Three A.M. (3 page)

I guess really it wasn’t that I had no interest, but that the more time I spent there, the more knotted up my stomach would get. Seeing all that … beauty … from the past. I don’t know how he and the people who worked there took it. I guess one asshole couldn’t. At first I thought maybe it was sentimentality. Of the few government or business files Eddie housed, only one file had been tampered with, and it seemed nothing had been stolen. Some cash, but not much, had gone missing too.

If there had still been functioning banks or insurance agencies or whatever, it would have been much easier to lock the situation down. But there was only cash, and it had been that way for years … maybe ten, eleven years, in fact. I never really understood the factors of inflation and free market economies, the bullshit that mattered in the global world I grew up in, but in the mist, a dollar was a dollar: a piece of paper I held until I spent it on scotch or stuck it in a hole next to my bathtub.

I liked it that way. The last bills were printed well over a decade ago, so whenever you’d exchange money, you were guaranteed it would be worn, soft, and faded. It was oddly comforting. A touch of before. Seems like it should have been worthless, but we were all so damn nostalgic for some semblance of order that we bought it, so to speak. Funny what a few rectangular pieces of paper can do. Or make one do.

I sighed, resolved to review my notes, and got my little gray plastic tape recorder out of a cabinet, setting it by an outlet next to the couch. There were only two outlets in my apartment. I plugged my sun sphere into one and whatever else I needed rotated in and out of the other. You could see where there used to be five outlets in the place, but with power as precious as it was now, a residence as small as mine got only two. Some buildings had been taken off the grid altogether and left to molder; some—mostly government facilities—were aglow at all hours of the day. Not sure who made the decisions, but the lights always came on when I flipped the switch, so why bother wondering? At least we didn’t pay for electricity anymore. My parents used to get on my case for leaving lights on or the television playing. I missed them, but was glad they died before everything changed. When I thought of them, it was in a perfect vacuum of then, never touching now.

They both got sick, like most everyone else, and died mercifully fast. At least Dad did. I hoped she did too. I wasn’t with her at the very end. I still wondered sometimes if they had lived longer whether I would have been different. But just as soon as they were gone I joined the service, and deep down I was so fucking bitter about it all that I never thought about them for long. They were from before, after all. Thinking of them meant thinking of it all.

So Eddie. Poor Eddie losing money and data that led to more money lost as tearful, indignant families took their files and pictures and film and videos elsewhere. I flipped on the tape recorder and pressed rewind, planning to relisten to all my notes and observations and then make a decision over whom I’d try to scare a confession out of first.

A few photographs and documents he’d let me borrow lay littered about on the coffee table. In only one of the dozen-odd pictures was there even a trace of the fog. It was a picture of a gnarled little pine tree. The sun still fell upon the grass around the tree, but it was soft, diffuse. The picture must have been taken in the last few days of light.

I cracked another beer and sat down to listen to my canned voice mumbling out observations and hypotheses. I reused my tapes so much, their quality was always shot and a scratchy, humming white noise played under my every word, but before long, I wasn’t paying any attention anyway. I was thinking about her. Rebecca. It’s strange how quickly you’ll start to assemble fantastic notions about people you don’t know from a hole in the ground. Before long, I was picturing things she might say and how I might respond. I pictured her smiling at me, wearing that red dress here in my shitty little apartment. Then she was in blue jeans and a tight T-shirt—nothing fancy—the opposite of how she had dressed and acted, in fact. Laughing, talking to me about things, about life in the past. Christ, I bet she hardly remembered the past. Before.

I imagined her telling me she had no case, no money for me … it was all just an act and she was scared and lonely and spent her last cash on those drinks she bought at Albergue. I would hold her and gently rub the small of her back and breathe in her scent and she would be crying when she pulled away from me and would tell me they were tears of happiness … relief.

“I need to get fuckin’ laid,” I said aloud, standing up and shaking my head at the bullshit fantasies. It had been maybe six or seven months, and I couldn’t even remember her name. Carol or Carrie or something? I left while she was still in bed, awake, and she knew I was going and was not at all upset by it. I couldn’t blame her. It was Carol. I nodded wistfully to myself, remembering her long chestnut hair streaked gray. She was maybe five years my senior, maybe more. We met while buying the same kind of soup, and in both our eyes was the same simple desire: flesh. After we fucked a few times, it was painfully clear that behind our eyes were irreconcilably different people.

In spite of everything, she was full of life. Slender and toned, her skin healthy if a bit thinned by age, she used to walk around her apartment naked, telling me about the myriad paintings on her wall. I never once let her into my shithole of a home. The way she would moan and close her eyes so tightly, a tear sometimes sliding down one cheek while I grunted and dripped with stale whiskey sweat above her—I couldn’t take it. I think she pitied me, and that made it all the worse.

It went on for maybe a month. Probably less. The morning I left, we didn’t speak a word. And I’d hardly thought of her in all the months in between.

I stood before the window wearing just a pair of shorts. There was a breeze up this morning, and every once in a while I could make out the street a story below me. The orb posts, dark for now, pierced up through the mist. Squinting at where I knew an alley opened onto my street down to the left, I thought I could discern the shape of a person. The form was unmoving, and through the slowly drifting mists, I couldn’t be sure if it was anyone or even anything at all … maybe just a shadow. I strained to see but never got a clear look.

I thought of going downstairs and outside to check, just to satisfy my curiosity as I was sure it was nothing, but decided to drop it and sat back down beside my tape recorder. At least the little incident had gotten my mind off women and my underused genitalia. I pressed play.

“Saturday, the … the sixteenth, and I have now been, uh … it’s been three weeks since I began profiling the employees here.…”

I leaned back on the couch, groaning at my own tedium. Most of the tapes I had so far were filled with minutiae and fruitless conjecture. Every session ended with me creating more of the same. And when I went down to see Eddie, forget about it … hours of fucking notes I’d sit and drink to later.

*   *   *

An hour had passed, and still I sat listening to my notes and scratching down highlights and thoughts on a little yellow pad of paper. Frankly, all my recordings usually came in as nothing more than tokens. I’d play snippets out of context for clients and show them notes scratched here and there on my yellow pads of paper. (I’d bought a massive stack of the notebooks from the shitshop years ago and still never filled them all.) I’d talk about this tendency of such and such person or this bit of anecdotal bullshit and ask a few questions that I couldn’t care less about and then I’d stop whoever I thought was stealing or the errant husband or whatever in some lonely alley and shake what I wanted out of them. It worked, so why not? Also, if you surprise someone a few times in the same place, then wait a few weeks and do it once or twice more, they’ll be on edge for months, if not forever.

We’re so attuned to patterns that it’s easy to create them for people. I’d say, “I’ll be watching you,” do so for a little bit, and then I was. Always. I saw the old Asian woman from the shop below me at the same times every day. She kept a schedule of when to scowl out at the world, to press her round cheeks between the metal slats of the grate and her forehead against the thick glass.

I stuck to my various routines because I wanted to, not because of any exterior pressures. We were all just rats in the maze. Me. Rebecca. All of us. When I was a kid, I spent one afternoon out in a field near my parents’ house screwing with this ant colony. I watched them for over an hour as they built a massive anthill. It seemed like it was two feet high, though really it was probably only eight or nine inches. I was barely four feet tall then, so things were bigger to me.

When their work had died down for a while and they seemed satisfied, I jammed a stick in there, plugging up their hole. Suddenly there were more ants than ever, running here and there and digging and scrambling over one another, and in minutes there was a new hole right next to the one I’d blocked. Next, I watched as they filed past one another in a perfect line, one by one maintaining the lanes of their ant highway. I put a rock right in the middle of their path, and at first they all rushed around and over it and then soon they were passing one another again in a perfect line, two inches left of the rock barrier I’d created. To them it must have seemed a mountain, but they just ran around it.

Sometimes I felt bad for the ants I’d crushed and blocked. Sometimes I felt more sorrow for having caused them suffering than I did for having hurt human beings. Any man I’d crossed or injured and any woman I’d slighted or cheated had at least made choices. And I had made choices too, so I could never feel sorry for myself. But for the stupid little ants who just kept running, there was no choice but to do so, and I felt rotten for having played any part in stopping that.

