The Danger of Being Me (30 page)

I had come too far down my long and curving path.  I couldn't think of a reason to change direction.  I unfolded that slip of paper, found the phone number that had been jotted there by another Michael Everett, in another lifetime, on another plane of reality.  In the world-from-before.

Then those two pieces of information finally recognized each other from opposite sides of that crowded room in my mind.  And they knew one another very well.

4.

I looked back across the parking lot to the payphone.

Then I stuffed the notebook back into my bag, dropped it into the footwell.  I reached into the Jeep's ashtray below the dashboard, scooped a handful of change out of it, leaned out of the car, threw the passenger's side door closed.  Crossed the macadam.  I arrived at the payphone too soon, pulled up short, stared at the graffitied booth.  Then I took the last step, reached for the phone, careening unto the breach with no plan.

I stood there with my hand on the receiver for nearly a minute, working out a strategy.  Traffic buzzed by me on the Black Horse Pike, and an Oldsmobile Bravada pulled up to the pump opposite the Wagoneer.  A balding man stepped out, swiped a credit card, began fueling.

He looked around the parking lot, glanced toward the store, seemed to consider heading inside, decided against it, and paid me no attention whatsoever.  I watched him for a moment, fascinated, unable to turn away.  It occurred to me as I watched the driver pick at his fingernails that he was somewhere in the midst of his own story.  Perhaps it wasn't the kind of riveting story that would be made into a Lifetime movie of the week, but it was his story.

And as I held onto a payphone receiver, I felt a weight of cosmic insignificance, felt the soft breath of nothingness on my face.  My story was irrelevant to the universe, an inconsequential farce.  I was perfectly forgettable, an unnamed character passing through the background of a thousand other stories at any give moment.

I smiled, and lifted the receiver from the payphone, pressing the handset to my ear.  I dropped two quarters into the machine, then keyed in the phone number for information.  The line rang twice before an automated female voice asked me for a city and a state.

I punched the zero button until that automated voice surrendered, agreeing to connect me to the first available operator.  The line clicked once.  I listened to generic music for ten seconds while the Bravada driver topped off, hung up the nozzle, decided to run inside after all.  He vanished through the convenience store's door, and the nondescript music broke off in my ear as a real woman picked up.

"How can I help you?"

"Yes," I said, forgetting what I was trying to do.  "I was trying to get some information."  I found that unbearably hilarious, and had to bite the inside of my cheek to keep from breaking out in a fit of hysterical laughter. Then I suddenly remembered why I had called in the first place, and I became convinced that there was no way this would work.  That also struck me as strangely comical, and I smiled.  "I don't know if you can help."

"What were you looking for?" she asked.  She sounded stressed and bored and overworked all in the same breath, but she kept her tone friendly.  I gave her credit for that.

"I've been getting these phone calls for about a week," I lied.  "This guy, harassing me, saying he found my number in his girlfriend's phone and he's gonna come find me, and, you know…" I caught myself rambling.  "The whole ordeal is just a big mess I'm sure you don't really care about."

"Okay," the woman said.  I could hear the grin that the word had passed through.  I thought that maybe I could play this part well enough after all.  I grinned as the balding man pushed out of the store with a plastic bag in his hand and made his way back to his vehicle.

"Anyway," I said, watching the man climb back into the Bravada.  "I'm finally here filling out a police report, but all I've got is—" I lowered the handset's mouthpiece, pressing it to the side of my neck as the SUV started.  "What's that?" I asked no one, watching the Oldsmobile roll across the parking lot.  "Yeah.  I'm on the line with them now."  The balding man pulled back into traffic.  "Okay.  Yeah."

I tilted the handset back to my mouth, said, "I've just got a number."  I listened for a few seconds that swelled as they echoed back on themselves inside my brain.  If the ruse was going to fall apart, it would happen now.  This woman would either take the bait, or she would tell me that she might have been born at night but it wasn't last night.  Maybe she'd just hang up, and this ridiculous half-formed notion would stall out before it ever got started.  I could finally head back into Philadelphia, and—

Her voice was kind as she said. "What's that number?"

