The Danger of Being Me (31 page)

Two blocks later, a half-acre of arid hardpan hunkered against the sidewalk on the left.  Scattered chunks of brick-wall choked the lot, the remains of an apartment building that had stood there until being leveled.  Hunched next to that jagged field stood an abandoned warehouse that had narrowly survived the hasty demolition that had turned the neighboring property into the far side of the moon.  A ten foot tall chain link fence garnished with barbed wire and several warnings to keep out had failed to prevent the warehouse from being repurposed as a canvas for every fledgling artist with a shoplifted can of spray paint.

Vibrant siguls overlapped and elbowed each other out of the way.  Someone calling himself the
HeLlRaZoR
had posed the cryptic musing
DYDA-U-SSDW?
A rudimentary outline combined a loop, triangle, and trapezoid into what looked like a muted post-horn.  An elegant graffito by an auteur called
psychë
declared
I AM A VOICE
, and I was mostly surprised that I was not at all surprised to find the poetry of Woodrow Sykes spray-painted on an abandoned warehouse in the brokedown outlands of New Jersey.

A plywood sheet had been kicked out of a second-story window of the warehouse.  Two teenagers sat on the ledge while three more scuffled behind them, throwing punches and shoes and laughter.  A girl, perhaps fifteen, leaned on the frame, watched her friends, drank from a paper bag.  She passed the bottle to the kid nearest to her, and he was promptly kicked in the back before springing inside.

I pulled to a stop at the intersection, paused, looked over the lot and the building beside it.  That girl saw me, looked at me, watched me with the passing interest of a tiger guarding her territory. This was her crumbling world, and she was at home in it.  She was the fabled psychë, the next warrior-princess in the linguistic crusade.

I grinned at that, nodded to her.  She didn't react, might not have even see me.  But she watched the Jeep as I pulled around the corner and away from Ward Boulevard.

I piloted the Wagoneer up Hucknall Road into a business district at the center of town.

I passed another gas station, considered stopping to buy another map, decided against it.  Hucknall would take me back to Ward, and Ward would take me back to Route 30.  As long as I could find my way back to Hucknall, I didn't need to know the lay of the land all that well.

I rode the highway for another give minutes before spotting a sign that welcomed me to Collingswood.  A block up, I pulled into the parking lot of the Garden State Savings & Loan, circled the building, emptied back out onto Hucknall and headed back to downtown Hobbes Landing.  The town was smaller than Prophecy Creek.

A few minutes later, I turned off the main artery down a driveway.  I rolled into the parking lot beside St. Ursula Catholic Church, and stopped among a cluster of other vehicles.  I folded my map all the way back down and stuffed it into my bookbag, grabbed the newspaper off the passenger's seat, and climbed out of the Jeep.

I locked down the vehicle, glanced up to the soaring steeple and white cross straining toward the sky.  Then I slung my bag over my shoulder and hiked along the driveway back to the business district of Hucknall.

Five blocks from the church, I passed by a bike shop and paused in front of the three-story headquarters of the Hobbes Landing Police Department and courthouse.  The stone building stood back from the street, and at the center of the concrete terrace between the sidewalk and the glass front doors stood a six-foot tall bronze statue.

I knew I should keep walking, but I fought the impulse to hurry past the building.  Because I wanted to know.  The statue looked toward downtown Hobbes Landing like a never-blinking sentinel.  I crossed the concrete, crouched to the plague at the figure's feet, brushed away a handful of leaves, saw the inscription reading Alexander Hobbes.

He had sailed up the Delaware River in 1758, settled in the area I now visited.  Before the Revolutionary War, he bought the land that would later become Hobbes Landing, and became the town's first sheriff by unanimous election.  The statue above me had been created by local sculptor Cheryl Fitzsimmons in 1974 for the town's bicentennial.  I wondered briefly if Fitzsimmons still lived in town.

I stood again.  My knees crunched like aluminum cans being crushed in the brisk April morning.  On my way up, I spotted the belt buckle that Fitzsimmons had fashioned for her subject.  Seven brass nodules stood out in sharp relief, and I recognized the seven stars of Orion.