There were very few insects left in the city. There were still ants around, but not like I remembered in my childhood. Every now and then, I’d kill a roach or a fly in my apartment or office. I never felt any moral ambiguity about killing them. They shouldn’t have come into my space. I’m not sure if it’s boyhood nostalgia that makes me feel like the rocks and sticks in the anthill were wrong but the roach under my shoe is fine. Maybe that’s growing up … leaving certain memories and sensations in the past. Maybe it’s just that then, when those ants built that hill, it didn’t seem so futile. I could crush their colonies and they’d keep coming back, as determined as ever.

Before, when you looked down from a building top or high window at the city streets, it was just the same as the frenetic little insects’ world. People running around bumping off one another or sitting in traffic and jockeying for car-lengths. Drop a parked cab or an overturned trash can in front of the cars or the pedestrians, and they’d pause for a bit until they figured out which way to scurry around it, and then everyone would fall in line behind them and form a new channel and get on with themselves.

I used to sit in parks or cafés in the days of the light mists and spreading disease and watch people and feel angry as hell. Everyone had a sense that things were changing and government platitudes and optimistic radio announcements and billboards and all the fucking farce had no effect. We knew things were bad and heading south. I’d sit and watch as people had their last few weeks of sidewalk conversations and treetops and glimpses of sky, and everyone knew that it was a gathering darkness but no one said much of it. Like when you sit by the bedside of some moribund cancer patient, it’s always rosy snippets from the past or bright cherry blossoms ahead and oh so many smiles and then their multiplying cells win and the sky goes from blue to gray and then there is no sky. Mothers with hollow eyes rubbing ignorant children’s heads and forcing smiles for the other mothers who gathered around them: “It’s going to be all right … right?” “Oh yes!” one says, as if with authority. As if with any fucking clue, with anything to stand on or lean against aside from pathetic, wayward optimism. “Yes … it’s going to be fine. I can feel it!” Pollyannaism for some; whiskey for me. No fucking clue what the rest wake up for.

That’s when everyone started walking with their heads cast down; up was depressing, the ground and the streets familiar. Hardly anyone’s eyes met anymore. All everyone was worried about was not getting their toes stepped on. By feet, by life … just don’t get your toes stepped on or your hands slapped and don’t think too much. We’ll get through this, folks. The fucked-up thing about humanity is that we always do. We get through things. We’re so goddamned adaptable, we can live in ways we were never meant to. The initial depression and the few instances of looting and the tears and rapes and the rending of garments and gnashing of teeth and all just faded away and people accepted it all.

I gave up on Eddie and whatever asshole was stealing his sad bastard clients’ memories. I paced around my place, slowly dressing, one article of clothing between sips of cold coffee and cigarette drags as I wandered, muttering. When I was half-drunk, I felt so fucking sentimental and sorry for the people having things stolen away from them. They only wanted to keep their photos from curling up in the dampness, and so they stuck them in Eddie’s climate-controlled warehouse. Sometimes I was so sorry for them and sometimes—when cold sober or dead drunk, mostly—I was so disgusted with the lot of us that their innocence and indignation made me sick. A blubbering grandmother or blustery young father bitching about their last trip to a forest being gone and boo fucking hoo. I wanted to tell them to give up … curl up … die or accept it: The forest is gone. Enjoy the foggy streets and sleep with your vents pumping and drink lots of the few kinds of liquor you can still get.

*   *   *

I stepped out into the cold, gray morning and stretched a bit. My jeans were rumpled, and I wore just a T-shirt and slate-colored jacket. As I’d gotten out of the mood to work on the memory thief, I’d gotten in the mood to get rough. I decided to visit a deadbeat who owed me money. Heller. Didn’t even know his first name. He was maybe thirty—a squirrelly guy who jumped at loud noises and probably did a lot of drugs and had made the mistake of borrowing from me. He had a few different apartments all in his name; one had been a dead aunt’s, the other a dead sister’s or cousin’s, I’m not sure. It was tricky to track him down because he moved around between the places all the time.