Eleven Twenty-Three (35 page)

“If they want to go, sure. But she hasn’t
been too receptive about it, either.”

“That’s because this is going to require more
than what any of us have ever put into anything, Layne. And for
what will in all likelihood be little payoff.”

“There’s the almost certain alternative,”
Tara says.

Hajime gives each of us one final perusal
before breaking out into a half-laugh, half-whine.

“Okay, I get it, I get it,” he says, rubbing
his face with his hands. “We’ll look into it. God, I’m exhausted
already.”

Tara finishes cooking dinner while Hajime and
I stand out in the front yard smoking cigarettes. Headlights appear
at the end of the street and I immediately reach for the revolver
stuffed down into my pants.

“Whoa, wait,” Hajime says, stopping me. “It’s
Julie.”

He doesn’t question the gun in my pants.
Julie pulls her Accent up behind Hajime’s car and gets out,
polka-dotted in blood.

“Holy shit, are you okay?” I ask, running up
to check on her.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” she says, looking down and
noticing the blood as if she hadn’t seen it until now. “Don’t go
into town. Everyone is crazy. Some old man tried to grab me when I
was out looking for Matt. I think he wanted to rape me.”

“How do you know?” Hajime asks.

“We girls can usually tell. When there’s
blood and dead people everywhere, there’s no healthy reason for it
to be hard, you know what I mean?”

“Jesus,” I say. “So what’d you do?”

“Here you go,” she says, reaching into the
passenger seat and removing a cracked and splintered baseball bat,
slathered with gore. She tosses it to me and I catch it, inspecting
the wood, at the little pieces of bone dotting the stained red
surface. “Survival of the fittest, you know? And I’m quite fit. Why
are you shaking?”

I think of telling them what happened with
Adam Something-or-Other, how I took control of the situation, how I
had no choice but to shoot him and so I did. But I keep quiet.
Somehow my own odyssey in town this afternoon doesn’t feel the
same. Unlike Julie, who has moved on and is now telling Hajime that
she never did find Matt’s body and that maybe he’s still alive, I
feel like a fugitive, a villain. I feel like my father, and like my
father I say nothing.

The four of us inspect the broiled T-bones
and mashed potatoes and beans on our plates, and I find myself
feeling more than slightly guilty over just how famished I am,
considering how we’re Myanmar now.

“Is your sister going to eat?” I ask
Tara.

“It’s not looking like it. She didn’t want to
come out of the bedroom.”

“She’s going to have to get it together,”
Hajime says.

“Well you can explain that to her after
dinner, if you’d like.”

“Don’t tell
him
that,” I say, pointing
at Hajime with my knife. “He’ll do it.”

We laugh, begin cutting into our food. When I
take my first bite of the steak, it’s dry and overcooked, but by
the third swallow, I’m certain this is the best meal I have ever
had. The others seem to agree, as all four of us devour our food
greedily. Julie smothers hers in steak sauce, and when I stare at
the brown juice streaked across her plate, I am reminded of the
image of old blood congealed along a tile floor. I become nauseous
and focus instead on Tara, who chews deliberately and seems to be
in deep thought.

“So I think I figured it all out today,”
Hajime says, breaking the lull.

“I don’t want to talk conspiracies and
doomsday predictions right now,” Tara sighs.

“No, no, it’s not about that. I mean I think
I figured out the significance of the number eleven
twenty-three.”

“
Did
you now?” I chuckle. “I’m glad it
wasn’t just me trying to crack the code here.”

“I knew there was something familiar about
the number sequence one, one, two, and three,” he explains. “So I
opened up my college math book and started thumbing through it.
Then I found our town’s lucky digits right there, followed by five,
eight, thirteen, and on into infinity.”

“Okay,” Julie says, her mouth full of mashed
potatoes. “My interest is piqued, Hajime.”

“Have you guys ever heard of the Fibonacci
sequence? Fibonacci numbers? Spiral math, basically?”

Shaken heads and downcast eyes around the
table. Every one of us with the exception of the Asian prodigy
across from me has always been math retarded. I almost failed my
college algebra course years ago, and only ended up passing because
of a bullshit story I handed my professor involving a didgeridoo
and my aunt having testicular cancer.

