a look at the maps, too.
Then we’ll finalize our plan.”

“It’s going to be eleven twenty-three soon,”
Tara says, glancing at her watch and clenching off a single tear
that forms when she sees the time. “What do you want to do?”

“I think I may have a plan for that too,
actually.”

11:12:13 AM

Tara doesn’t like my plan very much.

“Eat my
fuck
, you failed ex-teacher
pederast.”

“Come on, Tara. The last two times it
happened, I didn’t turn. It might be our best bet. You’re just
going to have to trust me.”

“You’re asking
me
to trust
you
?” she says. “Is that what you want? For me to trust you
with my
life
? I can’t even depend on you for something as
simple as monogamy.”

“Monogamy isn’t simple, first of all. Second,
this has
nothing
to do with Mitsuko, and you need to
acknowledge that. This has to do with surviving, and that’s it.
Last night you and Julie both tried to kill me. Then you tried to
kill yourselves. Frankly, I don’t want to have to deal with that
alone again. Tying you up would keep
both
of us safe, Tara,
and you know it.”

“I’ll be in my room,” Julie says to no one,
standing awkwardly in the kitchen. “I’m not really into getting
tied up and humiliated, despite what one of my ex-boyfriends may
have told you. So if anyone hears a bad noise in a few minutes,
come and check on me, okay? Is that too much to ask?”

Neither of us responds to anything Julie just
said, and when she shambles off furious and not ready to die alone
in her bedroom, Tara and I still don’t move. The door slams and the
house trembles.

“Anyway, I
don’t
know that we’d both
be safe, Layne,” Tara continues. “You want me to allow you to put
me in restraints and tie me down so that I have absolutely no way
to defend myself if
you
lose it? That’s just plain
over-the-top stupid, and it’s not happening.”

I clench my fists and take a deep breath, not
making eye contact with her. She’s been this way from the moment
she woke up last night after it happened, having no memory of ever
trying to pull my skin off or deflate her own head against the
floorboards, but vividly recalling every aspect of my argument with
Hajime just before she went under. Even in the throes of our own
mass extinction, Lilly’s End is apparently not entirely above
network TV melodrama.

I slept on the bloody pullout bed last night,
listening to Tara weep solemnly as she scrubbed the stained carpet
in her bedroom with a soiled sponge.

“Tara, I can only—
assure
you—that I
will not turn at eleven twenty-three. Don’t ask me how I know this,
but I do. Mr. Scott said so—”

“Mr. Scott
said
so?” she repeats,
imitating a laugh. “Do you realize how much of a complete dunce
you’re being?”

“No more of a dunce than you were for
actually wanting to
stay
here when we got back into town a
few days ago, Tara.”

“Oh, shut up, you bastard. That was before
any of this happened and you know it.”

“Exactly my point with the Mitsuko thing.
Hindsight is twenty-twenty. Get the analogy?”

“I’m not letting you tie me up, and that’s
final,” she says, in typical Tara fashion completely disregarding
everything I just said. “If you don’t like it, you can just get the
hell out of my house. If I turn, I turn. It won’t be your
problem.”

“I’m not leaving you alone here, Tara. It’s
not me I’m worried about.”

“You talk like you’re some kind of invincible
presence here, that you’re somehow transcendent and beyond death. I
hate to break it to you
again
, but you are just as liable to
turn in a few minutes as I am. Maybe more, in fact. You seem due
for another round any time now.”

“If you say so, Tara. You’re the last
Tennille now. The ball is in your court…”

I immediately regret saying this and have to
watch as her eyes well up and she runs into the bathroom to cry
without me seeing her, as if the short bursts of ultimatums
regarding marriage, the offhand comments every time we try to go to
Starbucks now, and the conversations on not having conversations
never happened and I haven’t seen Tara break down before.

I take the brief opportunity to remove the
long telephone cord from the closet, set up one of the kitchen
chairs in the middle of the living room, and finger the old
neckties stuffed into my pocket. I lick the salt from above my
upper lip, scraping the bristly origins of a beard with my tongue.
I wait for her to return, glancing at my watch.

11:14.

If I ever get out of here, the first thing I
am extricating myself from is time. I will never own a watch or
clock again, and will make a point to tell the world that the
fourth dimension is in reality nothing more than a long black car
on a very tight schedule.

When Tara finally trudges out of the
bathroom, her perception of the situation probably emerges in this
order: Layne standing erect in the middle of the living room,
waiting; the telephone cord bundled up in his left hand; that
god-damned briefcase still dangling limply from the other hand,
except now it’s covered in numerous nicks and scratches and scuffs;
the old neckties heaped on the floor; the wooden chair next to the
ties and how it wasn’t there before; and finally, too late, Layne
charging toward her with glassy shark-like resolve in his eyes.

“You son of a
bitch!”
she screams and
tries to back away, but I have already engulfed her.

Without a word, I throw the cord over her
head and jerk it back against her ribcage. I jostle with my
girlfriend for only a moment before her compounded fatigue
overwhelms her and she allows herself to be dragged over to the
chair. After I force her to sit, I wrap the telephone wire around
her and the back of the seat several times, tightening the grip
with each revolution until she is gagging and complaining that she
can’t breathe, though her ability to call me every name she can
think of and even throw in a comment about Olivia indicates
otherwise.

While I’m restraining her, Julie pokes her
head out of the bedroom and sees what I am doing.

“I sure hope you don’t turn, Layne,” she
says, and closes her door again.

“Layne, please,” Tara whimpers. “You’ll kill
me. Julie,
help!
”

“I’m not killing anything, Tara,” I say
calmly, picking up the first necktie and using it to bind her feet
to the legs of the chair. “I’m just sick of this bullshit every
twelve hours. I’m taking a sabbatical this go-round.”

As soon as I think she will stop fidgeting in
her chair, Tara throws a sudden tantrum, tossing her head from side
to side and thrusting her pelvis up. The cords start to come loose.
I grab her by the arm and force her back down, grabbing the other
tie. I wrap up her hands; I tighten the telephone cord two more
times; I sigh. Tara turns her head and tries to spit on me, but she
has no saliva and only manages to expel a foul-smelling white
spray.

“I can’t believe you,” she mutters, defeated.
“I told you not to do this, and you did it anyway. In five minutes
or so you’re going to attack me and here I’ll be in this chair,
unable to do a thing. You’re killing me by doing this. Maybe Julie
too. You know that, right?”

“Maybe I’m doing this for a little peace of
mind, Sunshine. Maybe my intentions are totally benevolent, and
maybe you secretly believe in me and that’s why you’re not flailing
around and being a general pain in the ass right now. You think,
maybe?”

“Yeah, well,
maybe
you actually want
me dead, and I’m just accepting it for what it is because I’m just
really, really exhausted and I really, really hate you and want the
guilt of killing your own girlfriend to hang over your head
forever. Just maybe.”

“There’s no telling,” I murmur, moving away
from her and standing by the window, peering through the blinds at
a middle-class neighborhood not so unlike another random convoy of
flimsy tin-roof houses and thatched huts in a third-world shit-hole
somewhere. I glance automatically at my watch. “It’s eleven
nineteen.”

A moment passes without any noise from either
of us. I can hear Julie cursing at herself in her room, and feel
the invisible energy of Tara frantically working things out in her
head. I catch sight of the TV in the kitchen just long enough for
another encouraging message: