Three A.M. (2 page)

Mist swirled around me and I was still for a moment to adjust to the fog-blindness, leaning against the bricks of Albergue just like I did most every night of my life. I could see three orbs tonight, and set off heading south after lighting a cigarette.

The orbs in this part of town were placed about ten feet apart from one another. I laid my hand on the first as I walked past it. The luminous, yellow orange sphere was warm beneath my palm. There had been a slight breeze up right when I’d left, but it subsided now and I could see only one orb ahead of me and one behind as I turned onto Sixth Avenue.

My brow grew damp with the mist and I wiped at it with a dirty old handkerchief, picking up the pace a bit. I hated the cold, clammy feeling I got all over my exposed skin at night. Eighth Ave had blowers and they would likely still be on at this hour, so I headed that way, cutting down an alley. There were no orbs in the alley, but I knew it well and ran my hand along the wet bricks of the wall as I walked.

I crossed Seventh and passed two people. A woman and a man—that much I could tell by their silhouettes. Another short alley and I came out onto Eighth Avenue, where, sure enough, the blowers were still running.

The fog swirled and danced ten or fifteen feet above street level; higher than that was thick gray. But on streets like this, when the blowers were all on, you could almost see clearly. I passed one of the massive fans as I walked up the street and gripped my coat closed against the wind. Behind it was a small dead zone, where gray wisps drifted downward, out of reach of the blower fans a few blocks north.

I paused there for a minute to light another smoke. The ten-foot-tall fan hummed, impressively quiet when you weren’t on the business end. As I took my second drag, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up—just a bit and only for a fleeting moment, but I’d learned to take them more seriously than anything else on earth. Subtly, pretending to stretch and roll my shoulders, I looked all around me.

I couldn’t see a soul. Not on the street and not in any of the first- or second-floor windows of the nearby buildings. The only sound was the blower’s hum. I decided to write it off, but made careful note of where I was and the time anyway. Just before midnight—the witching hour, I thought to myself with an internal smile. If someone was watching me, no need to convey any sardonic thoughts. Or anything at all.

Abruptly, I set out walking north again. Though all seemed normal, I had already made up my mind to take a snaking, illogical path home. I passed through dark alleys, up streets lined with softly glowing orbs, and down a couple of the larger, clear-blown boulevards. Rebecca and her red lips kept drifting into my thoughts, and before long, I was more wandering than evading.

She was still on my mind as I sat in the chair beside my threadbare mattress drinking a glass of scotch with no ice. And she stayed in my head as I slept on top of the covers.

2

I awoke around three in the morning, just like always. Through the gray sheet tacked over my window came pale yellow light from the sign of the shop below. It sold clocks and lamps and all sorts of bullshit. Shelves piled high with coffee mugs, hammers, picture frames—whatever they found they put up for sale. Asian guy and his wife. Not too old, but beaten down … He always used to cast his eyes on the floor and mumble when I’d greet him. So I stopped saying hi. The wife would lean against the front window all day, her face pressed between the retractable iron cage that had never been slid aside.

She would peer out into the few feet she could see before the mist got too thick, and then, whenever someone materialized out front she leaned back, staring at them with her little black eyes. I’d never heard her say a word. I hadn’t been in there for over a year. I got my sun sphere there: a fancy model with a luminous clock built into it. That’s how I always knew it was three.

For a long time, I had gotten it into my head that something was waking me. It was too precise for a body clock phenomenon. Certainly not my body, at any rate, which was usually full of booze and nicotine and whatever and never went to sleep at the same time two nights in a row. So I picked random nights and stayed up. The first night of my little experiment, I tried to read, tried to listen to music.… It was all too tedious: trying to pass time made time go slower, so I had just sat there in my chair, glancing from the white wall glowing yellow in the shop’s light to the sun sphere and the blue numbers glowing inside it.

Nothing. Three
A.M.
had come and gone without so much as a breeze outside.

The following night I awoke at 2:58.

I had stayed awake and sober at least ten other times, watching three in the morning slide silently by. But still, five nights out of seven, I woke up.

