Eleven Twenty-Three (47 page)

I freeze. A terrible realization hits me,
but—
no
. That’s impossible. That is not possible.

“Maybe you’re one of those people, Layne,” he
picks up, suddenly nervous. “Maybe you could take that briefcase
off your arm right now and it wouldn’t matter. It might be nothing
more than a six-pound placebo dangling from your wrist.”

“Hajime, we’re kind of pressed for time, as
you can imagine. What’s the verdict, bro?”

He takes a deep drag from his cigarette and
exhales the smoke slowly from his nose. I try to push the thought
out of my head, but begin sweating instead.

“Come back inside for a minute and let’s have
a drink. Then I’ll give you my answer.”

Returning to the living room, we see more
partying ghosts than ever, and they’re getting out of hand. Ghosts
guzzling down beer, getting stoned on the couch, necking on the
stairs, wailing incomprehensible nonsense by the bathroom, munching
noisily on potato chips in the dining room, still more ghosts
fumbling with the stereo knobs—Hajime’s End of the World party is
reaching critical mass, and it’s not even five in the afternoon
yet. With the power out across town and the body heat and smoke
permeating the room, the entire house has turned into a sauna, and
most of the ghosts are sweating and fanning themselves with
see-through hands.

I follow Tara and Hajime through the living
room, which now trembles from the cacophonous notes of the song
“Pejorative Messages Etched on Cigarette Lighters” by Heroin for
Nine-Year-Olds. A slightly hunchbacked apparition with bags under
his eyes and a t-shirt depicting a scene from
Suicide Club
shambles toward me. He reaches out and grabs me by the shoulder,
using my body to steady himself. He coughs violently and looks at
me with cracked, watery eyes.

“Have you by any chance seen a guy named
Scott at this party, man? I know it’s a long shot that he’d be
here, but I was just hoping…”

“Um, no,” I stammer. “I haven’t seen him yet,
but I’ve kind of been looking for him myself, so if you do spot the
guy, would you mind letting me know?”

He bends over and starts coughing again. It
takes him several seconds to get out whatever’s in his throat and
to catch his breath.

“Why are you looking for him?” the man
wheezes. “Does he have something of yours too?”

But before I can answer, Hajime grabs the
briefcase and leads me away like a dog on a metal leash. The
hunchbacked guy reaches out and holds onto the wall for support. He
begins hacking again.

“Don’t worry about him,” Hajime whispers,
accompanying me to the kitchen. “It’s only Jason.”

“Well, if Jason was just referring to the
same person I am, we need to sit down and talk in the very near
future.”

I looking back to catch another glimpse of
him, but predictably, Jason is gone. The little gray girl in the
living room waves to me with a hand that only has three fingers.
She smiles just before sliding into the curtain again. I’m sick of
ghosts.

In the kitchen, Hajime lines up three shot
glasses on the counter and fills each with bourbon. I wince, unsure
if I can keep anything like that down. Olivia sidles into the room
just as Hajime hands us our shots.

“What’s going on in here?” Olivia asks,
casting me a sinister glance that quickly disappears the moment she
realizes where Tara’s attention is currently focused.

“Well, dear,” he says, “it would appear that
yours truly is about to engage in some truly dumb shit within the
next couple of hours. Your old teacher over there can be quite
persuasive at times.”

“Oh, you’ve got to be
kidding
me—”

“Your face, Olivia,” Tara reminds her,
balling her fist.

Olivia quiets down.

Hajime smiles sadly and pours another glass
for the girl. He hands them out, but I intercept Olivia’s shot and
pour it into the sink.

“You’re underage, young lady,” I say, and
hold my glass up.

Hajime and Tara follow suit. Olivia folds her
arms and waits for her drink to be returned, but Hajime only
shrugs.

“He’s a schoolteacher and you’re underage, I
guess,” he says. “Okay, guys—”

“
Was
a schoolteacher,” Olivia
interrupts.

“
Is
a schoolteacher, you cunt,” Tara
hisses. “Hajime, you may continue.”

“Thank you, Tara. What I was going to say is
that your speech convinced me. You two have got my help for the
evening. Now tell me what you have in mind. Oh, and
gan-bay
.”

