Eleven Twenty-Three (30 page)

“You don’t
know
that, Layne. You have
no memory of what happened last night, remember?”

“How am I supposed to remember if I have no
memory?”

“You know what I meant,” she says. “Now let’s
deal with your problem. It’s not the end of the world, and
fortunately for you, my grandmother was quite the seamstress.”

Tara takes the sweater I was about to put on
and lays it out on the bed. Minutes later, she slices along the
bottom of the right sleeve with a penknife. Then she goes past the
armpit and down the side. She hands it back to me, the entire side
now cut open.

“You can put it on now,” she says.

“So what do I do? Just walk around with half
the shirt cut open?”

“No, genius, I’m going to sew it back for
you. But don’t think I’m going to do this every time you bathe.
You’re just going to have to leave the sweater on for a few days
after I fix this.”

“But Tara, I don’t want to
shower
with
this stupid sweater on—”

“It’s either that or you learn to sew,
asshole,” she interrupts. “It was you and Mr. Scott’s idea to put
the handcuff on in the first place, so just deal with it. Now be
still and let me stitch this thing up.”

“So what do we do?” Mitsuko asks the
group.

“Well, I think we should escape,” I say.

“I meant in the next hour, Layne. I’m not
even thinking about the long-term right now.”

There are half-drank glasses of orange juice,
coffee and a barely touched bowl of Corn Flakes on the counter.
Cigarettes are already lit, and Julie swallows another Xanax. It
looks as if about half of the group showered, judging from their
hair and borrowed clothes. Mark’s wearing one of my Polo shirts,
and it’s too small for his tall wiry body. I glance down at the
side of my own shirt, crudely stitched with black thread.

“Should we separate?” Jasmine says. “Should
we get as far away from each other as possible right before it
happens?”

“No,” Hajime says, also clean and freshly
shaven, which makes me wonder where he got a razor, if he used
mine. “If we do that, we can’t stop anyone from hurting
themselves.”

“So it’s settled,” Mark says. “We stay
together. That’s it.”

“It might get ugly, though.”

“That’s a risk I’ll take, Jasmine. I say we
hide all the things in the living room that could be used as a
weapon and just wait it out.”

“Are you going to take out the floor and the
walls too?” Mitsuko asks, raising her eyebrows.

“Or we can just stand here like dumb shits
and argue about what to do all morning,” Tara says, moving out of
the kitchen to start working. Others follow her lead.

I don’t move, because I can’t stop looking at
Jasmine and Julie and Hajime.

At their gray skin.

Chloe and Tara fold up the pullout bed and
replace the couch cushions. Hajime removes the glass knick-knacks
from the shelf above the fake fireplace. Mark stuffs a tarp into
the fireplace immediately after that. Tara and I turn the TV around
to face against the wall. Then we unplug it. Jasmine carries off
the stools from the bar and puts them in Miranda’s room and Julie
brings in an extension cord and ties a knot around the handles on
the cabinet under the kitchen sink. Tara brings in handfuls of
blankets and stretches them out along the hard wood floor. Hajime
and I carry the coffee table outside and put it on the front porch.
Members of the group intermittently stop what they are doing to
figure out their next move.

“It looks like the handiwork of a poltergeist
in here,” Mark says, taking a break to survey the transforming
living room.

“So you see it too?” I ask him.

“See what?”

“Their skin.”

“What about their skin?”

“Oh, um…forget it,” I say, running my free
hand over my face, crushed.

“Are you okay, man?” Mark asks me, staring.
“What are you talking about with their
skin
?”

“I’m fine. I just meant how pale everyone
looks.”

“Well everyone is
scared
, Layne. Not
all of the gang is charmed with a magical briefcase to keep us out
of harm’s way, are we?”

Before I can come up with a rebuttal or maybe
even a half-witty retort, he goes to help Mitsuko and Julie tie the
rest of the kitchen cabinets. The three of them cast glances in my
direction during their private conversation. I slink outside to
smoke a cigarette.

I stare at the bruise forming on my wrist
while I smoke.

When I come back inside, everyone is standing
in a rough semi-circle, admiring their handiwork.

