John Gone

By Michael Kayatta

Copyright 2012 Michael Kayatta

Smashwords Edition

It was the sort of glare that would have
bothered most people, shimmering and flickering against the
afternoon sun as clouds moved past, refusing to let anyone forget
that it was there. For John, it made him curious, as most things
did, but it was almost two o’clock, and his mother had said to be
ready by then. Still, something was out there in the sand causing
the light, and if he didn’t investigate it, who would?

The teen ran across the beach behind his
house to the water’s edge and crouched down above the light he’d
followed, positioning his back to break its line to the sun. The
gleam cooled at his shadow, finally allowing him sight of his
discovery: a half-buried, metal-rimmed circle of glass edging shyly
above the flattened sand below him.

John tilted his head to the side and saw
numbers engraved on the glass along its curve. A small metal arrow
was nearing a carefully etched nine from underneath. He’d found a
wristwatch. John lifted it from the sand and shook it clean within
the ocean before bringing it to his ear. It was still ticking.

Dangling the watch by its leather band, John
looked through the glass and noticed something odd. Seated behind
the hands was a network of crisscrossed wires, each hair-thin and
pulled taut against the frame. They nested so tangled and thick
that nothing but more wires could be seen beneath their top layer.
He wondered what possible purpose they could serve so simple a
machine.

John placed the watch on his wrist. As the
metal touched skin, he felt an instantaneous jolt, as if two
magnets had been suddenly joined together. The skin of his left arm
prickled, and the small hairs that lived there raised straight.

His arm jerked back sharply from the shock,
and to his surprise, even though he’d yet to latch its band, the
watch didn’t fall. John quickly spun his wrist upside-down. Both
halves of its band dangled down as expected, but the metal base
remained stubbornly in place against his skin.

Confused, he shot his fingers around its face
and pulled. For more then a minute he tugged and yanked, strained
and jerked, but as hard as he tried, the watch sat firm against his
wrist as if glued. Out of breath and exasperated, John finally let
it go. He’d made no progress; the watch was stuck to him.

Suddenly, the boy noticed movement beneath
the glass. The tiny metal threads nestled beneath the watch’s hands
had come to life, intermittently vibrating at different intensities
as the second-hand ticked past the numbers that circled it.

At first, the resonations seemed random, but
the longer John watched the wires stir, the more he sensed an
indefinable order behind their movement. The effect was
bewitching.

“John!” His mother’s call broke the trance.
“John, it’s two o’clock!”

John read the time from the watch; it agreed
with his mother. Quickly, he latched the band beneath his wrist and
ran through the sand back to his porch where his mother stood
waiting and smiling. Embarrassed by his predicament, he hid his
hand and the watch in his pocket as he approached.

“Are you ready?” his mother asked.

“I’m not sure how to be ready when I don’t
know where we’re going,” he answered, unlatching the Velcro straps
on his dripping sandals.

“What’s that on your wrist?” she asked,
eyeing the watch he’d just exposed.

“It’s nothing,” John replied hastily, kicking
the sandals from his feet. “Just something I found on the beach.”
He moved swiftly past his mother and walked through the wide
sliding glass door behind her to her bedroom.

John lazily plopped down on the edge of her
still-made bed, being careful to place his arms, and the watch now
stuck to one of them, angled behind him. His mother stood for a
moment looking out past the sand to the ocean before turning and
joining him inside.

“Another late night?” he asked as she closed
the glass shut behind her.

“It’s not so bad,” she said.

He watched his mother’s reflection as she
checked what was left of her make-up in the mirror above the
dresser. A once-white plastic nametag with her name written on it
hung crookedly from the front of her shirt.

She unpinned it and turned around. “Come on,
get your shoes. You shouldn’t be late today.”

John bounced from the bed and walked to the
shallow closet outside his room where he found the worn, brown
tennis shoes he’d left there the day before. As he crouched and
laced them onto his feet, his eyes drifted to the watch still
gripping his arm. Surely there was something simple he was missing,
some button, switch, or trick to it.

John stood and walked toward the house’s
front door with his head still turned down at his wrist. He pulled
lightly against different points around the face as he moved,
hoping to find a weak point. Nothing seemed to work.

Suddenly, a familiar, feminine voice called
his name from farther down the hall. “Johnny!” it exclaimed in a
high-pitched squeal.

“
Johnny?
” he heard his mother repeat.
She’d never met anyone who’d called him that.

John raised his head and saw two women close
in front of him. His mother was standing addled at an answered
front door, while his girlfriend stood happily on the other side,
just a foot away from her. They’d met, and that wasn’t supposed to
have happened.

“Molly?” John remarked. He choked on the
name.

“Happy three!” she replied. Molly clacked
past John’s mother in high-heeled shoes and threw her arms around
John’s neck in a familiar hug. “Daddy and I came all the way from
the mainland to take you out to lunch for our three week
anniversary!” She looked over her shoulder at John’s mother. “Your
mom can come, too. We can wait while she gets dressed.”

John’s mother looked down at the clothes she
was wearing and crossed her arms over the dried coffee stain on her
chest.

John slowly backed from Molly’s embrace and
opened his mouth to speak. No words followed.

“You didn’t forget our three week
anniversary, did you?” his girlfriend accused.

“No, of course not,” he answered defensively.
It was an innocent lie. He hadn’t known that three weeks was an
anniversary couples were supposed to celebrate.

“John starts his first job today,” his mother
chimed in.

“Thanks, Mom,” John muttered.

Molly seemed confused. “So you weren’t
planning on celebrating with me?”