“
Gan-bay
,” Tara and I repeat, barely
able to refrain from jumping around and giving Hajime a hug and
kiss.

The three of us clink shot glasses while
Olivia watches in horror. As I swallow the bourbon, which tastes
angry going down my throat, I make brief eye contact with Olivia
and have to stifle a giggle.

I realize that this little girl, this
conniving brat that once dominated most of my daily thoughts and
lurked about the recesses of my every nightmare, means nothing
anymore. The fifteen or twenty minutes she recently spent naked and
sweaty with Hajime are completely inconsequential, lost time buried
underneath piles and piles of eleven twenty-threes, scuffed
briefcases, and forged documents. In fact, when I look at her, only
a few hazy memories prevent her from being a perfect stranger now.
She’s callow, vulnerable, and desperate, distinguishable from the
other doomed spirits of the End only in the fact that she will
remain sober for the duration of this party.

05:27:00 PM

When I open my eyes, there’s only blackness.
Tiny imperfections in old fabric and the distinct feeling that this
shroud may be the last thing I’m ever unlucky enough to see. The
cold creeps in from outside and mixes with my breath, which is warm
and uneven and smells like the flu. It’s as if I were staring at
the insides of my own eyelids.

I told everyone to be patient, that no matter
what happened, they couldn’t move. I reminded them that if they so
much as flinched once the soldiers arrived, they would be shot, and
that all of us would. But lying here at the curbside now, wrapped
and bound in a black sheet, blind to the world, I have trouble
heeding my own orders.

There’s static on the walkie talkie, and then
Mitsuko’s voice: “How long do we have to wait here like this?”

My stomach flips again and a wave of nausea
passes. I shift slightly on the briefcase, which is stuffed
underneath my lower back. Then I fish out the radio from my
pocket.

“They should be here any time,” I say into
the mouthpiece. “They make daily rounds and this is one of their
last stops before heading to the barricade line at the northern
edge of town.”

“I think I’m going to freak out,” Julie’s
voice says. “We can’t do this. It’s not going to work.”

“It will work. Now keep quiet. Don’t
move.”

The ghosts and I resume radio silence and
wait.

My girlfriend carefully slid the blade of her
penknife along the fabric of the black thermal shirt. After she
finished cutting the side open, I slipped it on and smoked a
cigarette while she sewed it back up. Tara was out of black thread
and used red in its place. The thread looked like slivers of future
blood running up and down my ribcage.

Hajime watched bemusedly while slipping
batteries into the walkie-talkies.

“This is quite a life you’ve made for
yourself with that thing hanging off your hand,” he said. “Won’t it
get in the way during the pick-up?”

“I hope not.”

“You
hope not?
That’s your
answer?”

Just then, Julie and Mitsuko entered the
house. When Hajime saw his sister consorting with the three of us,
his jaw dropped and he shook his head.

“Wait a minute,” he stammered. “Wait just a
minute. You assholes didn’t tell me that you’d talked my
sister
into joining this idiot brigade of yours. Mitsuko,
how’d you let them talk you into this?”

“They didn’t talk me into anything, Hajime,”
she said meekly, as if she were just as afraid of her brother’s
reprimand than her fate in Courtney Park tomorrow. “I came to
them
. I want to escape.”

“What about Mark?”

“What
about
Mark? He’s dead, Hajime.
You know that. I had to put his body in front of our house
yesterday, in case you were too busy with your bullshit party and
forgot. I’m sorry if I don’t feel like being social, but I want out
of here.”

“Yeah, I can see that,” he said, looking at
the pile of linens by the door. “And it’s a beautiful gesture that
you’re planning on leaving town in the same manner as Mark did:
wrapped up in a bloody sheet.”

Mitsuko is wrapped up in Miranda’s bloody
bedsheets, lying in front of Mr. Dawson’s house across the street
from Tara’s. Julie stationed herself at the corner, bundled up
inside two black trash bags tied together with twine. She’ll be the
first to get picked up. Tara’s body is stuffed into an oversize
duffel bag, her legs and midriff exposed. She insisted on being
left in front of her own house when the pick-up crew arrived. I’m
the final one to go, stuffed inside a thick blanket tied with rope.
I’m positioned at the last house on the left. From what we can
tell, it’s the final stop on the soldiers’ route before heading
back to the barricade.

