Eleven Twenty-Three (56 page)

“Mr. Prescott?” he asks in English, his
accent indistinguishably East Asian.

“Yes?”

“That is all,” he says, and goes quiet.

He nods, and the others seem to approve. One
of them speaks in Japanese to Hajime, and I recognize him as
Hajime’s father, though his face is rougher now and his hair
shortened into a military-style crew cut. Hajime steps over to the
glass table and picks up the briefcase. The handcuff glimmers in
the artificial lighting.

My timeline will continue only as long as
they will it so; after that, I too will become just another
classified footnote in the unread history of the world.

“Save the taxi receipts, Mr. Prescott,” one
of the men says, and lights a long Italian cigarette.

The group chortles vaguely at his comment,
and the cold grip of steel clasps against my wrist as the next set
of documents are sealed.

08:21:07 PM

With every moment that passes, another
traveler turns pale and gray before my eyes. With every fresh sip
of beer, someone’s flesh loses its pallor and becomes transparent.
Before long, I again find myself haunted, just like always.

Beijing Capital International Airport is
nearly empty this Christmas Eve. Aside from the man squirming
nervously behind the counter, I’m the only one in the bar. A blue
and yellow Corona lamp blinks on and off behind me, and a napkin
falls off the table next to mine onto the floor, which is covered
with black scuffs. I check my watch and continue waiting. Outside
in the expansive airport corridor, two Iranian men speak into mikes
hidden beneath their jacket lapels. They wait for me to make eye
contact and one of them shakes his head.

He hasn’t arrived yet.

“One more?” the bartender asks me.

“Why not,” I shrug. “Yeah, one more.
Thanks.”

I light a cigarette and continue waiting.

The fidgety Chinese barman brings over
another mug of Tsing-Tao and places it in front of me. As he
removes the other empty glass, I notice blood on the rim. I softly
touch my lip and think back to a night in Shanghai.

Somewhere near the end of my third beer, the
Iranians signal me and I quickly gulp down the rest of my drink.
Just then, a lanky Indian man—blue jeans, gray turtleneck sweater,
duffel bag, and a laptop case—walks by in the direction of Terminal
13. His ears are tucked behind white ear phones and he concentrates
only on his destination. I pick up the briefcase and hurriedly sign
for the bill.

I realize something.

Proving our human lives were intransient and
irrefutably tangible would seem quite simple. After all, there are
an almost infinite number of articles printed in our timeline that
confirm we were here on Earth. But that’s just the problem, isn’t
it? School transcripts, mortgage papers, car loans, hospital bills,
credit card invoices, Valentine’s cards from our mother,
disappointing pay check stubs, Dear John letters, unread
résumés—there are so many documents out there attesting to nothing
more than our continuation and ever-mounting debt to the world that
we’ve slipped into a paper trail reality. It’s a world where the
record of our concrete existence has become more concrete than the
existence itself. The moment we are born, we are given a
certificate to substantiate it. And one day all too soon, our next
of kin are given a certificate that verifies our death. It seems
that the only document we’re never given is the one that proves we
lived.

I follow him past the ghosts in Terminals 11
and 12, past the information desk and restrooms, and into the
seating area of Terminal 13. He takes a position off to the side,
near the windows. The plane has yet to arrive outside, and a
baggage car loaded down with spectral passengers’ personal
belongings waits idly by for the 737 to pull up to the Tarmac. The
Indian man removes an issue of
Time
from his laptop case and
flips it open to a random page. Not many of the other seats are
taken, and the ones that are have been occupied almost exclusively
by droopy-eyed tourists and homesick American college students
looking for familiar grounds to haunt. Here in China, 5,000 years
of toilet paper history have guaranteed that there’s nowhere left
for the spirits to lurk.

The next man looks young, no older than
twenty-five or twenty-six. His naturally wavy hair is squashed down
onto his scalp with gel, giving it the appearance of constantly
being wet. His sweater has a tiny pink stain on the back side of
his right armpit, and his duffel bag looks worn with use. As I
approach, I can tell the music blasting into his ears is some kind
of dark trip-hop, Polygon Window maybe. I swallow and step around
another line of vacant chairs to take a seat in his row.

The man glances over at me and immediately
notices the briefcase handcuffed to my wrist. He stares for a
moment, misses a beat, and quickly feigns interest in his magazine.
When I hear the muffled beats taper off on the iPod, I cough.

“So where you heading?” I ask.

He seems confused for a moment, as if he’s
unsure whether someone is speaking to him. When he sees me two
chairs over from him, smiling politely and waiting for an answer,
he slips off his ear phones.

“Excuse me?” he says in crisp American
English.

“Oh, nothing,” I sigh, portraying
disinterest. “I just asked where you were heading, is all.”

