Time Out Read online

  Time Out - Edward M. Lerner

  I’m coughing, choking. Every breath sears my throat and rasps like sandpaper at my lungs. Fire licks hungrily at walls, furniture, equipment. Smoke is everywhere: thick, black, and toxic. The flames hiss, crackle, and roar.

  But nothing masks the screams.

  I fear I’ve been reliving it aloud, because the cop seated across the table glances at the wall with the one-way glass. Following his eyes, I catch my own reflection. That slump-shouldered, expressionless figure seems at least twice my thirty years.

  The cop’s look asks, “Do we let him keep talking or read him his rights?”

  My rights. I try to care. Only the flames and smoke—and the screaming—are real to me.

  Maybe I overlooked some signal. Maybe the cop made up his own mind. He begins reciting, “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say or do can…”

  No matter my rights, I must remain silent. I dare not let anyone even suspect, or it will all have been for naught.

  The horror once more washes over me, untouched by conviction I could not have done anything else. Again memories obliterate the present.

  I’m in the warehouse. I feel the scorching heat, and I hear the screams, and I smell—

  Convulsively, I throw up.

  CHAPTER 1

  The tale began and ended—if it has ended—with Jonas.

  I would have liked to see myself as Watson to Jonas’s Holmes: a colleague, though not an equal. I knew better. I was more clueless even than Watson.

  Better to call me Ishmael to Jonas’s Ahab, Sancho Panza to his Don Quixote, Igor to his Victor Frankenstein. There were no happy endings to those pairings.

  So, Jonas…

  * * * *

  Mornings spent in the Home Depot parking lot had cured my pallor. Flab, alas, did not yield so easily. The owlish glasses probably didn’t recommend me, either. Whatever the reason, the weathered-looking men in their battered, mud-spattered trucks had yet to acknowledge me, much less to offer me work.

  A Mutt and Jeff pair, grinning, had ridden off on the flatbed of a pickup, twenty or so minutes earlier. Likely they were the last who’d get work today. The main thing that I’d learned about day labor was that construction jobs began early. That, and that soon the store manager would tell us rejects and laggards to shove off, before the parking area and the store got busy. The understanding was we’d be elsewhere by ten.

  I’d barely set off for home, such as it was, the June day already warm and humid, when the Hyundai station wagon pulled up. Dirt lay as thick on it as on any truck that had come trawling for cheap laborers, but still it didn’t fit. The back seat was folded down, and the cargo deck was filled with—I had no idea what. Like a tornado had hit a Radio Shack, and deposited the debris there. The driver’s shirt, seen through the grimy windshield, might have been white. The faint music sounded orchestral and baroque.

  A window slid down. (The music swelled; Vivaldi, I decided.) This was where the would-be employer would shout out for carpenters, or painters, or just strong backs.

  This guy was at a loss what to ask, but managed to come up with, “Who speaks English?” He himself had a trace of an accent. Slavic, I thought.

  Most everyone answered yes (or sí, or twice da). Three of us stepped up to the Hyundai.

  The driver had a square face, clean-shaven, with epic frown lines. His gray hair was as snarled and unruly as a Brillo pad. Sixty-ish, I guessed. His eyes, small and close set, darted about.

  Beneath the edginess, I sensed something else. Determination. As for the hiring of day labor, he didn’t know what he was doing.

  That was okay. I didn’t know what I was doing, either.

  I said, “A priest, a minister, and the Dalai Lama walk into a bar. Stop me if you’ve heard this one.”

  The man in the station wagon smiled uncertainly, displaying large, uneven teeth. He said, “I’ll take that as a yes.”

  “How can I help you?” I asked.

  “Odd jobs in my workshop. Cleaning. Furniture moving. Sort and inventory a bunch of stuff. Run errands. Just so you know, I have some high-voltage equipment. It’s all labeled. You’ll need to stay away from it.”

  “I can do odd jobs,” I assured him, “and not electrocute myself, either. I’m Peter Bitner, by the way.”

  “Jonas,” he answered reflexively. “Have any technical aptitude? Electronics, computers, ham radio, that kind of thing?”