I slapped a hand over my mouth to hold in a giddy laughing.  I cleared my throat to cover the noise, then opened the slip of paper still pinched between my fingers.  "Six oh nine," I read the cramped handwriting that I barely recognized, "seven nine five, zero seven six one."

"Hang on a sec," the woman said, so I did.  I heard a keyboard clicking from her end of the line, and savored the absurdity that this should be so easy.  I quite nearly felt bad for lying to this stressed, bored, overworked woman, until she told me, "I'm sorry, that number's unlisted."

Of course it was.  I swore under my breath.  It was just my luck to get hold of an operator I could convince to help me, and then ask her to search an unlisted phone number.  I didn't say that out loud.  I just watched the traffic race by, and thought quickly.  There had to be a way.

"Sir?" the woman said after too long a pause.

"Yes," I said, "sorry.  I was writing something down."  My mind raced as I looked up into the sky.  A Boeing 747 with an AirTran logo cut southward from the Atlantic City International Airport, and I took a shot in the dark.  "They really just want to figure out where the calls are coming from so they can file the paperwork for the complaint."  It was a reasonable lie, a vague, bureaucratic sounding lie.  I could only commit to my story and hope for the best.

I heard more clicking then, wondered if maybe my luck just needed a little nudge in the right direction.  I waited a couple of seconds before the woman said, "It looks like it's originating out of the Hobbes Landing service area."

This time I did laugh.  "Jesus," I said without thinking too precisely on the event.  "All the way from Jersey?  I don't even know anybody who lives in New Jersey."

"Probably," she said.  "It's also possible that the owner of the number could have moved.  When the police trace the number, they'll be able to determine that."

I thought then for a moment that this stressed, bored, overworked woman had known all along that my entire story was a fantastic lie.  But I also realized that it didn't really matter if she had.  She had chosen to give me the information, and it meant little to me if she'd done it for no better reason than that I'd livened up her otherwise tedious morning just a bit.  I almost hoped that was true.

"You said Hobbes Landing?" I asked, still smiling.

"Yes, sir," she confirmed, and I thought maybe she was smiling too.  "That's really all I can tell you."  I imagined there really was more that she could tell me, but she wasn't going to.  And that was just fine.  Because what she'd given me was more than I possibly could have hoped for.

"That's fine.  Great, actually," I said.  "It'll give them a place to start."  I almost ended the call, but instead asked for the sake of verisimilitude, "What county is that?"

She laughed, a warm, maternal sound that reminded me of Regina.  "Camden County."

I looked back to the hand holding the small slip of paper, and saw that I'd clenched my fist around it.  I said into the handset, "thank you so much for your help."

"Is there anything else I can do for you?" she asked.

I laughed softly.  I was sure there was, but I doubted she would do it, and I thought I could work with what she had already given me.  So I told her, "I don't think so."

"Then you have a great day," she said.

I hung up the phone, pocketed the slip of paper.

Then I said to no one at all, "we'll see."

I crossed the parking lot again, shoved my way back into the convenience store.

The cashier didn't look up from his magazine.  I passed the register to the rack of maps in front of the counter.  I scanned the titles, spun the rack, glanced over the selection arranged by county, found one of South Jersey.  I grabbed the many-folded sheaf out of the display, flipped it over to find a wireframe outline of the state on the back. The lower eight counties stood out in green, each one labeled.

Camden County sat right in the middle.  I laid the map down on the counter, saw the price of $2.99 in the corner.  I dug a five-dollar bill out of my pocket, slapped the cash down on the chipped formica.  The kid jerked at the sound, flailed briefly in his seat, twitched toward me with a flash of confusion fluttering among the constellation pimples on his face.  Then he spotted the money and looked at me.  I held up the map to show him what I was taking.

The cashier pushed himself out of his chair and laid down his magazine as I started for the door.  He picked the bill off the counter.  "You want your change?"

