Eleven Twenty-Three (45 page)

“Our plan will work fine,” I whisper into
Tara’s ear, but as we head for the house, something troubles
me.

Ashley notices as Tara and I cross the lawn,
and she mentions something under her breath to Alisha. Both of
their eyes move toward the house and the girls launch into giggles.
They watch carefully as we enter the porch and a part of me wants
to walk right up to them, ask what immediate effect the Magna Carta
had on European economic development, and laugh heartily as they
squirm with the realization that they
squandered
a free high
school education.

Tara tugs at my jacket and I decide to stick
to my objective. I scan the area for my best friend.

There are more ghosts inside. A middle-aged
man, whose eyelid has somehow been sliced in half and flaps down
over his eye like a ripped tarp every time he blinks, greets the
two of us as we enter. He quickly introduces us to a woman with
bleached blond hair and meth-rotten teeth who used to be a beauty
queen in Texas. Why he would tell us this now is unclear. Tara and
I wave awkwardly to the burnt out couple and excuse ourselves,
attempting to move into the house. We have to wait as several
spirits come filing out the front door. One of them, a see-through
woman wearing a Hawaiian shirt, stops to ask us if we’ve seen her
son, whom she shows us a photo of. He looks to be a typical eleven
or twelve year old, with a pale face, brown hair, and a few
freckles that seem airbrushed into the picture. It’s interesting
that, even in an old photo, the boy is still transparent, like he
was never alive to begin with. He was always a ghost.

The woman tells us she hasn’t seen him since
he went running off during the eleven twenty-one Sunday night.

“Somebody needs to double-check the time on
their microwave,” I mumble to Tara, who suppresses a dark
chuckle.

Neither of us mentions the lady’s dead son
and instead we focus on our search for Hajime.

The power is out on this side of town as
well, and the living room is lit by the sunshine streaming through
the blinds and some candles a girl with cerebral palsy keeps
igniting with a pink Bic. The cigarette and pot smoke keeps the
beams of light suspended in mid-air. I’m afraid that the room will
rain ash. Some guy with a tattoo of alien hieroglyphics on his arm
brings in a small stereo, slips four batteries into the back, and
then the opening riffs of “52 Girls” by the B-52’s reverberate
throughout the house. Less than two minutes pass before someone
puts on “Lateralus.” Five minutes into Tool, the music lulls again
before the opening strains of “95% of the World is Third World” by
Suicide Machines echo across the living room.

“These people are all gray to me,” Tara
mentions as we venture deeper inside. “None of them seems to notice
it in each other, though.”

“Ghosts aren’t haunted by other ghosts,” I
say.

“You’re right. They’re haunted by the
living.”

“Close. They’re haunted by
us
.”

As if in response to my last comment, several
of the partiers direct their attention toward us. I sip the beer
and nod stupidly to the spirits that we pass. Tara mumbles
questions to random people regarding the whereabouts of the host,
but all she receives in response are blank looks or spiels
concerning people they used to know who committed suicide. Everyone
gazes down at the briefcase attached to my wrist. I grip the handle
tighter.

When I turn to gauge my girlfriend’s
reactions to the haunting, a shiver runs down my spine when Tara
still appears just as ethereal and faint as the other partiers. I
momentarily forgot.

“Do I look like these people when you see
me?” I whisper, afraid of what I already know will be the
answer.

“I already told you, sweetie. The answer is
yes. You’re just like them to me, and I’m just like them to
you.”

“That’s not exactly reassuring.”

“As long as others
don’t
see everyone
the way we do, maybe it is,” she says.

There are quite a few survivors who managed
to show up at this impromptu end of the world soiree. More than I
ever thought would. Instead of spending their final hours in
Lilly’s End attending to ailing friends and family, praying in the
solitude of abandoned churches, hatching escape plans similar to
our own, or simply counting their blessings, most surviving
townsfolk chose to come to Hajime’s shitty old house instead.
They’re spending what may be their final day on earth drinking
themselves stupid, smoking grass, swallowing pills, snorfing slock,
eating bundegung, and attempting to squeeze in one last screw with
fellow townies.

Aside from the curbsides piling up with
cadavers and gas-masked death squads marching through the
neighborhood, not much of the town culture really changes here in a
week.