  “None whatsoever,” I told him.

  He nodded. Ignorance, apparently, was a good thing.

  The men who had stepped forward with me sidled back. Too many had been stiffed at the end of a day’s work. When, in the charitable expression, you’re an undocumented worker, as many here were, or working off-book for cash, as did everyone here, to whom would you complain? People learned to avoid anyone who felt off.

  Jonas felt off to me, too. So what? I was divorced, disgraced, and destitute. Disowned by my parents and deserted by my so-called friends. (Except, when I was honest with myself, the few who had tried to stay in touch. Them I was too ashamed to see.) Days away from homelessness. Rejecting a job—if Jonas offered me one—was a bigger risk than getting cheated.

  I asked, “What do you say?”

  We haggled a bit and came to terms. I got in the car beside Jonas.

  “So,” Jonas finally said, “a priest, a minister, and the Dalai Lama.”

  “Sorry about that. I was improvising. Here’s a joke I do know. What do you call a thousand lawyers, buried up to their necks, at the bottom of the ocean?”

  “I don’t know. What?”

  “A good start,” I told him.

  From his bitter laugh, I guessed that Jonas, too, had had a run-in with lawyers.

  * * * *

  We rode in silence, apart from tinkly harpsichord music, to a seedy, light-industrial neighborhood. Jonas parked outside a wooden warehouse, its paint cracked and peeling, the name of a defunct moving-and-storage company faded almost to illegibility. I began my first chore: toting in the boxes and bags that filled the station wagon. Wherever Jonas shopped, it wasn’t the mall. As for his so-called workshop, it dwarfed my house.

  The four-bedroom colonial I had once owned, not the dingy, little more than a closet that I rented in a transient hotel.

  Grime coated the warehouse floor, and slogging along we added to the already innumerable shoeprints. Oscillating fans stirred the dust. More dust danced and sparkled in the sunbeams slicing down from windows beneath the eaves.

  The ceiling was at least twenty feet over my head. Along one edge of the cavernous space, above a glass-walled row of mostly vacant offices, was a partial second story accessible from one end by a cargo elevator and from the other end by a narrow flight of well-worn wooden stairs. Paint lay so thickly on the treads as to almost mask the gaps between planks. Beneath the stairway, strata upon strata of paper sheets, flapping to the back-and-forth cycling of the fans, covered a long corkboard.

  Jonas had not been kidding about high-voltage stuff. Opposite the offices, within a padlocked, chain-link enclosure, was what looked like a Dominion Power substation. Something inside the fence put out a tooth-rattling bass hum. Fat insulated cables snaking along the concrete floor supplied power from within the cage to—I had no idea what.

  Gray cabinets, many with their doors hanging open, lined the remaining two walls. In a corner, amid heaps of scavenged electronics, were two freestanding metal strongboxes each the size of a file drawer. I couldn’t imagine what Jonas imagined anyone might want to steal from here.

  Computers, instruments, and tools covered the tops and lower shelves of a dozen wooden workbenches; more gear overflowed into the aisles aboard wheeled carts. Colored wire, as abundant as tinsel on a Christmas tree, hung everywher
e.

  Needles leapt and twitched, digital readouts blinked, and weird shapes morphed and spun on large displays. Of the instruments near enough to read, about half showed the current time. I thought nothing of it: half the gadgets in my former home doubled as clocks, too.

  This was some workshop.

  “So are you a mad scientist?” I asked him.

  “Not yet. Just peevish.”

  Taking the hint, I finished unloading the station wagon without asking anything more personal than, “Where do you want this?” (I staggered under a couple of the boxes, but didn’t ask for help. If my new boss hadn’t noticed that I was a runt, I saw no reason to bring it to his attention.) When I encountered a chicken-wire pen with four guinea pigs, I told myself these were pets, not, well, guinea pigs.

  Chore two, long overdue, was mopping. Wash water turned black within minutes; I rolled my bucket to and from the single utility sink as much as I swabbed. I hadn’t finished half the floor—what showed of it—when Jonas was ready to drop me off. Apart from muttering as he tinkered, his words incomprehensible when they weren’t inaudible, he had had nothing to say about what he did.