“Well, I barely remembered it myself, but
then it came back to me,” he says. “There was a mathematician in
the thirteenth century named Leonardo de Pisa, but he went by
Fibonacci. This guy explained that there was this sequence of
numbers you could see everywhere in nature, and they always
followed a pattern wherein every number on the sequence was always
the sum of the previous two numbers. You could see it in flowers,
in bee population growth, in seashells, in space, in the vowel
sounds of Sanskrit—everywhere. And if you divided one number by the
one before it, you always got the same golden ratio of
one-point-six-one-eight. It’s all about patterns in what you might
think are randomly occurring numbers. It’s all part of the
spiral.”

“I’ve
heard
of this,” Tara says,
suddenly animated. “It was mentioned in a Dan Brown novel.”

“You probably shouldn’t admit you read Dan
Brown, Sunshine.”

“Well anyway,” Hajime continues, “guess what
the first four positive numbers on the sequence are.”

“One, one, two, and three?”

He nods.

We exchange glances, consider what Hajime is
saying. I’m vaguely reminded of a dumb psilocybin-induced
conversation I had only a few days ago with Tara, about God and the
Devil being nothing but equations we couldn’t break down. It seems
like years ago now, a scratchy sound byte full of cliché and scant
meaning.

“It doesn’t seem to happen at eleven
twenty-three on the dot, either,” Hajime says. “I’d be willing to
bet that it happens at eleven twenty-three and five seconds
exactly. Five is the next number after three on the sequence. Then,
the whole thing ends eleven minutes and twenty-three-point-five
seconds after it begins.”

“At eleven thirty-four and twenty-eight
seconds?” Julie asks. “Thirty-four is a Fibonacci number, too. Is
my math right?”

Hajime nods again.

“That could be true,” I say. “So you’re
saying that the entire ordeal in Lilly’s End revolves around a
common sequence of numbers relating to spirals? Why?”

“Well, I don’t
know
why,” he answers.
“Just like I don’t know exactly why there’s chemtrails blotting out
the atmosphere over our heads every day. But they do, and they’ve
definitely affected us.”

“Wait,
what’s
blocking the
atmosphere?” Tara asks.

“Never mind, dear,” I say, waving the subject
off.

“We’ll probably never know why exactly,”
Hajime says. “We’ll never know if this is just a naturally
occurring side effect to the gas mask men’s plot or if it was
planned from the get-go for us to go ape shit at eleven
twenty-three. We’ll probably never know if I’m even right about my
little theory. Maybe it’s just a—what do you call those things I
don’t believe in anymore, Layne?”

“A coincidence?”

“
Right
. Exactly. A coincidence. Maybe
it’s one of those. Maybe this whole ordeal is.”

“But you don’t believe that,” Julie says.

“No, I don’t. This Fibonacci sequence theory
makes too much sense to me. Why would this town only spiral
completely out of control at the same arbitrary time each day? If
the rise and fall of multiple populations in nature tends to follow
this spiral math, why not the rise and fall of our own isolated
township? If spiral math dictates the rules for entire
galaxies
, then why can’t it dictate the pattern of mortality
for a few thousand Lilly’s End residents? Or maybe the men who
manufactured this…whatever it is…designed it with the Fibonacci
sequence in mind. Maybe we’re being given clues to figure out.
Maybe it’s an experiment involving these numbers as catalysts for
disaster. I don’t know. But it’s here, and it’s killing the
End.”

“Did you bring the book you got this from
with you?” I ask. “Does it mention anything about the relationship
between this number sequence and, um…metaphysics?”

Hajime narrows his eyes and stares at me for
a long time.

“The
metaphysical,
Layne?” he repeats.
“Like, the relationship between spiral number sequences and…the
paranormal?”

“Forget it,” I say, looking away from his
gray skin, which is translucent in the kitchen lights.

“No, no, Sunshine. What are you getting
at?”

“Yeah, Layne,” Julie says. “Are you seeing
things levitating? Other dimensions? Having psychic moments?
What?”

“I’m not seeing
anything
,” I tell
them. “I just wondered. I wondered if maybe there was
anything…impossible…happening here in Lilly’s End, and thought
maybe it was all interrelated.”