I see resilient lesbians and lonely fat girls
hanging out on the staircase drinking from bottles of Wild Turkey
and Apple Vodka. There are two-person lines in front of both the
upstairs bathroom and the one with the breathing towels. Strewn
about the living room (where only days ago a small band of close
friends lounged around and tripped on shrooms) are several angry
scene kids with white belts and blue handkerchiefs stuffed into
tight jeans from JC Penney; Kennedy High School’s ear-ringed guitar
teacher; a girl I once had sex with after picking her up from the
bowling alley bar, who now drunkenly asks a guy I barely know named
Damon if he misses being able to visit somewhere she refers to as
the Koner; a half-black guy sitting alone on the love seat by the
wall who stuffs two yellow football-shaped pills into his mouth
while expertly rolling a huge blunt; and two gray-haired truck stop
women who take turns sipping from a mug of beer. Permeating the
entire house is the smell of a dozen styles of food wafting out of
the kitchen and dining room. Neither of us spots Hajime and so we
split up.

In the dining room, there are several
half-eaten casseroles, finger sandwiches, buffalo wings, pulled
pork, chips, nachos, vegetables, hot dogs, drunken noodles, potato
casserole, cold hamburgers, and a Caesar salad made with
sketchy-looking lettuce.

In the kitchen, two pig-nosed girls with
similar tramp stamps on their lower backs stoop over a cooler full
of blue hunch punch. The Burmese guy who runs China Buffet over on
Laurel Boulevard tries to push another case of beer into the
fridge. Cans tumble out and land on the floor. He soughs with
generations of disappointment.

“Have you ladies seen Hajime?” I ask. “The
guy who owns this house?”

“Damn, somebody
owns
this place?” one
of the girls asks in a thick Southern drawl. “I thought they just
moved the party here ‘cos no one was alive in it. Who’s
Hajime?”

“Never mind,” I say, grabbing a handful of
chips from the bowl on the counter.

“What’s his name again?” the other girl asks,
laughing. “Had You Made? Is that what he just said? What a
funny-sounding name.”

“What time did this party start?”

“I’m not sure. Me and Carrie just got
here.”

“I think it started not too long after the
last time everyone got sick,” Carrie says, obviously unsure.

“Thanks,” I mutter. “You ladies have been
most helpful.”

“So, like, what’s with the briefcase, buddy?”
Carrie asks my retreating shadow.

I meet Tara in the back room where we had the
Ouija board session a few days ago. There’s still no sign of
Hajime, but a gruff-looking man tending to his torn open kneecap on
the floor in the hallway tells us that he saw a little Asian guy go
into the upstairs bedroom with some girl not too long ago.

“Hajime is incorrigible,” Tara says. “Only a
guy like him would be able to pull off a shindig this size the day
before everyone dies and still find time for a quickie with some
party whore.”

While waiting for Hajime to surface, the two
of us sip from cups of beer and watch the last of the Lilly’s End
failures chat away and slurp drinks. We catch snippets of
conversation revolving around escape (though not a single person
speaks of it with any real interest or conviction), whether the
government can be trusted to safely evacuate everyone tomorrow
morning (the pervading attitude is mostly positive), and what life
will be like having made it through this week (probably pretty
rough). A cute girl I used to see in the hallways of Kennedy High
School but never as a student asks Tara and me if we’ve seen her
friend Adam. I wipe the sweat off my brow and tell her he’s not
here.

A timid-looking woman wearing a Murder by
Death t-shirt and wrinkled jeans listens to a guy with big hair
that I was once introduced to at a teacher certification class as
he prattles on and on about a pirate party he once attended in
Maine. She asks him if he has any of his own pot, and he shrugs
while saying ominously, “I do—but we have to stop by my place to
get it…”

One of the lesbians on the stairs leans in
and plants a gentle kiss on a plump girl’s cheek. The lonely
survivor smiles shyly and points toward the door. She leaves,
accompanied by two beautiful gay women. One of them gently runs her
fingers down the girl’s back, toward her ass. A short man with a
receding hairline and wearing a faded Captain America hoodie
quickly takes over their space on the steps. He tinkers with his
MP3 and intermittently wipes tears out of his eyes. Not long after
he plants himself there, a skinny girl wearing glasses and sporting
various tattoos and a reptilian tail emerges from upstairs and
licks his ear lobe, and the two of them soon depart as well.