Sighing, I eschewed the half-empty bottle of scotch on the table and walked stiffly, naked, into the kitchen/living room. The only other room in my place was where I shit, showered, and shaved. I spent most of my time home half-awake in the bathtub or half-asleep in bed. The rest I spent in the twelve-by-ten room where I occasionally had food and had a small cloth couch and a pressboard table. There were also some cabinets and drawers, and in one of those drawers were the pills I took some of the nights I couldn’t sleep. Actually it was most nights. And I’d been taking two or three of them at a time recently.

They were technically for manic-depressives, but they let my brain shut the fuck up and my body go limp, so what the hell, I used them. I got them from a guy named Salk, who was some sort of pharmacist and sold whatever he could sneak out to a few loyal buyers. He gave me a good price because he knew what I did for a living and that I could have him busted hard anytime. I had helped him out of a few jams because he knew I was buying pills illegally.

I hardly remember how our unique business relationship began—a bar and some drunken conspiring, I’d wager. It certainly was strange: All he had on me was that I bought government-controlled substances, and all I had on him was that he sold them. It was a vicious, beautiful cycle that kept us both fucked and both safe.

Those were the best kind of partnerships to have.

I popped two pills and sat down on my ratty couch to have a smoke. It usually took about two cigarettes’ time until the drugs got to work. Those few minutes always got very strange. Right before I passed out, almost invariably, I thought of life before the fog.

I had been twenty-eight the last time I saw the sun. Fifteen years ago. And that had been just a chance parting in the mist. It took months for it to go from clear to hazy to socked in. I was so used to it that it rarely occurred to me just how different things were. But those first days—those had been horrible times. Everyone gripped by a sense of despair. Suicides ran rampant. Fear was everywhere. As the sickness spread and they started shutting down cities, quarantining us by the thousands, the fog started in and changed everything. Fucked everything up.

I hadn’t driven a car, thrown a baseball, lounged on a bench … nothing like any of that in a decade and a half. It’s amazing how little you can do when you can’t see a goddamn thing.

The pills started taking hold before I was finished with my cigarette, but I still wanted a second so I lit another off the embers of the first and inhaled deeply. I loved that little burn at the back of my throat when I took in a lot of smoke. Let me know I was doing something. Killing myself, sure. But fuck it—I was in charge. I was aware.

I pulled open the window and lay on my back in the middle of the floor. After a minute, damp gray air crept across my body. It was cold tonight. I smoked my cigarette and looked at its little orange tip, my own personal orb, glowing in my own personal haze. My thighs and stomach grew chill and wet as the heavy air passed over the hairs of my body. I shivered, smiling like a half-wit, and ran my left palm across my chest and down along my torso, blowing smoke into the mist.

The sun always used to bother me. When it shone in my eyes, I hated it. As a carefree kid, I hated when it heated my shoulders, or later baked my fatigues while I was out on exercise runs … when it cooked our backs while we did push-ups out in the grass.

And the grass made my flesh itch. I missed diving into cool water, though, stepping into the river, being wet and cold all over. I ran my hands over my face and thoughts and shoulders and clinched the cigarette butt between my teeth. Fucking sun. I had hated it and the grass, but I missed it all. I would gladly have gotten a thousand little cuts and itching, sticking grass all over my body and rolled in the sun now, but it was never anything but the mist and no more cool blue lakes and no more deep blue. Just fog and a world at arm’s reach. Around the corner was a million miles away. So fucking pathetic. Goddamn disgusting just blubbering and jacking off there lying on the floor in the fucking mist in my own little chambers and running hands all over my body until I was lost in the pills and dreams I never recalled after a few minutes when I’m awake and grasping for them and they drift away.…

*   *   *

Oatmeal and coffee and some bar that was supposed to have fruit and vitamins and shit in it. All I tasted was the shit. That was my morning routine. That followed by pushing the heels of my hands against my head to hold the pounding headaches at bay. I knew I did it to myself, but somehow the painful pragmatism of avoiding morning hangovers never beat out the gratification of a good drinking session at night. Ever.