“It’s not exactly a padded cell,” Tara says,
“but it’s the best we can do.”

Within twenty minutes, the entire room has
changed dramatically. The floors are padded with blankets. The
electronics have been unplugged and the power cords tied up. All
the glass and sharp objects have been moved to Miranda’s room,
which was locked from the inside. The stools and the lone wooden
chair by the front door and anything else easily wielded or thrown
have been removed. The framed photographs and Magritte prints have
been taken down from the wall and placed outside. It’s almost as if
someone had attempted to childproof the house.

But just beneath the blankets shrouding the
floor is still the floor. The walls are still exposed, now more
than ever. Further, all potential weapons aside, we living beings
are still armed with our own appendages and animal instincts. Our
minds are still exposed. Our natural human propensity for violence
against each other and ourselves remains intact.

All of us immediately seem to realize that,
phony preparations aside, we’re still in grave, inescapable
danger.

“We’ve got about twenty minutes,” Hajime
says.

“What should we do until then?”

“Does anyone want to pray?” Chloe asks the
group hopefully.

“To
what
?” Hajime asks. “The god that
either forgot about us or never gave a shit in the first place?
Yeah, sign me up for that one.”

“You know what?” Chloe says.

“What, dear?” he says, already smirking.

“You’re nothing but a little
asshole
,
and your bullshit nihilistic attitude isn’t getting us
anywhere.”

“Well neither was your catatonia last night,
but I didn’t say anything.”

“Oh, I’m sorry that I was a little bereaved
after both my parents just died, you piece of shit
bastard
—”

“I’m going to go smoke another cigarette,” I
declare to the brewing argument, moving unsteadily toward the front
door.

Outside, the sun is up and the breeze feels
light and it’s much warmer today. Flint Street is, with the
exception of a young couple screaming how much they love each other
three houses down, totally benign. On a morning so peaceful and
motionless, no one would ever suspect that in just a few minutes,
all hell will break loose and a new drove of no ones will meet
their end.

But this is history, I realize to myself.
This is the way it’s always been.

Before 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945, the city
of Hiroshima was just another sleepy factory town attempting to
rouse itself from the previous night’s slumber. It was just another
Tuesday in New York a few years ago until big planes crashed into
the sides of two of the world’s most easily identifiable and
heavily trafficked landmarks, turning a date into a catchphrase and
using sick televised performance art to manipulate the way a cocky
world power views its own existence forever. One thousand, nine
hundred thirty years ago, what probably began as a mundane morning
in the lives of the citizens of Pompeii, in the blink of an eye,
transformed into one of the more infamous and devastating natural
disasters of all time.

The greatest tragedies of the ages always
begin with “just.” Just another day. Just another morning cab ride.
Just another ignored warning. Just another father’s funeral.

Then everything changes.

But at least those other stories are
known
. At least some knowledge and wisdom can be gained from
the pratfalls of past Fortune’s fools. The details are jotted down
and thereafter constantly revised in our history books, mulled over
by bored college kids, and scrutinized by the more empathetic of
humankind forever. Sad lessons are learned by the present
generations lucid enough to see their futures hinted at in the
past.

And the world is better for it. The future is
the wiser, or at least attempts to be.

The story of Lilly’s End is not so lucky,
however. Unlike New York or Pompeii or Hiroshima, not to mention
Pearl Harbor or San Francisco or any other civilization nodding
knowingly to itself as it painstakingly mends its wounds, the
demise of a little nowhere shit-hole like Lilly’s End will go
unrecorded. No lessons will be learned by the world at large. Like
those other tiny insignificant outposts of time, this town will
simply disappear into the paperwork, mummify beneath the twelve
layers of ash, and go unnoticed in the backs of corporate
newspapers and blurbs on TV news broadcasts more content in
flashing images of raped little girls, dubious democracy in Iraq,
and presidential candidates with black skin, senility, or a vagina.
The End will quickly fade into the realm of a whispered,
unconfirmed haunting. Nothing more.