“Me? I’m just heading home for Christmas like
the rest of these poor souls.”

“You’re going to be a little late, aren’t
you?”

He smiles politely.

“I couldn’t get leave from my job until
today, so yeah, I’m going to be a little late. But I’ll get there
eventually, right?”

“I hope so,” I say, grinning to myself. “And
where is ‘there,’ if I may ask?”

He seems slightly uneasy by my insistent
small talk, but finally puts his magazine aside and turns to face
me. He shaved his face recently, and has a small patch of razor
burn on his neck. His nose is sharp and his features soft and
friendly-looking. His eyes are honest and his hands
well-moisturized.

He’s fucked.

“Well, I’m originally from Seattle,” he says,
“but I’m going to be visiting my grandmother’s home in this little
town up in Washington State. My family’s getting together there at
her beach house for the holidays. What about you?”

“I’m going home too,” I say. “In
Florida.”

“Oh really? Whereabouts in Florida? Two of my
good friends are going to school in Tallahassee. Are you from
anywhere close by?”

“Actually, not that close. My town was a
little farther east, on the coast. But it was small. You’ve
probably never heard of it.”

He nods, fingering the issue of
Time
next to his knee. I notice that Lilly’s End is this week’s cover
story. He waits to see if I continue the conversation, but for an
uncomfortably long moment, the only thing I can focus on is the old
black and white aerial photo of Abraham Tyson’s town by the sea
leering at me from the front page.

“I’m Paul,” I say, extending my hand. “Paul
Prescott.”

“Paul, it’s nice to meet you. My name is
Sonjay.”

“Pleased to make your acquaintance,
Sonjay.”

When he takes my hand in his and shakes it,
his flesh instantly fades away, his eyes become gray, his hair
blurs into an abstraction, his clothes go tattered and colorless,
and Sonjay Brohns transforms into a ghost. It tries not to pay any
mind to the handcuff and metal coil attached to my wrist. When the
coil clatters against the metal armrest of the seat, it looks away
and coughs.

“I have a feeling that it’s going to be a
long flight,” I murmur.

“Well, at least you have someone to chat with
for the next eleven hours or so, right?” it says, relaxing in its
chair and picking up the magazine again. “We can sit next to each
other if the plane’s empty enough.”

“Sounds good. I love these chance encounters,
you know? Or as my father used to call them, ships that pass in the
night.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Oh, I mean…I can’t wait to get home.”

“Me too,” he says.

I turn away and stare out the window. The
plane is pulling up now. They will be boarding soon. The handcuff
digs deeper into my wrist, causing familiar pain that sends me
reeling with memories I’m not sure are real. It doesn’t matter, I
remind myself. In a few minutes, I will be slipping the briefcase
into the ghost’s luggage. In a week, I’ll be removing the handcuff
from its battered wrist. In a month, the paper trail will disappear
beneath the weeds and Layne Prescott will no longer exist.

The reality of it all suddenly overtakes me,
and I have to grind my teeth to keep from succumbing to nausea.

“Excuse me for a moment, Sonjay,” I say,
standing up and heading toward the nearest restroom.

Sonjay waves goodbye and resumes his
reading.

By the time I reach the bathroom the sickness
has passed, but I don’t stop. I keep going, retreating from the
spirit in Terminal 13. My gait increases with each step and before
long, I’m running for the nearest exit.

The farther I move away from my successor,
the quieter the airport seems, and the more muddled life becomes. A
vision of the future forms in my mind, the ghosts become a breeze,
and the future of everything slips into an unconquerable ether.
Minutes plummet from the timeline and the years quickly follow.
Evolution becomes singular disintegration. Our world ends.

In my vision, a haunted airport corridor
becomes an empty desert dotted only with rugged outcroppings of
stone. Sand sweeps by in what is now a gust, and it builds. Soon,
the sands are sweeping over everything, through Beijing and
Mongolia, through India and Siberia, down into Burma and out across
the choppy waters of the Indian and Pacific Oceans. The storm
engulfs Europe and Australia, scoops up the red dirt of Africa, and
charges past the Atlantic. It doesn’t take long for America to
disappear just like all the others, a formless blur lost in the
sand. The storm charges its way west until it collides with itself,
eating into its own tail and becoming perfect chaos. By the time
the winds finally subside and the sands return to the earth, our
entire world has become nothing more than a series of
indistinguishable outposts of a forgotten species. Unidentifiable
shell fragments. A planet of unmarked tombstones. A graveyard of
graveyards. Ghost towns without ghosts.

Because in this world, there is only one
presence, and that presence is mine. Anything else can only be
attributed to that fleeting memory of the living.

Lakeland, Florida and Beijing, China

January 31, 2007 – March 6, 2009