Thirteen Specimens (27 page)

     I crossed to the other side of Mill Street. I would actually need to cross another, diagonal road before I reached the outskirts of the lot. Waiting for a single car to pass, I stood near the outermost of the Odyllic structures, and what must have been the smallest. And most modern; I’m certain that it hadn’t existed when Farmer Plastics had owned the property. It could only contain two or three rooms, the outside of the flat-roofed little box composed from vertically-ribbed concrete, looking like corduroy or corrugated cardboard. I glanced back over my shoulder at the building, orange-pink light from a street lamp glowing dimly on its surface. One face of the building was entirely made of glass, and a door into the concrete box was situated in the middle of this. The door was glass, too. Even from here I could see the gold letters stenciled on the glass door gleaming in the street lamp’s murky illumination. The letters read: DOOR 2.

     Why they should label this as the building’s secondary door, I didn’t know. The only other door into the box was on one of its windowless sides, and it was metal and nondescript and sported no letters at all. It hardly seemed like the primary entrance.

     As near as I could tell, this building had been used for meetings, a miniature conference building. I had often looked through its glass, if only from a distance, while walking by. Though there was no furniture in those few rooms now, I could easily imagine long tables resting on the bare carpets, plush chairs ringing the tables, and interchangeable men and women in funereal business suits seated in those chairs, reading the future of company stocks in the vapors from their lattes like soothsayers.

     The one lonely car had swished past. I left the tiny, abandoned conference building behind me, crossing into the fissured and littered parking lot, which yawned like a black lake under the night sky.

     There was a figure moving across the parking lot in my direction, silhouetted in the glow from another street lamp. A tall lean figure. I changed the angle of the stroller. I wanted to turn right back the way I had come but I couldn’t do that; it would look cowardly. I wished I had seen this dark form in the parking lot before I had crossed the street.

     But as the person neared me, and I neared them, widening my angle of approach as much as I could, I saw that it was actually two figures, two forms. The person had a small dog on a leash, and this was why they were in the lot. Such an innocent and prosaic activity put me much more at ease. Now I could hear the tinkling of the dog’s ID tags, and could see that the person wore a baseball hat. By
the time the individual spoke to me, I had already figured out that it was a woman.

     “Your baby likes a nice night stroll, huh?” the woman asked me.

     She stopped. I stopped. I hoped she wouldn’t come close enough to look into my stroller. Her dog peered at me attentively, its leash taut. I gestured toward it. “So does yours.”

     The woman glanced over her shoulder toward a long factory building which formed one of the lot’s borders. It was white with windows trimmed in an innocuous sky blue. Along its face were planted a row of hedges that were overgrown, in need of shaping, reverting back to something wilder. Facing me again, the woman moved toward me. I dreaded her approach. In a lowered voice, flicking her head somewhat to indicate the structure behind her, she said, “Not a good idea to bring your baby around this place, though.”

     “I live just down the street,” I said in a lame explanation or excuse, regretting then that I should divulge such personal information.

     Her little white dog, shaggy as Grover, sniffed loudly and aggressively at my sneakers. I love dogs, and even small animals like cats. I used to have two pet mice as a boy. But there is something unnatural about small dogs that grates on me. They are a travesty, mutations fabricated by man, an insult to their proud wolfish forbears. There is something about them that makes me want to squash them like bugs, even though I would not deliberately squash a bug.

     “It’s just that this place isn’t safe, you know?” the woman said in a near whisper, now that she was close. I could see, under the bill of her baseball hat, that she had an attractive face. Short brunette hair. She had a runner’s body, a bit tomboyish in dress and carriage.

     “What do you mean?”

     But I could tell that she had made out Grover’s blue, bug-eyed face at last. I prayed that she assumed it was merely a toy resting
beside
a child, that somewhere in the bundle of blankets there was a still a baby, but when her eyes returned to mine I knew she realized the truth.

     I stammered, “My son died two years ago.”

     “Oh...I’m so sorry. That’s terrible. What...”

     “Leukemia,” I told her. “He was three. He’d be five now.” I looked down into the stroller. “He’d be too big to need this.” After another awkward beat: “I was laid off five months ago. I had more time around the house – my wife left me last year – and I was cleaning out the basement. Found the stroller. It made me feel good to get out, you know, go for walks. So I...I started taking this...with me...”

     “I’m really sorry. About your wife, too. I know how you feel – my husband left me a year ago, too. He wasn’t sympathetic to me at all. He knew I had medical issues and he didn’t stick by me. People are so disposable now...”

     “Right.”

     “I used to work for these assholes.” She cocked her head toward the white building with the blue-trimmed windows again, her voice dropping even lower as she took a step even closer. The dog kept snuffling at my feet. “It made me sick...but even the doctors can’t pin it down. Either that, or they’re all paid off, and knowing this place I wouldn’t doubt it.”

     Her words were finally getting through to me. “You worked for Odyllic?”

     “For two years. In the office...but I got sick, and missed a lot of work, so they fired me, even though it was their fault, of course...”

     “So, what did they do in there? What did they make?”

     “Oh, these, I don’t know, little plastic beads...green plastic crystals...they sold them to places that heat them up and mold them into things...”

     “Oh, yeah, okay – sure – I used to run the third shift soda plant operation at Sunderland Farms right here in town. Those crystals sound like the pellets we’d melt down to mold into soda bottles.”