I look up at the chemtrails lining the sky,
and without another word, go around to the back yard. Miranda’s
lone Ked is still poking through the leaves, except now it’s
swarming with ants. After checking to make sure that no one is
looking and that I am completely alone out back, I drop to my knees
and pray. The breeze tapers off. A helicopter approaches from the
distance.

I stay on my knees for a long time, but God
answers me with nothing more than some uninspired bird chirps and
the ticking hand of a wristwatch.

11:20:00 AM

I always thought how strange it would be to
look into the eyes of a murderer just before they do you in. To
peer into the two human camera lenses that will record your death;
to ponder what’s going on in the brain just behind the cameras; and
to know that they will go on seeing, go on recording images into
their memory, whereas you will not. How frightening and
existential, to realize that your entire collective experience and
repertoire of recorded images are about to be stuffed down and lost
inside the dusty file cabinet of the past-tense. Even worse, to
know that what your murderer sees of you as they take your life is
but one moment of their ongoing,
living
history? Realizing
that your story ends here—staring into this black angel’s eyes
until there’s nothing left to see but the empty void you always
knew was just beyond the range of the camera.

With this in mind, I meet eyes with Chloe.
Then Jasmine. Then Hajime and Mitsuko and Mark and Julie. Then I
reach out and take Tara’s hand next to mine, holding my breath.

“I’m looking into the eyes of my own
potential murderers,” I mutter. “It’s quite an experience.”

“Just know something, guys,” Jasmine says.
“No matter what happens in the next fifteen minutes, I still love
you. You’re still my friends, even if you do something a little
unbecoming.”

“I agree,” Mark says. “But if you guys can
help it, don’t fly off the handle. Try not to. Okay?”

We nod and mumble half-promises and stare at
our watches and cell phones, waiting.

11:21.

A tingle in the base of both my feet. A
running cold that slithers its way up my leg. My heart sinks into
the quicksand of my guts.

Mark winces in pain. Jasmine touches her
stomach. Tara’s eyes leak. Her sister glances over at her, shrugs
helplessly, and looks down at the floor. Hajime remains unmoved,
his face buried under a veil of Asian nonchalance. Mitsuko glares
at me from across the room.

I clench the briefcase tighter.

“I don’t know if I can go through with this,”
Chloe states simply, still focused on the quilts under our feet.
“Waiting helplessly for it to happen, knowing that in two minutes
we won’t recognize our own family—I don’t—”

“One minute,” Mark intones, peering at his
cell phone. “It’s eleven twenty-two.”

“Do you guys realize what we’re potentially
about to lose?” Chloe whimpers, losing control of herself .

Julie suddenly belches up liquid and dives
toward the floor, throwing up all over the quilts. Jasmine does the
same, spitting up something yellow onto the wall. My head swoons
and I tighten my grip on the briefcase.

I look down at my watch.

The second hand tap dances past the 50, the
52, the 54 and 56, the—

“Oh my god,” someone cries, but it’s faded
and bent and drenched, awash in the moans of the room.

I take another look down.

11:23:03.

When I look up, the room has frozen. No one
coughs. No one gags or spits. There isn’t a raised eyebrow or an
opened mouth. There is only the synchronized sucking in of air.

And for what feels like a very long time
after that, no one exhales.

The only movement in Tara’s death-proofed
living room is the eyes—the shifting, rabid eyes, searching out
monsters that hide behind the faces of your closest friends.

Seconds pass. A bead of sweat leaps from my
chin. Then another. My girlfriend slowly tilts her head toward me,
the beginnings of a grin taking shape on her face.

Mark is the first one to open his mouth and
speak.

“Maybe it’s not happening this—”

But that last word, the word “time,” is
blasted into a thousand inaudible splinters when Jasmine punches
into the bristly underside of his chin, crushing his larynx. Before
he can even interpret the signals of pain being telegraphed to his
brain or instinctively clench his teeth or grab for the smashed
wreckage of his windpipe, Jasmine’s leaning in, open-mouthed,
toward his face. She clamps down into the squishy flesh of Mark’s
mouth and immediately drops to her knees, tearing some of his
bottom lip off, exposing twitching muscle and purple gums.