Eleven Twenty-Three (24 page)

“You’re right. It doesn’t. You’re still an
asshole.”

“What’s going on in the End are random people
going nuts because someone else is making it happen,” I said to no
one, though Mr. Scott was still listening over on the railing. “I
can’t blame my mother for going nuts any more than I can blame
Sirhan Sirhan for killing Robert Kennedy while in a hypnotic
trance.”

“Nice conspiracy drop,” my best friend added.
“I’ve taught you well.”

“Well then if this bridge has a magnetic
control over its suicides,” Mitsuko said, “then they have no
choice. Is that what you’re saying, Tara? That there is an
unavoidable draw to places like this that’s irresistible to the
hopeless?”

“Exactly.”

“If that’s true, then none of these bridge
jumpers can be held accountable for their actions. Therefore it’s
not even
suicide
. It’s murder.”

“So who do you slap the handcuffs on, idiot?”
Hajime said. “The bridge? Or yourself for giving in?”

“How about the bridge
authorities
for
not putting up a higher railing?” Tara said. “When Joseph Strauss
designed the bridge in 1937, his plans called for a five-and-a-half
foot rail—”

“I certainly shouldn’t blame myself for
whatever it is I’m going to see at my feet when I wake up,” I said
to the breeze. To Mr. Scott.

But you will
,
I thought to myself.

“But you will,” Tara muttered, leering at
me.

“Don’t forget another possibility,” Mitsuko
said, biting her upper lip and looking at me with cold black eyes.
“Maybe you’re dead, Layne.”

“Maybe he is,” Tara added. “After all, this
is a graveyard we’re standing on. That could be why he’s
remembering it now.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Tara. Melodrama
much?”

“Pretentious, cold-hearted dick much,
Hajime?”

“But no, really, you
could
be dead,”
Mitsuko said. “After all, this conversation you’re remembering
right now never actually happened the way you’re remembering it
that day two years ago. Maybe this is some weird solipsistic
component of the Afterlife.”

“Maybe it’s just a dream I’m having and when
I wake up I’ll be staring down at a friend I killed while in the
trance,” I muttered, tossing my cigarette over the railing and
watching it disappear in the wind. “I might wake up in the blood of
my mother’s corpse.”

“That could be, as well. You might wake up
any number of ways, Layne. The only common thread between them is
that none will be good.”

I looked back at Mr. Scott, who was now
standing up on the railing and trying to maintain his balance.
Another police officer strolled along behind him, taking no notice.
Mr. Scott looked back over at me that day two years ago and smiled.
He took off his sunglasses and tossed them into the ocean. Then he
removed his wallet and dropped that too. Tara and Hajime argued
behind me, and Mitsuko got a call on her cell phone from this new
guy she was seeing, some guy named Mark Conet that she would be
unfaithful to.

“Does anyone else see him over there?” I
asked the group, but everything was unattainable just then. The
bridge was a painting and the entire scene was buried underneath
the escalating ringing in my ears.

In the memory, there was only the suited man
with the briefcase and a misanthropic teacher from Florida that he
would someday entrust it to.

Mr. Scott motioned with his head down to the
case lying on the footpath one final time, began the traces of a
sly grin, and then tipped slowly forward. He never lost eye contact
with me as he fell, and once he left the flimsy grip of the bridge,
sailing out into the sunny oblivion, his body flipped and Mr. Scott
fell the rest of the way down with his back to the water and his
gaze fixed firmly on me. When he hit there was a tremendous splash
and an ear-shattering smack, and Mr. Scott immediately disappeared
underneath the waves, leaving only a haunting final image
behind.

But he did not die.

Everyone else did.

[
TIME
UNDETERMINED
]

When I come to, my cell phone is still
vibrating in my pocket. My head and torso are soaked through with
bathwater. And my legs are on fire.