Before we planted ourselves at the curb on
Flint Street, we tracked down other corpses from nearby homes and
dragged them out to the streetside as well, hoping the abundance of
bodies would help offset any suspicion from the MOPPs. Two cadavers
were left exposed, their faces locked in terror and their blood
brown and crusted. We wrapped the other three in sheets like
ours.

Nine dead bodies on Flint Street, rotting
away in the pale December sunset.

“No sign of any soldiers yet,” Hajime says
after a while, reporting from the living room of Tara’s house.
“Maybe they won’t do a sweep of the neighborhood today.”

I grab at the walkie-talkie in the dark, but
hesitate. I say nothing. Neither do the girls. The only sound is
that of Hajime breathing into the mouthpiece. He doesn’t remove his
finger from the TRANSMIT button.

I think back to a day when I was nineteen,
smoking cigarettes in the breezeway of my college during a violent
rainstorm; flashbacks to a conversation concerning the film
Repo
Man
that I had with a Bostonian named Dustin, how we were all
nothing more than nondescript labels on generic white food cans;
listening to “Everlong” by Foo Fighters on a little purple boom box
when I was seventeen years old and believing that I would kill
myself before I turned twenty; the way Jasmine’s eyes rolled into
the back of her head as she dug her fingers deeper into the chasm
in her face; a time when I randomly remembered a boy named Jeremy
Best that I went to elementary school with, and in a perfect moment
of synchronicity, ran into him in a St. Augustine bookstore moments
later; my father’s aftershave, spilled across the porcelain sink in
the bathroom of our old house; Hajime running his fingers along the
leather of his father’s briefcase when we were kids, telling me
that what his dad had in there was
terrifying
; and a night
on Tara’s porch not long after she moved into the yellow house,
where I was certain that if I didn’t count to 23 over and over
again without stopping, the streetlight across the street would
come to life and wreak havoc across the neighborhood.

“I hate to ask about it again,” I said,
lifting my arm while Tara worked the needle and thread under my
armpit. “But how exactly did you say Mark died, Mitsuko?”

“I can draw you a flow chart, if it helps,”
Mitsuko said. “Look, I already told you. It turned eleven
twenty-three and he dove from the balcony and killed himself. He
broke his neck. It’s over, and I’d rather not talk about it, if you
don’t mind.”

“Sorry.”

I
did
mind, though. There was
something not right about her story. She said that Mark lost it and
was out of control. This part I had no trouble believing. But there
was something else. The end of her story—it didn’t add up.

All of us pulled our shirts up to expose our
chest. Hajime duct-taped our passports, a small loaded handgun, and
three thousand dollars to each of our ribcages, and then lowered
the garments with a sigh.

“This is it,” Tara said. “We all know our
positions. We all have our radios on the correct channel, right?
The car is loaded and ready. Everything is in place. Hajime, you
know what you’re doing?”

“Do
you
?”

“Let’s go,” she said, wiping tears out of her
eyes.

Hajime interrupts the quietude: “I think of
the future a lot.”

No one responds. We wait, wrapped in our
shrouds on the curbside. Ghosts pretending to be the dead.

“I see a blue sky hidden behind gray smog as
far as the eye can see, the atmosphere above our heads dotted with
military planes bearing no flag…I see empty interstates and clogged
city streets…I see the Middle East getting swallowed up by the
desert sands and a million SUVs swallowed up by our garages…I see
the faces of a billion Asian children no longer able to point out
where America is on a world map…Darkened warehouses full of
unsnorted cocaine and unsmoked marijuana, but lines around the
block for every same-day pharmacy across the country...I see kids
no longer interested in getting high, only in momentarily attaining
the sensation of being normal…Low-flying rust-bucket planes zooming
over the Mexican border, piled high with pills of every size,
shape, and potential side effect…Dunes of blue powder,
kindergartners with encyclopedic knowledge of grams and milligrams,
and cracked white bowls overflowing with rainbow-colored candy that
your doctor promises are safe to eat by the handful…”