Eleven Twenty-Three (42 page)

Tara props her head toward the bloodstain on
the floor, the place where Chloe cut her wrists. She lies very
still with both eyes closed, trying to keep from turning in less
than a minute.

“Do you think you and I are somehow
impervious to the magnetism of this town?” she asks.

“This isn’t the Golden Gate.”

“But it is, Layne. In fact, it’s the Golden
Gate, Aokigahara, and half a dozen other high altitude bridges all
at once. Lilly’s End is the murder-suicide capital of the world
now. So what about us, you and me? Are we beyond its clutches?”

“Why don’t you mention Julie in this
scenario?” I ask.

“Because she doesn’t see things the same way
we do. You heard her yourself earlier: Julie doesn’t see that
everyone’s a ghost, Layne. I don’t think anyone sees it but us. You
and me.
That
has to mean something.”

“I’d agree.” A pause. “That’s why I think Mr.
Scott is trying to help us get out of here, and why we have to help
get Julie out.”

“Come on, Layne. He knew about the eleven
twenty-three ahead of time and you don’t seem to be alarmed by
this. He’s able to send you messages even though the town is
completely shut off from the rest of the known world. He put that
briefcase in your bag. How can you possibly believe he’s trying to
help us?”

“Precisely because he
did
put the
briefcase in my bag, sweetie. Because we appear to be the only two
people he’s been in contact with. We’re the ones who’ve seen his
face and spoken to him. Further, like you just said, we’re the only
ones who see everyone the way we do. Now look, I’m not saying that
Scott isn’t involved. Far from it. I just believe that maybe, for
one reason or other, he’s using his involvement to help us, even if
he can’t or won’t help anyone else. It’s no easy feat that we are
still alive at this point, you know?”

“You don’t know that ‘still alive’ part for
sure…maybe we’ve been dead for some time.”

“What I’m telling you, is that it’s not a
coincidence,” I finish.

She looks up at the popcorn ceiling and tries
to fight away the syncope. I prop myself up on an elbow and gaze
down at her in the shadows, and then at my watch. Only a few more
seconds now.

When the traffic light changes outside, the
tint on the bedroom wall goes from green, to yellow, to red, and
back to green again. Tara’s skin pallor changes according to the
streetlight. I can barely see her anymore.

“Maybe…maybe you’re right,” she murmurs. “I
just don’t understand why he’d help us, unless it was part of their
plan.”

What I can’t bring myself to admit is that I
don’t
care
what their plan is anymore, as long as we live at
the end of it.

“Maybe it’s our fate,” I say, glancing down
at my watch one last time.

Across Lilly’s End, there are screams and
spilled blood. Gunshots and prayers. A precipice.

But not here. Here in this room, in this
little yellow house, everything remains tranquil and static.

“Sunshine,” Tara says, “you told me when we
first met that you didn’t believe in fate, and that when it came to
our existence, the future was still unwritten, the present was in
the hands of well-paid ghost writers, and the past itself needed a
lot of editing. You asked how there could be such a thing as
predetermination if our actions are always lost in the retelling
anyway. Remember?”

“Yeah, but—but I was lying. Maybe it’s our
fate
to do things that are inevitably omitted from the
records, you know? Like it’s part of the larger scheme. Whatever it
is, I decided the morning I met you in front of that coffee shop
that there was no such thing as a chance encounter. And look at our
meeting with Jonas Scott in Shanghai last week. Or the fact that
you and I are the only two people in Lilly’s End who realize we’re
gray and transparent but are still alive and breathing. I mean,
it’s just—”

“Ships never just pass in the night?” Tara
says.

“Right,” I nod, yawning. “Exactly, Sunshine.
Ships never just pass in the night. That’s why I think we have no
other choice than to trust Mr. Scott. He’s the person planning out
our fate right now. It’s our job to follow his instructions and
fill in the gaps.”

“In my dream, he was a writer…”

“Oh, by the way, it’s eleven twenty-four. We
were all given the night off, apparently.”

“Thank God,” Tara sighs.

I go into the other room and untie Julie, and
return to Tara’s room barely able to keep my eyes open.

“Goodnight,” I whisper, unknotting my
girlfriend. “I love you. I love you
so
much.”