I regarded Alexander Hobbes for a long moment, felt a smile crease my lips, and turned back toward the street.  I walked further up Hucknall, passing a bakery, a hardware store, another church, a laundromat.  I walked by a grocery store and a municipal park, and a candy store that made me think of Aubrey Woods and the Chocolate Factory.

Not far past the Schanne Sweet Shoppe, I reached a custom stationery store.  I looked through the storefront window at the front of the building, and saw the Greek letter Xi, what looked like an
[I]
pushed over on its side, etched into the glass.  An old man who could have been my grandfather on another plane of reality glanced up from inside.  He smiled at me, and I smiled back.

Then I continued on, passing an attorney's office and crossing the four-lane street.  I had nearly reached the end of the business district, saw the houses of a neighboring residential area.  From the opposite side of the street, I hiked back up Hucknall, stopping once to glance through the window of a lingerie store called Club Coquette.

Seven o'clock had come and gone by the time I reached St. Ursula again.  No one had mourned its passing.  My tour of Hobbes Landing had been interesting, but hardly useful.  I still had no plan to find the heartless bastard that Amber had called Hank.  I passed Pete's Pour House and reached the corner, stopping at the curb.  For one glorious moment, I considered abandoning this dubious endeavor.

I shook my head at myself.  I wasn't leaving Hobbes Landing.  Not until I did what I came to do.  Hank was unlisted.  I wasn't going to be able to get his address.

I couldn't go to him.  So that left one solution.  It was surprisingly simple when you got right down to it.

I had to make him come to me.

The light over the intersection flicked from red to green.

A few cars accelerated up Hucknall in the direction of Collingswood, and another couple passed by on their way toward Ward Boulevard.  They were driven by ordinary people, on their way to work, on their way home, settling into the tedious rhythms of their day. None of them would drive a stolen vehicle to another state to chase a man with one name and an unlisted phone number.

I didn't move.  I had nowhere to go and nowhere to be.  I stood at the intersection where Cortland Avenue crossed Hucknall Road. It was as good a place as any other. I stood about the same chance of running across the man named Hank right here at this intersection as I did hiking from one end of Hobbes Landing to the other and back.

So I stood, and I thought.  Here on this bustling corner in this historic borough of New Jersey, the gears of my mind felt clogged with early-morning exhaustion.  The sun burned too brightly in the sky, reflecting and refracting across a cloudless sheet of vibrating cerulean.  My task felt all at once too colossal.  Because I was a seventeen year old kid with a folded scrap of paper in my pocket, wandering unknown streets in search of an unknown man.

I was insignificant, irrelevant.  Inconsequential.  I could throw myself into the traffic rumbling along Hucknall and get run down by a York Brothers box truck, and be buried out there in an unmarked grave at the back of Eternity Hill Memorial Park, or have my shattered body thrown into a dumpster behind the Schanne Sweet Shoppe, and the world would go right on spinning just as it has for epochs and eras and eons untold.  I could spontaneously combust right here on this street corner under the overheated glare of the morning sun, and the rest of humanity would continue into the future without me.  Just as it should.

I stood at the intersection of Cortland and Hucknall as the universe unfolded, unwound, ended, rewound, restarted, played forward, brought me back once more to the places I had been.  To a bustling corner in downtown Hobbes Landing.  Such as it were.  The traffic light over the intersection flicked from green to yellow, from yellow to red.  I waited.  For a sign.  A revelation.  Whatever was supposed to happen next.  Because I had no plan.

Forty seconds passed.  A long white bus pulled to the light headed toward Ward Boulevard.  Three diagonal stripes in orange, purple and blue marked its flank, along with the word NJTransit.  It was not a sign, or a revelation.  It was a public bus.  But I knew that I was not irrelevant, even though nothing I did would change the world.

Because it didn't matter whether I mattered to the rest of the universe, as long as I mattered to the right people.  And I thought that maybe I did.  That maybe I mattered to Regina, whose nightmare had saved my life, and to Helen, whose constellation of freckles looked so much like Orion the Hunter.  And maybe I mattered to Ethan, who was dead and buried under a yellowed lawn in Meadowbank, and maybe I still mattered to him because not even death matters to the right people.

It was even possible that I mattered to Amber.