“I didn’t see anything about that,” Hajime
says. “Besides, what’s happening in Lilly’s End is outside the
realm of normalcy, yes. It’s pretty messed up, and a lot of people
are dying. But that doesn’t make it
impossible
. I don’t
believe that any laws of physics have been sidestepped here, and I
don’t think we’re dealing with monsters, either. We’re just dealing
with our own neighbors and friends and family succumbing to a
chemical, a virus, something that none of them can control. I
thought we agreed on that. What have you seen?”

“Nothing,” I tell them, removing a cigarette
from the pack nestled away in my shirt pocket. I frown at the two
left inside. “All I’ve seen is that we’re in deep shit. I haven’t
seen any ghosts or anything.”

“What did anyone say about ghosts, Layne?”
Tara asks, wide-eyed with panic.

09:08:07 PM

After dinner, we throw out various theories
on the origins of the eleven twenty-three: a government experiment
using spiral-based alien technology; daily chemtrails loaded with
self-replicating nanobots programmed to activate and wreak havoc
and turn the End into gray goo at the same arbitrary time every
twelve hours; a twisted future reality TV show created by some
insane mathematician and funded by the military entertainment
industrial complex; and the ridiculousness goes on.

Finally, Tara checks her watch.

“Aliens, nanobots, a TV pilot—
whatever
it is, it’s going to happen again in a little over an
hour-and-a-half,” she says. “I’m going to bring Chloe out here so
we can keep an eye on her.”

“Good idea.”

Tara shambles off the front porch and into
the house. A moment later, we hear the scream. But this one is
different than all the others. It’s not the banshee-like cry of
fear, nor bubbled over emotions spilling out of people pushed way
beyond their limits. This is the scream of someone who has truly
lost everything, and only now realizes it.

The three of us run inside and down the hall
to Tara’s bedroom. At first, Tara blocks our view, standing in the
doorway with her hands wrapped around her mouth. She coughs and
gags before retreating to the bathroom.

“Oh my god,” Julie stammers. “Oh my god.”

The first thing I notice is the knife Hajime
pulled earlier, now discarded into the middle of a large pool of
blood. A couple of feet away, Chloe is bundled up in a fetal
position, her arms sliced open with much more deliberation and
anxiety than her father’s were. But she’s still just as dead.

“You’ve got to be
kidding
me,” Hajime
says, his body noticeably shaking and his breath coming out in
spastic bursts. “So it’s not happening at only eleven twenty-three
anymore?”

“No, it still is,” I mutter. “Chloe did this
to herself.”

No one speaks for a long time. In the
bathroom, Tara is sucking in sobs, repeating the phrase “Chloe’s
okay” over and over to herself, but to no avail. Her older sister
does not move. Tara is completely alone. Her entire family is
past-tense.

“We’re going to have to move her,” Julie
whispers. “We can’t just leave her here.”

“Where do we move her to?” I whisper back.
“The curbside so she can be picked up, thrown into the back of a
truck, and cremated somewhere tomorrow morning? That’s a bit much,
isn’t it?”

“So what else are we going to do with her,
Layne? We don’t have time to bury her right now. In an hour or so,
this could be us.”

“Let’s move her to Miranda’s room,” Hajime
says. “Whoever’s left at eleven thirty-five can deal with it.”

In an effort to save ourselves, we’re losing
everything worth saving.

We move the corpse, which is just now getting
cold, into Miranda’s room. Julie has to pick the lock first. While
Hajime and I stand there holding Chloe by the armpits and legs,
blood seeps out of the chasms in her wrists and builds into a small
puddle on the floor. I have to drag the briefcase through it when
we carry Chloe into the bedroom. Hajime and I gently place the body
on the bed, which is already stained from when Miranda hacked
herself up. I close the door behind me and run to the kitchen sink,
soaking my arms and the case in hot water. The water that cascades
down the drain is the color of old wine.

PARENTHESIS

Like a tiny precocious princess, Tara never
lets go of a question once she has asked it. This has always been
both her most engaging and infuriating character trait. Like her
campaign for a free Burma or continuing struggle to bind the two of
us in matrimony, Tara has always asked the biggest questions with
the largest question marks at the end, and nine times out of ten
will provide her own definitive answers within minutes of posing
them.