Silence, nothing.

“I said that I love you. Can you
please
be mad at me later? Sunshine, my skies are really
gray right now. I need you.”

“Oh shit, you are so lame.” A long pause.
“But…I love you too. Now goodnight. No bad dreams this time,
okay?”

“I promise nothing,” I mutter, trying to keep
my eyes open as long as I can.

Outside, the shadows of the trees dance and
the breeze tapers off once the rain comes. Tara tosses and turns
before finally cracking the window to smoke a cigarette. Cold air
seeps in. I bundle up under the covers. My girlfriend watches the
blood wash away from the freshly deposited corpses along the curb
under the glow of the streetlight. The continuous gurgle of
pink-colored rainwater flooding down the storm drain serenades me
to sleep.

[
TIME
UNDETERMINED
]

The attendants take away our empty cups and
collect all of our trash. The seatbelt light flashes. A pilot tells
us on the intercom that we will be landing in Shanghai shortly. The
passengers smile gratefully.

When I look out the window though, there’s
something very wrong. Below, the countless spirits of the dead
scattered across the country are simultaneously rising from their
unmarked graves. They’re clawing their way out of the loose dirt
and paper shreds, and they are quickly replacing the living. The
longer I peer down from my vantage in the sky, the grayer my new
home becomes. Those still living shift into the minority. On the
intercom again, the pilot promises us that we are making our final
descent, but he’s lying. Truth disappears and the sky eats the
airplane.

We never land, and the plane simply flies
forever through the gray. There is no Earth to return to, and
therefore no great escape into China, no furlough in a random
European mountain range somewhere, no begrudging return to the
States, and not a single anonymous hotel room to accommodate us. We
simply fly onward, unable to land or even crash, as there is
nothing but the mammoth ghost of existence to greet us, out there
in the smog.

Sometimes the flight attendants bring us
pills, maybe a Bloody Mary or a Heineken, anything to calm the
panic-stricken passengers during our eternal flight. As time
passes, everything becomes blurry. The in-flight movies run
together and the plots merge into one incoherent ramble. We no
longer realize when we’re being fed, and simply chew out of rote.
Sometimes I glance down at my lap to discover an empty food tray,
having no recollection of eating, but know that I have because the
evidence and the flight crew indicate so. Every once in a while,
the pilot informs us that we are making our final descent into
Shanghai.

When the plane makes a wide turn, I can see
the thick trail of poisonous exhaust left in our wake. In the
chemtrails, I see the faces of a million dead Burmese, but I can’t
talk to my fellow passengers about it, because their stories are
always changing, and I don’t trust them.

08:48:4
6 AM

At first I think I’m still trapped in another
dream, that somehow I’ve attained a fuller awareness of my
subconscious surroundings than ever thought possible. I imagine how
impressed Tara will be when I wake up and explain to her just how
incredibly lucid my last Lilly’s End emission was, even if it does
concern Mitsuko. When I try to move my fingers in the dream, they
move. When I tell my body to sit up in the bed, it sits up in the
bed. I can smell vanilla incense in the air, taste the old
cigarettes on the roof of my mouth, and feel the chill from outside
coming through the open window behind me. It’s the most vivid sleep
of my life.

Perhaps this is part of my brain’s coping
mechanisms; that to compensate for the harsh realities of the End,
my dream world has become the more potent and viable of the two
states of consciousness. I can even tell the time on the alarm
clock across the room—an ability Tara always told me was
impossible.

Then I realize what’s really happening.

I’m not in the throes of a dream at all.

Mitsuko really is here, right now, in this
house.

I pluck out a pair of wrinkled pants from my
luggage and throw them on before gingerly peeking out the bedroom.
I can see her standing on the porch, talking quietly to Tara.
Mitsuko’s hair has been tossed up into a clumsy bun and her pants
are wrinkled. Her shirt’s been ruined with two incongruous
bloodstains on the arm and just above the left breast.

Mitsuko is crying. She’s actually crying. I
didn’t think it was possible, that her brain long ago deactivated
her tear ducts due to a malfunction in the heart.

“What’s going on?” I say, approaching the
girls.

Julie uncrosses her arms on the couch, sits
up straight, and pushes her glasses up on the bridge of her nose.
She’s never been so excited.