The idea thrilled me, filled me with fantastic terrors.  It burned away the exhaustion in my mind like a nightfog burned away by the light of dawn.  Across the street, in front of a music store called Just Jay's, I spotted a scarred plexiglass cubicle housing a bench near the curb.  Three people stood inside the partition of the bus stop.  Waiting.  Not for a sign, or a revelation, but for the NJTransit bus to carry them into the tedious rhythms of their day.

I glanced back in the direction I had come, the direction of Alexander Hobbes.  The light turned green again.  The bus pulled forward to the plexiglass cubicle in the opposite lane and stopped.  I saw the wooden front door to Pete's Pour House twenty paces up the sidewalk, and next to it a payphone standing against the brick wall.  I smiled.

I could draw out the man named Hank.

6.

I tucked my newspaper under my arm and crossed the wide sidewalk to the payphone.

I didn't even hesitate.  I picked up the receiver, held it to my ear, dug into my pocket for a handful of change and the small slip of paper that another Michael Everett had stapled into a faded-green notebook.  I silently thanked him, picked four quarters out of my palm, and dropped them into the slot on the phone.  I looked at the number scribbled onto the small slip in a cramped handwriting I didn't recognize, laughed, punched in the digits.

The phone rang once, twice, a third time.  I considered what I intended to say when the line connected, but came up empty.  By the fourth ring, I started to think that the man called Hank wasn't going to answer.  Maybe he wasn't home.  Maybe that other Michael Everett had transposed a pair of numerals.  That would be just my luck.  But then the line connected halfway through the fifth ring, and a foggy voice answered.  "Hello?"

My mind went instantly, blissfully blank.  I held the receiver to my ear, and said nothing.  I had no plan, after all, and this was what I got for all my trouble.  Silence.  Like peace; like rest.  Like death.  After all these miles and all these hours, I had nothing to say to the heartless bastard that Amber had called Hank.

I blinked twice, hard, shook my head.  I hadn't come this far to cry off now.   There was only one way to do this, and that was to do it.  I lowered the mouthpiece, pressed it lightly to the side of my throat, said low and tight, "How many times are we gonna do this bullshit, Hank?"

Silence shot from one end of the line to the other.  It was a reckless opening gambit, especially considering that I had only devised it at roughly the moment that the mouthpiece had touched the side of my throat.  I had left myself no margin for error.  Either it would work, or it wouldn't.  I waited for a harsh click, ten seconds of silence, and a dial tone.  But it felt right, so I didn't think too precisely on the event.  Better to act than to think.

There was no click.  No dial tone.  I heard breathing on the far end of the line, and I knew that this was the man named Hank.  He said nothing for a dozen seconds, and I waited him out.  He didn't hang up.  Then he broke his silence and demanded, "who the fuck is this?"

Panic flickered in my chest. I crushed it. Because under that brashness I heard a cautious tone of familiarity.  He had an idea who the fuck this was.  I just had to give him a reason to believe that I was whoever he thought was.

"Really?" I demanded, managing to sound annoyed without really trying.  "Are you fuckin serious?"

Hank didn't answer.  He just kept breathing into the mouthpiece, making up his mind.  I gave him six seconds to make his decision.  When he still hadn't hung up, I knew he was right on the edge.  So I gave him a little nudge.

"I ain't playing this game today, dude," I told him.

Something rustled from his end before he answered.  "Jesus Christ, man," he said, and his voice shifted.  He lost none of his brashness, but he talked to me now like he knew me.  In his foggy mind, I was sure that he did.  "You can't just call me up out of the fuckin blue like this."

No
, I heard myself think inside my head. 
It can't be that easy
.  The thought sounded so close, so real, that I glanced back over my shoulder, the receiver still pressed to my ear, the mouthpiece against my throat.  That voice sounded so much like mine that I expected to find my own spectral reflection grinning at me from across the street.  Standing in the doorway of Just Jay's, or sitting on the bench of the bus stop.  His mad grin would be the last thing I would see before my sanity flaked away like paint peeling from the desiccated slats of a skewed fence.

I recognized no one.  These were just ordinary people, on their way to work or on their way home, settling into the tedious rhythms of their day.  I laughed at the grisly thought of my own madness.  I heard Hank breathing on the other end of the line again, and realized that would think I was laughing at him.  At his brash insistence that I couldn't just call him up out the fuckin blue like this.