Authors: Michael Marshall
W
hen Warner woke this time, he could tell that a lot of things were different.
Seriously
different. Gravity seemed to have altered, for a start, to be pulling him in a different direction. The rigidity of his position had changed, too, and felt less implacable. In addition to the pain in his thigh, to which he’d become horribly accustomed, there were now deep veins of discomfort spreading from his left arm and hand, the back of his head, and the small of his back.
Then he remembered why all this might be.
He’d tipped himself backward off a twelve-foot drop onto concrete while strapped to a heavy chair.
Astonishingly, he wasn’t dead.
Not yet, anyway.
H
e peered up into the near darkness and confirmed that his view was now of the underside of the half floor where he’d spent the last couple of days.
He turned his head to the right, and then all the way to the left. It hurt a lot, but he could do it. He tried moving his arms. They were both still constrained, but less tightly than before. The chair was broken.
How about that.
He took his time. He rotated his right arm around the shoulder and then started to pull the hand up. It caught hard around the wrist, but ten minutes’ patient effort worked it free.
He held it up in front of his face, turning it slowly around. He had his hand back. Slowly, he started to laugh, a dry whistle in the back of his throat. He made this sound until he believed he was going to be sick. His head spun. But he wasn’t stopping now.
He reached across his body and started working at the canvas tied around his other wrist. That arm of the chair was more badly broken, and his left hand took only five minutes to free. He reached both hands up together and tried to determine how the canvas around his neck had been fastened. After twenty minutes or so he’d made no progress—but then a chance movement revealed that the upper cross-panel on the chair had been broken, and a sideways movement of his head pulled it free. The canvas band stayed around his neck, but he could live with that. In a world where his fall hadn’t killed him, he was prepared to be accommodating on the details of survival.
He planted both hands on the ground and pushed backward, trying to gauge how badly damaged the lower portion of the chair was. It inched along with him, which suggested it wasn’t damaged enough. With a little more shoving and a series of slewed and twisted movements, however, it started to come apart. The process was made easier by the fact that he could feel very little in his right leg. That was likely bad in the long run, but for now it made things easier, and sometimes you have to be all about the now, after all.
He pulled. He wrenched. There was a slow, whirling sensation in the back of his head, which probably didn’t augur well. He sobbed from time to time, and was eventually sick, a sequence of wretched dry heaves. When he’d done with that, he went back to work.
After about forty minutes, he was free.
He rolled onto his stomach and pulled himself along the floor until his feet were no longer tangled in the remains of the chair. When he was close to the wall, he laboriously looked back.
It was pretty dark, but the pile of broken wood in the middle of the floor picked up enough ambient light to look like the aftermath of a conjuror’s trick, some Copperfield showstopper. Once there had been a man tethered in the center of it. Behold, now he was gone.
The escapee hurt, however. He was bleeding from a number of places, two fingers on his left hand looked and felt broken, and his head kept swirling, slowly, permanently, as if his consciousness was trying to exit via a blocked drain. He hurt
everywhere,
with a messianic, third act, this-may-not-be-fixable density of sensation.
But he was alive. So what now?
His aim had been straightforward. He’d gone through with it, too, attacked it with commitment. Only to find himself out the other side.
Death would have been simple. His current position was not.
He slowly stood up.
H
e made his way through the ground floor, supporting himself for much of the way by leaning against the walls. By the time he got to the padlocked door to the outside, his right leg had called off the pain amnesty. So had his memory. He’d recalled the full detail of why it had seemed reasonable to try to take his own life.
If the cops were digging around his house, then more than one system had failed, and his old life was over.
He couldn’t go home.
So where?
Even a week ago, he knew he could have called upon other friends. The club that he’d been a part of for nearly twenty years. After three days out of the loop, however, he had no idea what had happened there: what they knew, what they’d guessed, how mad they’d be, and what they’d be prepared to do to get back at him.
Getting in contact with them could be like handing himself up to a pack of dogs. Old, fading dogs, yes, but dogs all the same.
There was a pile of pallets close to the door. He gingerly lowered himself onto it. His pelvis didn’t like the arrangement, but he needed to rest. He needed to think. He gently patted the pockets of his gray sweatpants, now blood-and-sweat-and-urine-stained beyond recognition. No phone. Hunter would have taken that, of course. No money, either. No nothing.
Just him.