For some twisted reason, I did my best thinking hungover. So in a backwards way, enjoying myself at night usually led to a productive day. If drinking alone and stumbling around in alleys and popping pills can be called enjoying myself, that is.

I had a beer with the last bites of my bland-ass oatmeal. “I need a woman to keep me from doing shit like this,” I mumbled aloud. A woman would have been nice for sex too. And, well, companionship. I got over the sentimentality of the latter thought fast enough whenever it popped up.
Keep it down, Tommy. It’s just you and the bad people out there in the foggy city.

I had been finding myself more work as a strongman than as an investigator. Clients paid to have me scare people into paying up, or into not straying too far from their marital bed, or to stop asking questions.

The one actual case I had been working before Rebecca came along was a robbery. A big one that had taken a whole hell of a lot of planning. Over four years, in fact. The police had given up and so the guy had come to me. Eddie Vessel. Thin shoulders and pale skin. He ran a business that housed information for other businesses and for individuals, and someone had been stealing info and money. And staplers and pens and such, but that wasn’t why he hired me.

See, the police either tried really hard and didn’t quit until they nabbed a perpetrator—it didn’t matter much if they were guilty or not—or, if the case didn’t affect the government, they dusted a door handle for prints and then said, “Good luck, asshole. Investigation closed.” And there weren’t many cops. Or at least not walking the beat or taking down reports. Military squads patrolled the streets now and again, just enough to make their presence known—and believe me, when forty men in dark gray uniforms holding rifles across their chests materialize from the fog, you think twice about your next move.

Granted, there were transients and bums out there, but it’s not exactly squatting when you’re hiding out in a misty abandoned building with broken windows and no electricity. Sure, there were plenty of would-be thieves lurking, but what did it matter when there was nothing worth stealing? Or buying. Even if you could get your hands on a pile of cash, the only commodities worth much were food and drink. That’s all I ever saved up for, at any rate, with a heavy focus on the latter.

The police, on the other hand, weren’t so much there to protect people from danger as they were to coerce us into not causing trouble in the first place. They were the ones who came to you by night, not some thief or killer. I guess they got the job done in their own twisted way, though. People kept pretty much in line. And when something did go bump in the dark, when someone got beaten or stabbed or, every once in a while, ended up dead, a man like me was a pretty hot commodity. I’m goddamn good at what I do. In a city afraid to ask questions, I made my living asking them.

Following people around in the foggy streets, putting together profiles of their movements. Their habits. Who they talked to and when and all that detective stuff. Research, I guess—that word makes it feel more legitimate. But at the end of the day, I usually solved things by asking people questions they didn’t expect and watching them squirm. It’s amazing how much you can get out of people if they think you already have it. And it gets almost too easy when one slap or a good shaking is enough to terrify.

Eddie Vessel had maybe fifteen, twenty employees, and one of them had been stealing a few things a month for years and lots of things a day for weeks. The police accused the Eddie of robbing himself and advised him to leave them alone. He had narrowed it down to a few guys, and I narrowed it down beyond that. It was either this stupid-looking tall drink of water named Watley or a dark-haired, dark-skinned guy named Thurmond. They both had access to the company ledger, both had access to all the files, and both had a motive to steal: The world sucks. I had no idea why so many people still fell in line.

Watley was a family man; Thurmond, a drunken loser. So I figured Watley was the crook. Thurmond could get drunk enough off his salary. But if you had more than one mouth to feed, that could lead a man to rob the place he worked. With everything grown in greenhouses and every drop of water run through purification plants, it got more expensive to eat all the time.

I had no interest in the case, but I felt sorry for Eddie. Most of his business came from ordinary citizens, folks trying to preserve memories. His warehouse was full of audio recordings and paper documents and pictures that families wanted kept safe. I had dug through the place a few times on weekends, Eddie wringing his hands and following me around, dusting here and organizing there and trying to keep busy. Everything he stored was pre-fog. Pictures of husbands holding wives in bright, sunlit fields. Old videos of beaches and oceans or mountain ranges. That sort of stuff. Depressing.