I shot him a complicated, unknowable smirk.  "Keep it," I told him, and laughed.  If I kept running through my cash at this pace, I wasn't going to make it out of Pleasantville with a dime in my pocket or the Jeep's ashtray.  I didn't like the idea of using an ATM.  Not out here in the wind like this.  Not with the matter I was considering.

I shook my head, and spotted a rack of newspapers next to the door, the current issue of
USA Today
on top.  I grabbed a copy, waved it for the kid to see.  He nodded, and keyed open the cash drawer, tucking the money away.  I stepped back out into the aging morning, folding the newspaper in half and storing my new map inside.

I returned to the Wagoneer, piled into the driver's seat.  When the doors were locked, I dropped the newspaper onto the passenger's seat and unfolded the map.  The sheet blocked out most of the windshield by the time I got it fully opened.  I found the index along the far side of the page, scanned the list of place-names until I came to the coordinates for the grid containing Hobbes Landing.  Then I quickly located it toward the top of the map.

I pinpointed Pleasantville next.  And according to the legend and a rough calculation, the borough that Hank had called Amber from almost three weeks ago crouched just fifty miles to the northeast of this gas station.  Waiting.  For me, perhaps, though that didn't really matter this morning.  Because I knew that I was going to drive up the White Horse Pike into Hobbes Landing, even though I still had no idea what I meant to do when I got there.

Except that wasn't really true.  Sitting there alone in a Jeep Wagoneer at a gas station in the middle of New Jersey before six in the morning, it was impossible to avoid my own bleak truth.  That in the flooded subbasement of my own fractured psyche, I knew very well what I intended to do.  For almost three weeks, I had been forming this plan in that terrifying darkspring where the creeping fury and hatred swirled, building it out of smoke and shadows.

Now that I knew where, it wasn't a matter of what.

It was down to a matter of how.

I traced the most direct course across the map with my fingertip.  It was nearly a straight shot right up Route 30.  I started the Wagoneer, checked the clock on the dashboard, and figured I could be there before seven.  I could get the lay of the land before deciding what to do next.  I folded the map so that Pleasantville and Hobbes Landing were both visible, at opposite corners of the page, and laid the sheaf on top of the newspaper on the passenger's seat.

Then I dropped the Jeep into gear, and drove around the far side of the gas station.  From there I pulled into the traffic of South New Road, and headed north.

5.

Fifty-one minutes later, I passed the Eternity Hill Memorial Park and eased the brakes.

Dream Theater, Rush, Supertramp, and the custodians of progressive rock accompanied me along that long and curving highway.  I listened to the intricate arrangements, and I thought very little.  There was no need.  The time for thinking was done now.  All that was left was to act.

I drove by the sprawling cemetery, and realized that I had not once reconsidered this decision.  The thought pleased me.  Another difference between
me
and
him
.  The confused, terrified, defiant boy who had blundered over a crumbling dune and collapsed into the surf of the Angry Sea would have dwelt on this choice all the way from Pleasantville to the edge of Magnolia.  He certainly would have thought far too precisely on these events.

He would have rethought it, and overthought it.  He would have thought himself out of doing anything at all.  He would have taken one look at the broad sign reading Welcome to Hobbes Landing, and laughed uneasily at the lunacy he had entertained.  He would have kept straight, taking Route 30 all the way to the Ben Franklin Bridge.

Because he was a coward.  It was why he had left Prophecy Creek in the first place, why he had driven until the land had run out, and then sprinted the last hundred yards on foot.  He had run for the cheap thrill of running, because he was terrified of his own life.  But he was dead, cast back into the same waters that had given me life, and I would forever carry his blood on my hands.

But I could honor his memory, because his weakness had not been his own fault.  Only his refusal to face it had been, and that denial had cost him everything.  But I could do what he would not do.  I could pick up the scattered pieces of his life, and put them back together again.

Half a mile past the cemetery, I pulled off of Route 30 onto Ward Boulevard and headed into downtown Hobbes Landing.  Such as it were.  The pockmarked faces of these brokedown outlands rolled by the windows, huddled up against the road with a sort of brutish pride.  Morning traffic had picked up along this outlying capillary.