He was suddenly aware that he smelled really bad. On the upside, he noticed that the padlock on the big slab of hardboard was hanging open. Hunter must have broken it. He could have replaced the lock with one he’d purchased, of course, but evidently that hadn’t occurred to him. With his captive tied to a chair, why bother?
Because, you loser, some men are made of stronger stuff.
His survival was an accident, of course. But you make your own luck, right? Even now, even in these late days, even with the world as very badly screwed as he knew it to be . . .
Game not over.
He flipped the padlock off. It fell to the floor. He only realized how weak he actually was when he tried to move the makeshift door. He barely managed it, and nearly fell over backward to land with the thing on top of him. Finally he edged it far enough to one side that he could squeeze through the gap.
Once through, he found himself lurching down in a flat, muddy area between the shells of two five-story condo blocks. He shambled into the middle, stopped, turned around. It was fifty yards square, a few tarp-wrapped pieces of inexpensive machinery parked neatly over to one side. If you listened real hard, you could hear the sound of the ocean.
“You’re kidding me.”
He looked back the way he’d come.
Yeah. Once you were oriented, there was no question. This was the Silver Palms development on Lido Key. Small, by recent standards. Not a career maker, just one of those journeyman projects you’d walk away from with a few million—assuming you hadn’t been shut out of the deal by a trio of ancient assholes who’d decided to turn their backs on you. It was the very resort, in fact, that—when Warner had discovered that the others had edged him out—had caused him to unofficially and covertly resign from their dumb little club and start having some fun with the old fuckers on his own account.
Hunter couldn’t have known this, of course. It was merely life playing itself out like the big cosmic joke it was. Ha ha. Very funny.
Slowly Warner began to make his way up the slope, to try to find a public phone. He could think of one person he could call. Another if it
really
came down to it—though that would really have to be a very last resort. Neither of these people was Lynn. He was beyond any form of normal life now, and knew it. Lynn was back in the shadows of before-life-in-the-chair.
He knew also that his ghosts were still behind him, Katy closest of all, following him up the slope.
Let them come.
He was screwed, but he wasn’t dead yet.
I
was sitting looking at my phone, and no, I was not back at the house. I’d just called Steph’s number again—leaving yet another message, and remotely checking those on the machine (finding none but my own thirty-second slabs of ramping anxiety, a jump-cut graph of my state of mind since midafternoon). I was sick of the sound of my own voice, both inside my head and in messages apparently destined to go unanswered. My phone battery was down to ten percent, and the icon was firehouse red—which meant it could go splat at any moment, probably within seconds of starting to receive an actual phone call.
I knew I should be getting myself the hell back to base. Hallam had told me so (and I did feel a measure of relief, or at least a sense of having done the right thing, having mentioned Stephanie’s not-being-aroundness to him). Karren had told me that was the best place to be, too, if I wanted to get a jump-start on placating my wife. I knew it on every other level, including that it simply wasn’t a great idea to be seen getting drunk on the Circle, one of my key areas of business.
I’d known all these things when I ordered the previous beer, however. I wished I’d simply gone home after the first drink at Krank’s, sat in a chair, and waited for my wife. I would have been in the right place, possessed of righteousness: here I am, ready and willing to sort things out—and where the heck have you been, my love? Now I was in the
wrong
place, and drunk, and apparently intent on paddling myself further and further up a side creek of wrong action.
“Is that one of those phones where if you stare at it hard enough you can get it to explode? Because that would be cool.”
I looked up, startled.
At first I thought someone at one of the nearby tables must have spoken. Then I saw a slim figure ten feet away, just out of range of the bar’s lights.
“Who’s that?”
She stepped forward. It was Cassandra. She was carrying a paper grocery bag crooked in one arm.
“Oh,” I said. “Sorry. I was miles away.”
“Without a map, by the look of it. May I join you?”
She sat neatly, the bag perched on her lap like a well-behaved little dog. “So what’s up, Mr. Moore?”
“Up?”
“Just wondering why you might be here all by yourself. And glaring at your phone like that. As if it was a really
very
naughty phone indeed.”
“Battery’s nearly dead,” I said. “And I’m . . . It would just be good if it didn’t run out right now.”
“You want a charge?”
“You can do that?”
“Well, duh. Do I look Amish?”
I stared at her owlishly, wondering how exactly she could achieve this outside a bar. She laughed.