     “Yeah, who knows, maybe your place got their crystals from them. And some of their crystals could be melted down into plastic sheets...you know, like cellophane or shrink wrap...but when they did that, the plastic was clear, not green anymore.”

     “Yeah?” I said dubiously. I admittedly knew nothing about cellophane films, but I wouldn’t have imagined them finding their origin in plastic pellets. “So...ah, is this place entirely closed down or what?”

     “Ha,” the woman said. She had almost snorted. She had a bitter, ironic grin. “Ha,” she said again, and her eyes glittered intensely under her bill. “They supposedly went bankrupt a couple years ago, right? But I know there are still things going on in there.”

     “What kinds of things?”

     “Who knows? Research? Military research? They were always very secretive, believe me. They only wanted their employees to know one part of the elephant, not to see the whole picture, keep us blind, you know? But I live over on Willow Street, in a second floor apartment, okay? I can see the office building I used to work in. There’s always a gray car parked there. It’s a make of car that I’ve never seen before. Sometimes there’s another car that’s almost identical but slightly different. Only once did I see both gray cars there together. Company cars. But I’ve never seen anyone get in or out of them. Kind of a silvery-gray...”

     “Security people?” I suggested. “And maybe they just leave the car or cars parked there to scare vandals
off...maybe there aren’t even any guards inside the building, and that’s why you don’t see anyone...”

     Ignoring my suggestions, the woman went on, “Have you ever noticed the helicopters?”

     “Helicopters?”

     “Black helicopters. I’ve seen them from my apartment. They fly by at night time, right over the plant. One night I saw one land...somewhere on the grounds, I’m not sure where, but I definitely saw it come down. But the thing is, it was totally silent. If I hadn’t seen it, I never would have heard it.” Her grin widened w
ith a fierce kind of triumph, as if she had proven her case.

     “Wow,” I said, again lamely. I had to admit that did sound sinister. Some obscure make of helicopter, like those allegedly unclassifiable company cars?

     “I’ll tell you another thing.” Closer still. “Look up.” I did. She pointed, straight up. “See that plane going by?” I did. Distant twinkling colored lights. “Okay, and over there?” Shifted arm and finger. More twinkling lights. “And there. See it?” And again. “And there. See?”

     “Lots of air traffic,” I observed.

     “Yeah. Lots. So why? Why over this place?”

     I didn’t want to argue that the airplanes were so far up, they were over
lots
of places...that the ground as seen from up there was a quilt, and this entire massive factory complex was simply one square of that quilt. But she went on...

     “And you see that star, there?” I grunted an affirmative. “You see how bright it is?” She made a scoffing sound. “That isn’t a star.”

     I looked directly at her. “What is it?”

     “A satellite. A spy satellite. This company owns it. That’s not the only one. That one over there...you see it flickering? Why would a star flicker like that? A satellite...”

     “Hmm,” I said. So, Odyllic had made her sick in some way, she had said. Had Odyllic done
this
to her?

     “You know, I don’t think any of these are stars. How do we even know there are stars? Every one of these could be a satellite...that’s what I think. And you see
those
things? Huh? Look at
those
things.” She meant the cell phone towers. “You think those things aren’t transmitting all our phone calls right into government offices where they listen to everything we say? And who knows what those things are transmitting into our heads at night when we sleep, you know? Brainwashing us...”

     “I’ve heard...people say...it’s not good to live near them,” I mumbled.

     “I’m sorry to say this, but your son. Did you ever think about it?”

     I stared down at the red baseball cap on Grover’s fuzzy blue head. I couldn’t say anything for a few moments, and fortunately the woman put her hand on my arm so that I wouldn’t have to.

     “I have to go, and you should get out of here, too. I saw a security truck recently, something new, and I didn’t like the way the guy looked at me for walking through the parking lot on the other side of the buildings, near Willow Street, where I live. I think he recognized me. They don’t like me – I’m still planning on suing them. Anyway, my name is Marsha. I live over on Willow Street, 15 Willow, on the second floor. Come and see me sometime, okay? Any time you want, feel free to drop in. You don’t have to call. I’m not working so I’m usually home.”

     “Thanks, Marsha,” I said. I reached for her hand and we shook.

     “Come on, baby,” she said to her rodent, pulling it away. She waved to me. Then she put a conspiratorial finger to her lips, and raised her arm into the air, showing the stars her middle finger. Then she turned away.

     As I pushed Logan’s stroller back in the direction of my own home, I threw the receding woman a quick glance. Her long legs looked good in her tight blue jeans. Though it had of course been dark, I could tell she was pretty; in her mid-thirties, I guessed. It was indeed tempting to take her up on her invitation. But then I thought again about her comments, her theories, about the stars...

     The night had grown darker, cooler, since I had set out. The sky over the parking lot was too open, too high, but I refused to look up at its stationary glittering stars and moving glittering planes. I crossed toward that little corrugated conference building squatting in its feeble pool of sodium light. I would cut through its mini parking lot. I picked up my pace, anxious to get home as soon as possible. I hadn’t been conscious of the fact, while talking to Marsha, that one of my headaches was coming on. I dreaded it with a fatalistic resignation.

     But something made me pause as I cut through the conference structure’s tiny lot. My gaze had been drawn to its glass front, shaded under an overhanging slab of concrete supported by two metal columns. Set back in the darker darkness under this cave-like overhang, I had realized, a weak glow showed inside the building. Calling it a glow was overstating the situation, but there was the most anemic of illumination in one of the rooms behind that face of plate glass.