My head is slumped against the wall and my
knees are bent awkwardly over the rim of the tub. There’s fire just
outside the door of the bathroom. My leg hairs are singed off and I
look over at my pants to see flames already licking at the cuffs,
moving up the laces of my shoes, dancing along the surface of my
socks. I scream and jump up, shaking my legs and slapping at the
fabric of my pants. As I try to put the fire out, I slip in the
bath tub and grab for the towel rack, tearing it from the wall and
falling backward over the basin onto the tile. The low beastly roar
of the inferno gets louder every second, and I look around to take
in my surroundings. I think I’m standing in my mother’s bathroom. I
see her lone toothbrush in the blue jar by the sink, and her closed
medicine cabinet goes gray and charcoal under the heat of the
encroaching flames. There are the tan mats on the linoleum tile
floor and the cream-colored shower curtain piled into the tub,
along with a bent shower rod.

I have been in this bathroom several times,
and remember the night I came over for dinner and the light in here
cut out and I was looking at a malevolent reflection in the mirror
above the sink. But I have never seen the dark of her apartment
illuminated by the dancing glow of flames.

“Mom!”

The fire in the apartment rages as I call out
to her, but my mother does not answer. The bathroom door is already
spotted with fire, and outside of the room the corridor walls start
to catch.

“
Mom, are you here!?
” I scream.
“Answer me,
please!
”

The ceiling creaks and snaps and buckles. I
bury my mouth and nose underneath the collar of my sweater and
build the nerve to dart out into the hallway. The moisture in my
shirt and hair is sucked away into the boiling apartment and I’m
struck with an idea. I am reminded of something, a grainy
filmstrip, a fireman standing proudly before one of my random
elementary school classes, a pamphlet, something useless, and I
stop to look around the bathroom. Very quickly, I snatch the hand
towel from the rack across from the toilet. I hold it underneath
the sink and run water over it, then wring it out before wrapping
it around my face, over my mouth.

Breathing through the towel, I stumble out
into the rest of the apartment.

It’s dark. The lights are out. Fire has
already engulfed the couch, much of the carpet bordering the
kitchen, and a portion of the hallway. As I try to understand how I
ended up here and what is going on, my jacket begins to melt
against my left arm and I wail in agony and push forward. When the
flames move from the bathroom door to the ceiling, I scramble from
the hallway into the living room. The TV screen shatters in the
heat. The din of the blaze is all I can hear.

I scan the living room. The kitchen is empty.
The hallway behind me is vacant, but when I turn to run back to the
bedroom to find my mother the heat is too much and I cough under
the wet towel and my eyes are burning shut and it occurs to me that
there is no God in Lilly’s End. Not anymore.

Then I see it.

The couch is disappearing into a melting pile
of orange, but concealed behind the flames is the vague outline of
a person, their immolated body a motionless black sculpture as
everything around it burns.

My stomach sinks and I shake my head, unable
to believe what it is I am seeing.

It’s my mother.

My mother burning.

I allow my towel to fall away from my mouth,
and gasp for breath as the tears under my eyes get swallowed up in
the heat. My knees grow weak and I fall to the floor, which is hot
and covered in ash and grime. A reel of ghastly images of her
throughout the course of my life speeds along in my head at
dizzying, hellish speed:

In New York.

At a lecture.

On a school bus heading for Washington.

Handing me a video game when I was twelve
years old.

With him. Before the divorce.

With Grandma. Before she died.

This morning. Before the funeral.

Feeding me ice cream at a Twistee Treat.

Eating lobster. The lobster was dead.

Skiing on a mountain in Aspen.

Alone in her living room.

With the cats.

On the couch.

Dead and burning into nothingness.

Just like everyone and everything else in the
End.

That’s when I know: this wilting woman’s
apartment is where I am going to die, less than ten feet away from
her and miles and miles away from my father. My small-town
denouement will be as apt and adolescently symbolic as the entire
struggle preceding it. Like an irrelevant biography from a bad
history teacher, its only justification for existence being that it
fills in the time until something more interesting comes along,
something worth remembering.

But I am fine with the idea of dying, I
realize. For all I know, I’m the one who started the fire. The
orange trail led from the living room, to the hall, to the
bathroom, to me unconscious in a bathtub soaked in water. I’m the
one who killed my mother, and set the apartment ablaze to kill
myself. It’s me. This is my doing.

This is my part in the town suicide pact.