“I’m starting to doubt we’re ever going to
find the little asshole at all,” Tara gripes, folding her arms and
surveying the partiers in mild disgust. “Maybe he ditched his own
lame-o party.”

That’s when I see her.

The feeling that washes over me is not so
unlike those moments just before eleven twenty-three, that point
when your stomach drops into your groin and the world tries to
wriggle you from its surface. The only difference is that there’s
no magic briefcase to protect me from whatever is about to happen
this time.

Aside from a strapless blue dress by Calvin
Klein, this may be the first time I have seen Olivia Glatz out of
her school uniform.

“Oh—my—shit,” Tara chokes. “That’s not—”

“Indeed it is,” I answer for her. “Olivia
Glatz is at Hajime’s party. She’s survived the week, same as
us.”

“I was kind of hoping she wouldn’t.”

There’s a thin red scar that runs from her
right temple, around her eye, and down her cheek toward the chin.
There’s a small scrape under her lip. Her complexion is slightly
reddened, and I spot the glimmer of sweat on her forehead. Other
than that, the twelve-hour terror has had little effect on Olivia
Glatz’s complexion. This afternoon, she is wearing a long blue
flower-pattern dress that reminds me of a Japanese river just after
someone dies. Her earrings are made out of glass and resemble small
spirals that lead to what could only be hell. She has obvious
difficulty descending the stairs in the new heels she is
wearing.

“I can’t believe she’s still alive,” Tara
whispers, and then notices something that causes her to sharply
suck in her breath. “Oh my god, I’m
so
sorry—”

“It’s okay, Sunshine,” I reassure my
girlfriend. “She has a right to survive as much as—”

Her skin is smooth, tanned, and strong. Her
hair drapes her shoulders like luscious green foliage in a jungle.
Her hand, which for some reason she has extended behind her as she
descends the steps, is—

“—
us
,” I finish breathlessly. “I get
it now. You meant you were sorry about
that
.”

As Olivia moves down the stairs toward us,
Hajime follows closely behind, his face flushed and his brow beaded
with sweat. His hand is wrapped in hers. He spots Tara and I,
pauses a moment and whispers something into Olivia’s ear that
causes her to snigger.

Ships never just pass in the night.

“Well, I’ll be damned if he didn’t just bed
down with the girl that ruined my life,” I mutter, already balling
up my fists. “That worthless son of a
bitch
—”

“Whoa, whoa, wait,” Tara says, grabbing me by
the arm. “Remember why we came to this stupid party in the first
place, Layne. The four of us need him for tonight. You understand
that, right? We
need
him. So please, for
all
our
sakes, keep your old-school code of friendship ethics on a leash
for now, okay?”

I close my eyes and direct my head toward my
shoelaces. I cup my palms against the eyelids and press down.
Within moments the stars appear, a universe retreating into a black
hole, an existence outside the borders of time and imminent death.
I take a deep breath and pull my hands away.

“Okay,” I say, keeping my eyes closed tight.
“Okay, Tara.”

“Okay what?” Hajime asks, from the sound of
his voice not more than four feet away from me. When I open my
eyes, he emerges out of the retreating stars, clung up cozily
against Olivia. She looks at everything in the room right now but
me.

“Nice—nice, um, party,” I choke. “Someone
made banana pudding.”

“I’m glad you guys could make it,” he says,
regarding Tara, Olivia again, and finally me. “What happened to
tonight’s plans?”

Hajime’s practically waiting on his haunches
for my next move. His slightly curved lips, his hand still
engulfing Olivia’s, the fact that his foot isn’t shaking nervously
as he speaks to me—my best friend knew very well what doing this
would mean should I ever find out. He knew the statement he’d be
making after my ill-conceived fling with Mitsuko, and further,
would get to reap the fringe benefits of fucking a very attractive,
slightly underage girl in the process. I’m sure that once fate
presented the possibility, the bastard didn’t hesitate for a
second.