  The good news was, he paid everything to which we had agreed and tossed in a couple extra bucks for my dinner. The better news was, he wanted me back the next day.

  * * * *

  As I scraped and scrubbed the biology experiment that had once been a refrigerator, Jonas stopped mumbling to himself long enough to comment, “You do good work.” He retreated into a cluster of bench equipment faster than I, in my surprise, could summon a thank-you.

  It was our third day together, and I still had no idea what he did, or why his “workshop” brimmed with clocks and computers, or why he had enough smoke detectors, their boxes sealed, to fill a cabinet. Though he muttered as he worked, I wasn’t often close enough to make it out. When I could hear, I still made no sense of it. I’d never heard of entropy, tachyons, isotope separation, or recombinant DNA.

  When he took a break from his work it was to surf the web; he still muttered, only louder. From time to time he’d print off an item, highlight or underline or circle all over it, and pin it with the collection already on the corkboard. The printouts, at least, I sometimes understood: ways in which the world was going to hell.

  If Jonas wasn’t a mad scientist, he had advanced beyond peeved.

  The next day, as I shuttled old gadgets from his scrap heap to shelves I’d improvised from concrete blocks and boards, Jonas looked my way to ask, “What did you do before?”

  I didn’t care to share, but neither could I afford, however metaphorically, to bite the hand that fed me. And Jonas was decent enough, in his mad-scientist way. That morning he’d sent me with a twenty to buy pizza for our lunch. When I offered him his change, he’d waved it off.

  Before was nonspecific enough to leave some wiggle room without, quite, lying.

  “I was in banking,” I told him. That answer satisfied most people. Between the housing bubble going pop and the Great Recession, banks had done plenty of downsizing.

  “Where you worked as?” Jonas asked.

  “A clerical,” I equivocated.

  Because mortgage workers didn’t get much sympathy. Notaries who certified robo-signed eviction notices got none.

  Never mind that I either approved everything as I was told or got fired. Never mind that the homeowners involved were invariably months behind in their payments. Never mind that the lawyer who managed the delinquent-accounts department, who demanded we dispose of thousands of bad loans every month, got off with a tsk and a fat severance package.

  Britney had been shocked—shocked!—to find out what her trusted assistant had done.

  There wasn’t as much as a tweet to show what she had ordered me to do. She’d always given orders verbally.

  “Clerical,” Jonas repeated. “I can see that. You’re organized. Very systematic.”

  Doubtless why I’d made such a good prison librarian. Notary fraud is a felony.

  “Thank you,” I said, wishing he’d drop the subject.

  And then Jonas surprised me. He said, “I don’t keep records very well.”

  Big surprise.

  He seemed on the verge of adding something, and then thought better of it. “When you’ve finished clearing that pile of old gear, we’ll call it a day. Tomorrow, you can organize the storerooms upstairs.”

  * * * *

  On the eighth day, Jonas reached a decision.

  “Look, Peter, I need a regular assistant. You can see as much. You’re hardworking and surely capable of more than I’ve asked of you so far.

  “The thing is, my funds are limited. Suppose we stop the day-at-a-time arrangement and I set you up rent-free in a room upstairs. Same pay, still off the books, and I’ll furnish all your meals.”

  Saving me the daily rent I’d been paying on the rathole where I was living, not to mention that any of the second-story rooms I’d emptied out would be larger. Jonas, I’d found, already lived in a room upstairs. I was tempted. But—

  “I’ll need to know a few things before making this permanent,” I said. “Respectfully, how do you pay for this?” And for how long could he afford to keep paying? It wasn’t like I’d seen a customer, or that we were in a high-rent district. These might be hard times for mad scientists, too.

  And I’d learned a hard lesson on the limits to trust.

  “I’m not rich,” Jonas admitted. “I’m not without resources, either. The lease here is prepaid for another fourteen months by an NSF grant I used to have. Most of this equipment is castoffs, from my colleagues at the university. For day to day expenses, I have some savings.”

  “You’re affiliated with the university? Which one?”