“You would need to take a short walk back to my apartment. Where I have a USB charger cable for a phone such as yours, along with many other technical goodies and gewgaws.”
“Is it far? Actually, I have a car with me.”
“I’m sure you do. But—and please don’t take this personally—I’m thinking some foot-based locomotion would be a smart tactical choice for you right now. Certainly before attempting to steer a large chunk of metal back to the mainland.”
I thought for a moment. Okay, weird idea, but she was right—I was too drunk to drive, however slowly and methodically. Short walk, charge phone, get car, head home. That could work. It even kind of rhymed.
“That would be great,” I said.
I went indoors and found my waitress, paid. I caught a glimpse of the other waitress, the one from our anniversary night, on the other side of the room. She recognized me and gave a small, distracted nod. I thought about making my way over and asking if she’d seen my wife—you know, the woman I had dinner with upstairs the other night—but the room was crowded and I knew it would look drunk and strange, so I did not. I thought I’d got the drunk/strange look nailed pretty well already, without going to any extra effort.
Cassandra was standing on the sidewalk under a streetlight. She looked like the cover from some 1950s novel about an innocent in the big city, or would have if the Circle looked even slightly urban, and if they’d had emo chicks back in those days.
“Follow me, sire,” she said.
W
e walked up the road onto Lido Key. From there it was a long straight stroll along Ben Franklin Drive, past the car park for the beach and the looming hulks of condo developments. Lido is small, intimate, with a crescent moon of white sand beach about half a mile in length. At the far end, the key abruptly becomes much wilder, acres and acres of trees, bush, and near swamp around a couple of large, natural (and hence flyblown and unattractive) stretches of water. One day the whole key would doubtless be covered in opportunities for fractional ownership, but for now the southern quarter wasn’t that much different from the way it had been when dinosaurs roamed the earth.
It was dark, but the air felt soft and warm. At one point, halfway along the drive, I stopped for a moment, frowning. I turned around. I almost always did this when I came along this way, but had never been able to work it out before.
“Aha,” I said, however, feeling a flip of recognition deep in my gut. “This is it.”
“Yeah, I heard they kept the secret of life along here somewhere. So you found it, huh?”
“The Lido Beach Inn,” I said. “
That’s
where it was.”
“Excuse me?”
I turned to look at her, feeling old. “We came to Florida a couple times when I was a kid,” I said. “We always used to stay on Lido Beach. Back then this key wasn’t so developed, in fact it was the budget option—though it had been a big deal in the distant past. There was a huge old hotel back on that last corner, where the Sun Palms is now, but it was abandoned all the years we came. And along here . . .”
I indicated the row of finished and nearly finished developments that now lined this stretch. “I think there were already a couple of smaller condos back then, but it was mainly old motels. They’re all gone now, but every time I’ve been along this road since we’ve lived here, I’ve tried to work out where the Lido Beach Inn was. And I’ve finally realized, it’s here. Or it was.”
I pointed into the heart of a small, upscale development, and suddenly I could actually
feel
it, situate myself on the planet and in my memory and know this was the spot that had held a scruffy old U-shaped motel where you drove under an awning and turned right or left to park in front of two parallel blocks of rooms. There were perhaps a dozen rooms on each of the two levels, a swimming pool in between—and a walkway that led out to the beach. The motel had a laundry room, a Ping-Pong area with a table whose net never stood up, and whirring ice and soda machines. No restaurant, no bar, no store, no child-care facilities or concierge service. Just a place for families to hang out while they soaked up some rays (back in the days before it was determined that sunlight was cancerous poison and to be avoided at all costs). For a moment it all seemed totally real, as if those family vacations had been only a year or two ago.
I saw, however, that the building that had replaced the Lido Beach Inn could itself do with a lick of paint, a chunk of render missing up on one side. The next generation was already getting old. I recalled, too, that only two days ago I’d been caught up in lobbying Tony Thompson to refresh The Breakers, and found it hard to remember why. I knew I would do so again, at some point, but right now it seemed far less important than the fact that a gangly kid with my name and DNA had once passed over this stretch of sidewalk without realizing that twenty years later an older version of himself would be weaving there, drunk, missing a wife, his life in disarray. It seemed strange that we can do this, stand in a place and not be able to feel the breeze of a future self walking past. We wouldn’t be coming
back,
after all, had we not been there before—so the events must be conjoined. How had
he
not been able to see my shadow standing here? Had he not happened to look in the right direction? Or not listened hard enough? Or
had
I in fact caught a glimpse, and was that why I was back here now, to try to find my way back to that self? I thought about asking something like this out loud, but guessed I probably seemed drunk enough already. I let my hand drift back to my side.