As the fire sweeps along the walls, the
carpet, and eventually begins to torch the ceiling, I hear a
scratching sound by the front entryway of the apartment. I look
over and see Percy and Shelley by the door, which has very recently
been kicked open and haphazardly shut again. The cats tear at the
wood with their claws. One of them meows pathetically and falls on
its side, suffocating. I try to stand and make my way for the door
to let them escape, but the smoke is so thick now I can barely see
which way I am going. Everything becomes grainy and blurred. I feel
my consciousness sapping out of me again, and I see the floor
beneath me, inviting me to lie on it and dream.

I close my eyes, accepting the
invitation.

The front door bursts open, this time ripping
from the hinges.

The ghostly outline of a ghostly man blocks
the night behind him.

“Layne, where are you?” the man shouts.
“
Tell me where you are, Layne!”

My mother’s cats scamper out the front door
and disappear down the stairwell.

I push myself to my feet again and take two
more steps. I can taste the fresh cold air from outside getting
sucked into the apartment like a vacuum. The man calls for me
again. His voice is familiar.

“I’m—I’m here,” I choke, stumbling forward
and falling into someone’s arms. They catch me and drag my body
from the apartment. I feel a jelly bracelet rub against my cheek as
two more hands, these soft and unsure and clumsy, grab at my jacket
and begin dragging me down the stairwell leading to the first
floor. With each manic breath I take in, my vision returns, and I
use my own legs to stagger down the last three steps.

They lie me down on the sidewalk and I find
myself gazing bleary-eyed up at a starry winter evening. I let the
wet rag fall from over my face and take a deep breath of safe
oxygen.

“Are you okay?” someone asks me. It’s
Tara.

“My mom—my mom is dead,” I mutter, turning
over onto my side to cough up black spit and ash. “Tara, my mom is
dead.”

“But are
you
okay?”

“I said my mother is dead, Tara. So no, I’m
not
okay.”

“Both my parents are dead,” she says, and
begins crying. “Chloe’s with us now. It happened again, Layne. My
mother and father—”

I hear my girlfriend suddenly break down into
a fanatical bout of tears, moving away and falling into her sister
Chloe’s arms. The small man kneels down next to me. I stare at the
intentional holes cut out of his jeans and the bracelet on his
wrist, and think: useless alterations to impress a culture that
abandoned him.

“Where have you been, Hajime?” I whisper.

“It happened again a little over an hour
ago,” he says. “At eleven twenty-three exactly.”

“What did?” I cough. “
What
happened?”

“The deep shit from this morning. It happened
again at eleven twenty-three. All these random people freaked out
and started attacking anyone nearby. Mitsuko attacked me and Mark
in the car on the way to Tara’s place. I swerved off the road and
almost crashed. She scratched her head up and now she’s covered in
bruises from freaking out, but we were able to get the car stopped
and hold her down until it was over. She’ll be okay.”

“Mitsuko is with you?” I ask, trying to sit
up. I slowly peel the jacket off and toss it into the flowerbed
next to Mr. Burgundy’s body. The chill breeze runs over the burns
in my skin.

“It’s all of us, Layne. Tara, Mitsuko, Chloe,
and me—and back at the house there’s Mark, Julie, Jasmine—not her
boyfriend, though, because he’s—when I couldn’t get out of town
because of the barricade—did you know about that? —I went after my
sister, and we just started rounding everyone up before it happened
again. Sorry about not getting there at seven like we planned. We
ran into some problems, bro.”

“Why is it on fire?” I murmur, spitting and
taking the bottle of water Hajime hands me. “Why is my mother’s
apartment on fire? Did you see it go up?”

“I didn’t see it, Layne. But it doesn’t
matter. If this thing starts at the same time every twelve
hours—”

“Why is my mom’s building on
fire
?” I
repeat, standing up and turning to face the inferno. “
Why
,
Hajime? And don’t tell me that it doesn’t matter, because it
does
—”

Her apartment is gone, hidden behind the wall
of flames. The two residences next to hers are going up now too,
and smoke blots out the moon. The tiles of the roof begin to
collapse as the yellow and orange fingers poke through and reach up
into the night. The entire complex will be reduced to charred black
embers by dawn.