My girlfriend gives me a brief look-over and
studies my face for a reaction to Mitsuko’s arrival here. It must
not be so awful, because she nods a good morning to me and tells
Mitsuko to come inside. When she enters the house, she looks
around, carefully taking in familiar surroundings as if any one of
them may be bugged or wired to detonate.

“Sit down,” Tara says.

Mitsuko promptly sits down on the recliner,
without argument or even a raised eyebrow. I’m instantly
suspicious.

“What do you want, Mitsuko?” I ask. “We’re
kind of busy today, as you might imagine.”

“I know,” she says, running her wrists over
her cheeks to wipe away the moisture. “That’s why I’m here.”

I take this in and turn to my cohorts. Julie
shrugs. Tara stands by the doorway still, thinking about her next
move.

“Where’s Mark?” I ask.

Mitsuko doesn’t answer. Instead she inspects
her lap and tries to wipe away invisible dust from her wrists.

“Where’s Mark?” Julie repeats.

“Mark’s gone. He, um…he didn’t make it.”

“Oh my god,” Tara chokes, leaning against the
wall and taking in the news. “What happened?”

“Yesterday morning...he turned again…I
couldn’t control him and he was coming after me…I locked myself in
the bedroom, and when I came out…when I came out, he was gone…I
looked for his body, and then I…”

She doesn’t continue.

“And then?” Julie presses, unwrapping a
Snickers bar.

“And then…”

“And then?”

“And then…”

“And
then
? Yes? What happened to
him?”

“And then I found his body outside on the
sidewalk,” Mitsuko wails, burying her face in her hands. She chokes
out sobs. Tara moves uneasily toward her and rests one hand on the
widow’s shoulder. “He jumped from the balcony of our townhouse.
He’s dead.”

“I really, really hate this town,” Julie
says, and takes a bite of the Snickers.

Mitsuko releases fresh tears and looks down
at the floor.

“Well…I’m sorry to hear about your husband,”
I say awkwardly, glancing at Tara. “I’m, um, sorry to hear that.
Mark was—well, I’m sorry, anyway.”

“Yes, Layne, she’s got it. You’re sorry,
right? So get to the point, Mitsuko,” Tara says now, coming to a
seat next to Julie. I’m left standing between the couch and the
recliner, afraid to move. “Now that Mark is gone, what do you
propose?”

“It’s just that…my brother is hell-bent on
staying here and throwing some stupid end-of-the-world party. He’s
calling it his last great statement or something like a pretentious
ass and he doesn’t even care what’s happening anymore. But with
those soldiers coming…and Mark gone now…I don’t have anyone
else…and I don’t want to die here.”

“You left this house with no intention of
seeing or speaking to us ever again, Mitsuko. You and Hajime were
on the same wavelength only a couple of days ago. What
changed?”

Mitsuko pulls the stray black hairs out of
her face. When she straightens her shirt and avoids eye contact
with any of us, I’m left baffled. This is not the Mitsuko any of us
remember.

“I guess…I guess my entire outlook did,” she
explains. “I don’t have anyone left here to spend my last moments
with, and I’m…I was standing on the balcony last night watching
them take my husband away, and I realized—and this is so gay—that I
wasn’t ready to die. I’m not. So please, just hear me out,
guys—”

“You want to try and escape with us, right?”
Tara interrupts. “Is that what you’ve decided?”

“I’m not going to slow anyone down, Tara.
I’ll pull my weight. Just tell me exactly how this is supposed to
happen and I’m with you until the end, okay? Just give me a
chance…”

At this, she loses her words and tries to
find them somewhere among the floorboards. Julie shrugs again and
tosses her Snickers wrapper aside. My girlfriend works Mitsuko and
me into her line of vision and mulls this new development over
carefully.

“Mitsuko,” Tara says. “I know about you and
Layne.”

“Come on, Tara. Don’t we have bigger fish to
fry at this—?”

“Layne,” she interrupts, pointing at me, “it
would behoove you to just sit there and shut it.”

Remembering Tara’s crucial admission of still
being in love with me just before we drifted off to sleep this
morning, I promptly shut my mouth and sit by the bar in the
kitchen, watching the girls stare one another down.