“Come on,” Cassandra said. She stepped closer and looped her arm through mine. “I think you need to sit down for a while, big guy.”
I
t was only another ten minutes’ walk, down at the far end of the drive. Just before the road abruptly downsized to a single lane before winding off into the palms and scrub of the undeveloped part of the key, there was an old and dilapidated apartment block, a little back from the road on the nonocean side.
Cassandra led me through the metal gate. The building was three stories high and arranged in a horseshoe, an empty water feature in the middle with a long-dead fountain at the center. It was all straight lines and semicircles and looked like it might have been kind of a big deal in the 1930s. Giant grasses were running riot around the courtyard now, obscuring it from the road. Patches of once-white render had fallen off, revealing a pinkish layer underneath. I’d vaguely noticed this place many times before, assumed it was derelict and waiting a wrecking ball under the control of one of the local developers. Most from that era had already vanished, including the old Art Deco casino that older locals still spoke of with pride.
“You live
here
?”
“For now. It’s mainly empty, which is cool. Nice and quiet. Got kind of a vibe, too.”
“It’s an abandoned ship, is what it feels like.”
“Adrift, and far from home.”
She led me up some spiral stairs at the end of the right arm. As we came out onto the top floor, I tripped on a chunk of plaster that had fallen off the wall.
“Sorry,” she said, as she got out her keys. “The maid hasn’t been in a while.”
“Maybe the rats ate her.”
“The only major rodents I’ve seen are roving packs of developers—wondering if the time is right to pull down something fine and throw up something cheap and profitable in its place.”
“Touché.”
Feeling seedy, I followed her along the balconied walkway to a door halfway along the arm. I peered down into the overgrown courtyard as she undid the three separate locks in the door to apartment 34.
“Welcome,” she said, as the last one gave a
thunk
.
A short corridor beyond led onto a living room. Cassandra flicked a switch and three small lamps came on, shedding yellow-orange glows in the corners. There were two doors on the right-hand side of the room, a frosted glass one at the end. A single bed had been pushed against the other wall and piled with cushions. There was a desk fashioned out of cinder blocks and an old door, a set of shelves made of bricks and short planks. The walls had been painted some dark color. There were a lot of computing books and magazines and bits of computer hardware and in general quite a lot of
stuff,
but it would be hard to find an object that looked out of place or as if it wasn’t designed to go exactly where it was.
“You’re . . . tidy.”
She set the grocery bag down on the table, momentarily seeming awkward about having a stranger in her space. Despite her poise, it probably wasn’t very long since she’d been living in a room in her parents’ house. She looked around. “Well, I guess. Do I win a prize?”
“It’s just that women aren’t, always. I thought they would be, but you live with a few and find it ain’t so.”
“Well, then, Bill—if I may call you that—I’m pleased to have restored your retro faith in my kind.”
I felt myself coloring. “I didn’t mean women
should
be tidying the whole time.”
“Well, no, indeed. Then whenever would we have the time to cook and sew?”
I decided to shut up, and went to the bathroom. This was small but also tidy, and smelled of other people’s soap. Compared to Stephanie’s stash in the bathroom at our home, there was a notable lack of Women’s Bathroom Stuff, and I realized Cassandra probably just didn’t have the money for it. It was a long time since I’d been in the company of a woman who didn’t have the money for Stuff. I splashed a lot of water on my face, which made my head feel colder but no more clear. The towel I used had a hint of mildew, which made me feel nostalgic and affectionate, too. I think it was the towel I was feeling this toward, anyhow.
Back in the living room I saw that Cassandra had opened the frosted door at the end, revealing a minuscule balcony. She’d also taken off her coat, and was holding a white USB cable in one hand and a bottle of red wine in the other.
“One of these you need,” she said, jiggling the cable hand up and down. She was wearing black jeans and a close-fitting, multilayered top made from black lace, with a scooped neck and sleeves down to her wrists. “The other, not so much. But, like, it’s your call.”
“A small glass, maybe,” I said, businesslike. “While the phone charges. Then I’d better head home.”