  “Smithson-Briarwood,” he said, not meeting my eye. “To be more precise, my former colleagues.”

  Expired grant. Former colleagues. Old enough, no doubt, for tenure, and yet…

  Jonas sighed. “You’re right to be skeptical. My research is…unorthodox. I admit it. But I’m close, Peter. I’m close. And when I succeed”—he gestured grandly at the clutter all around—“everything will become so much better.”

  “What is your research?” I asked. It was politer than either question I wanted to ask: How much in savings? What happened to your grant?

  “It’s quite abstruse physics. Look, I can promise you this. If my savings run out, you can continue living here rent-free while the lease lasts.”

  “And you’ll put that in writing?”

  He nodded.

  Somehow, I had to ask. “Abstruse physics. How will that make everything better?”

  His face reddened, and I feared that I’d gone too far.

  “I was just curious,” I backpedaled. “It doesn’t matter.” As the silence stretched, I sweated.

  “My peers didn’t understand.” I sensed Jonas answered himself, not me. “So much rides on this, and yet they mocked my theories as foolish. Mocked me. Conspired to usurp my grant.”

  “So I think we have an agreement,” I told him.

  “No one’s books are perfect,” he droned on to himself. “Of course they found an irregularity or two. The excuse they were searching for to reclaim my funding.”

  “Auditors?” I guessed.

  His eyes snapped back into focus and he noticed me again. “Yes, the damn auditors. I appealed their ruling, for all the good it did me. When they denied my appeal I tried taking them to court, only to be told the matter was between me and the NSF.”

  I recalled how bitterly Jonas had laughed that first day at my lawyer joke. It seemed we had more in common that I would have guessed.

  I told my boss, “I’ll move in tomorrow.”

  CHAPTER 2

  My first few days living in the warehouse, I spoke more to the guinea pigs than with Jonas. I got to know the manager at the local bodega and the counter staff at the nearby eateries from which I picked up our takeout. I started flirting with the cute blond cashier, she of the most strikin
g green eyes, at the 7-Eleven.

  Whereas Jonas, after I moved in, hardly ever left the building.

  Perhaps that was why, at long last, Jonas ceased his muttering and emerged from among his clustered workbenches to ask, “Do you ever wonder?”

  Amid the monotony of my duties, I did little but wonder: about the shambles my life had become. About the choices I’d made, and that Amy, my ex, had made. About what Amy was doing now, and with whom. About the dreary and lonesome existence stretching ahead of me. I wondered if my scuzzball former boss was lolling on a beach, sipping mai tais.

  None of which I was about to share.

  “Sure,” I told Jonas.

  “Maybe the world doesn’t need to be this messed up.”

  If the world would leave me alone, I would gladly return the favor. I said, “Maybe some things are meant to be.”

  “Fate?” Jonas looked disappointed. “God’s will? Karma? Here I thought you were an educated man.”

  Did I believe in fate? Or did I only wish I did? How liberating it would be to blame forces bigger than myself for my failings. Because then they wouldn’t be my failings, would they?

  None of which I was about to share.

  “Not all education is the same,” I said. “You scientists learn to ask why things work. Engineers learn to ask how things work. Accountants learn to ask how much things cost.”

  “And English majors? What do you learn?”

  “To ask, ‘Do you want fries with that?’”

  Jonas chuckled, but I hadn’t diverted him. He tried again. “But maybe the world doesn’t need to be this messed up.”

  Forget fate, I thought. Just look at human nature. Evenings, if I took the time to surf the news, now that I again had access to the net, the world seemed pretty determined to go to hell.

  What was on Jonas’s mind today? Economies in freefall? Climate change? Nuclear proliferation? Terrorism? Narco-states? On his wall of woes, all had a prominent place.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  Jonas followed my glance to his corkboard. “Suppose someone knew what was coming. Would we listen?”

  Had I believed anyone ever listened, I would have been a whistleblower instead of a patsy. Or maybe my character flaw was the lack of guts, not a lack of belief. Either way, I had held my tongue and held onto my paycheck for a few more months, while Britney’s orders outvoted my conscience.