“Of course I was,” he said quietly, turning
his back to his mother and walking Molly a few steps away. “I just
had it planned out for tonight, not this morning.”

Molly’s lips bulged into a half-frown. “You
have
what
planned out?”

John shrugged his shoulders playfully. “It’s
a surprise,” he invented.

His answer did nothing for her pouting.
“Well, how will I know what to wear?” she asked.

“Just be ready by six, okay?”

“My favorite number,” she answered him,
lifting her shoulders and curling her smile as tightly as her face
would allow.

“John, we need to go,” his mother
interrupted.

John turned and nodded to her before
returning his attention to Molly. “I’ll call you tonight.”

“I’ll be getting ready,” she replied.

John’s mother stepped between them and put a
hand on Molly’s shoulder. “It was nice to meet you,” she said,
ushering the young, pretty blonde from the door.

“You too,
Mom!
” Molly answered,
flittering out of the house to the front driveway.

John and his mother followed Molly outside
and watched her enter the passenger’s side of a bright orange
convertible parked in their driveway. The driver lowered his loud
music as Molly entered the car. After a grin and a loose salute,
the man revved his engine and wheeled out into the road. John
noticed a vanity license plate shimmer against the sunlight as the
car pulled away. It read: “Saturday.”

“Are you angry?” John asked.

“No,” his mother answered, keeping her hands
on the steering wheel, and her eyes fixed on the road ahead. “Why
would I be angry?” It was the first she’d said since leaving the
house ten minutes ago.

“I don’t know, you just seem--”

“It’s just that we’ve always been honest with
each other,” she said quickly. “So why wouldn’t you tell me you
were dating someone?”

“Well, I--”

“It’s not a big deal or anything,” she said.
“It’s just your first girlfriend. Sort of big news.”

John closed his mouth and looked out from his
window to the line of identical houses passing his eyes at twenty
miles per hour, exactly the island’s speed limit.

His mother looked over to his uncomfortable
face. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be weird.”

“It’s okay,” John answered. “It’s my fault
for not saying something about her sooner.”

“So her name is Molly, huh? I like that. Like
Molly Ringwold.”

John looked down at the watch still adhered
to his wrist and answered her absently, “No, not like whoever that
is.”

His mother briefly looked over again. “I saw
you pulling on that thing earlier in the hall. If it’s
uncomfortable you should just take it off.”

“It’s not,” he answered quickly. “I was just
trying to set the time.”

“So that watch was just lying in the sand?”
she asked.

John changed the subject. “Are we going to be
there, wherever ‘there’ is, soon?”

“Yes,” she said, “it’s close.”

“Can you at least tell me where we’re going
finally?”

His mother smirked. “I guess it’s too late
for you to run away. It’s a company that helps the elderly.”

“So, you mean it’s a company that helps
everyone on Longboard Key.”

His mother laughed. “Business is good. I
guess that’s why they’re hiring.”

“Well, what do they do?”

“It sort of has to do with computers. That’s
why I thought you might be interested.”

John perked immediately. “Really?”

“Sort of,” his mother answered quietly,
impatiently eyeing the slow-moving car in front of them. “The way
Virgil explained it to me--”

“Who’s Virgil?”

“The man who owns the company. He said he
specializes in providing ‘The benefits of the internet without
resorting to the internet.’”

“What on Earth does that mean?” John
asked.

“I don’t know, honey, but I’m sure Virgil
will explain it to you.”

“But--”

“Oh look, here we are,” his mother said,
pulling the car from the road into a long one-lane parking lot.

John looked up through his window at the
warehouse now beside them. He’d seen it in passing numerous times,
but had never known what it was before today.

“So, what do I do?” he asked.

“Just go inside and find Virgil,” his mother
said. “He’ll explain everything. Now come here.” She reached across
the car and gave her son a sideways hug before kissing him on the
cheek. “I love you.”

John unbuckled his seatbelt and took his
frayed brown messenger bag from the back seat before exiting the
car and wheeling around the hood to his mother’s window. She spun
the short plastic handle beside her, lowering the glass in tiny
spurts.

“I’ll see you when you’re done,” she said
through the thin opening she’d created.

“But I still don’t know what I’m doing,” John
protested.

His mother smiled. “And now you and I have
one more thing in common. Have a good day, kid.”

As John lifted his arm to wave goodbye, he
felt a small electric jolt beneath the watch still stuck to it.

“Ow!” he yelped, whipping his hand back in
surprise.

“John!” his mother exclaimed. “What happened?
Are you alright?”

“It’s nothing,” John said swiftly, covering
the watch with his hand and turning his body from the car.

“Was it that watch?” she asked. “Maybe you
should let me--“

“It’s okay, Mom. I have to go.” He turned his
head and smiled at her. “I don’t want to be late on my first day,
right?”

She looked him over suspiciously. “Just be
safe today, okay?” she finally answered. John nodded and she backed
her car out into the road.

After his mother’s car disappeared down the
same road that had brought them, John wrapped his fingers around
the watch’s rim and pulled, this time determined to not let go
until finally breaking free of it. The face held strong against his
pull, so he pulled even harder. The skin around his wrist strained
and turned red. Soon, his eyes began to tear. Finally, he let it
go. Looking down at his wrist and the device now bound to it, the
teen was no longer annoyed. He was worried.

A strong gust of breeze blew past John’s
face, and the loud creak of old chains sounded above him. He moved
his eyes up to a sloppily hand-painted sign swinging above his head
and read the words “America Offline” made from large, stenciled
letters. For now, the watch would have to wait. If he could make it
through just a few hours of work, he’d have time to stop and think
about how to deal with Molly, the watch, all of it.