John Gone (25 page)

“Sort of,” she said absently. “But he’s not
here anymore.”

“Not here?”

“Well, he’s here, just, well, it’s
complicated.”

“It isn’t that Castler guy, is it?”

“Oh, God, no,” she said, almost choking on a
laugh. “But, it’s not funny,” she quickly continued, becoming
instantly serious again.

“Have I met him?” Felix asked. “Maybe in the
hub?”

“No,” she responded. Then, she began to
cry.

Felix glanced at her face, fast turning wet
and red. He sat still and watched her sob, completely unsure of how
to proceed. It was just so sudden. He could hug her, but what if
that made things worse? What if she threw his arm off of her in a
fit? He could verbally console her, but what if that made her feel
as though he truly didn’t understand her, making them even more
distant by result?

Locked by fear and indecision, Felix could
only remain quiet, and the silence that resulted was terrible.
Soon, she stopped crying and stood from the couch.

“I’m sorry,” she said, sniffling up the rest
of her tears. “That was unprofessional of me. Good night.” She left
through the door, and it slid closed with a thud behind her,
locking itself for the evening.

Felix stood and walked to the door. Leaning
down, he peered through its port glass at Karen. She was walking
away from his lab quickly, almost running, with the small metal box
containing the watch curled in her left hand. He sighed as she
shrank from sight.

He turned away from the window and found
Calendar looking up at him from near his feet.

“Yeah? Well, what would you have done?” he
asked the animal. Calendar stood silent.

Felix walked to his blue chair and sat on it
in reverse, his knees burying deep between the back and bottom
cushion as his arms folded around its back. He looked at the wall
now in front of him. One of the twelve painted windows decorating
his laboratory was there. It was the one he looked into least
often, partially due to its placement and partially because it was
the picture he connected with least.

Beyond the painted frame of the window was
the outside of an airport on a seemingly normal, sunny afternoon.
There was no strange biome depicted featuring some exotic animal or
plant to catch your attention like the other windows, nor was an
extrinsic climate portrayed, like a storm made of rain, snow, or
sand. It was simply the front exit of an airport and the image of a
man returning home, bags in hand, from what looked to have been a
business trip. There was a woman there, too, running to the man
with one arm open for embrace and the other carrying a small
toddler equally excited for the pending reunion. It was a simple
scene, the reuniting of a family long apart.

Felix wondered what his own return from this
“business trip” would entail. He wondered who would be waiting for
him on the surface with open arms, waiting to kiss and hug him back
into a normal life. He, of course, already knew the answer. There
was no one waiting for him on the surface. No wife, child, nor
family to speak of. No one to cry and to thank God that he wasn’t
actually dead for all those years; no one with whom to share this
vast fortune he was earning by being here. There were only two
Felix cared about now, and both were underground with him: Karen
and his tally-marked tortoise.

“It’s not real, Calendar, so stop fretting
over it,” he said. “Just a painting on the wall, nothing more.”

Felix dismounted the chair and walked to the
computer terminal at his desk. His pet followed him happily and lay
next to his feet as he sat. Felix powered on the computer’s monitor
and stared into the white text prompt blinking in the upper-left
corner of his otherwise black screen.

“Let us see if we can find this mysterious
man to whom Karen was referring,” he said down at Calendar. The
tortoise produced a happy yip and spun around in a quick circle
before settling again.

Felix punched a flurry of letters and numbers
into his keyboard and was soon presented with a list of the
facility’s security camera archives. He’d known nothing about
networked computer systems when he’d arrived, yet only two years
later had been able to break through the most technologically
advanced security measures available for the facility to install.
This relative ease of entry onto its internal network was probably
the exact reason, Felix thought, that only the hub was video
surveilled.

“Let’s see,” Felix said under his breath, “it
would have to be recent, but maybe not since I arrived.”

Felix scrolled through the archives until
coming across the months in 1970. “As good a place to start as
any,” he mumbled.

Felix began to fast-forward through the
footage, watching month after month until, an hour later, the year
was exhausted.

He’d seen Karen often enough in the videos,
though never speaking with anyone out of the ordinary. The
likelihood of randomly stumbling across an answer in the hub
archives was unlikely at best, but Felix was stubborn and had
nothing better to do with the next few hours of night.

By 11:00 he’d sifted through a few more years
of the company’s archival footage, starting with 1969, then moving
to 1971. Finding nothing of interest in either, he checked farther
back to the months in 1968, 1967, 1966, 1965 and finally 1964 where
he found no trace of Karen at all.

At least I know when she started working
here. At least that’s something
, he thought. Felix let out an
audible sigh that woke Calendar from his nap.
It's
meaningless
, he admitted.

Defeated, but still awake, Felix scrolled
back to the earliest year available on the network: 1961. He chose
the first month in the list and yawned as he watched recorded
footage of company employees milling about the hub. The pixilation
of the footage had increased while the frame rate had dropped, but
other than the video quality, not much had changed in the twenty
years since the facility had opened.
Or at least
, Felix
considered,
since the cameras had been installed
.

There were fewer people than he was now
accustomed to, but those who were there still wore the same red and
blue badges over their long white lab coats as they did now. Like
clockwork, at the 8:00 A.M. mark, a small army of Blue Badges
entered the doors around the perimeter. He scrubbed forward and
watched them all reenter the same corridors at 7:00 P.M. He played
the footage forward and backward over and over again by dragging
his cursor along the bottom timeline. The effect was entertaining,
like little mechanical birds in a cuckoo clock
, he
thought.

When his eyelids grew heavy, Felix knew it
was time to abort his unfruitful endeavor and finally get some
sleep. He had a long day of attaching small wires to small
conductors, and a morning saturated with what Felix knew would be
an awkward conversation with a newly sober Karen.

As he moved his cursor to close the
computer’s connection to the network, Felix noticed something so
odd that it snapped him awake. His spine straightened and his
eyelids shot open wide as he leaned in toward the screen to examine
the hub’s walls. From the four angles present in the footage, he
could see the entire surface of the room’s curved wall. One hundred
and seventy-two doors were present, twelve more than stood
presently.

Felix rifled through the subsequent months
sequentially until coming across the first instance of a door’s
disappearance in the April of 1963. He moved the slider through the
thirty days of linked video stream until finding the exact moment
of the door’s disappearance.

What in the world?

Felix monitored the time stamp as he slid
between the door’s existence and disappearance. Footage had been
removed between 7:15 P.M. and 7:45 A.M. The transition was
seamless, too, something no one would have noticed who wasn’t
looking for it. At 7:15, the “1” in the timestamp simply changed to
a “4,” and one of the 172 doors on the wall changed to flat
concrete like magic. It was as if the door’s removal had never
happened.

Felix clicked out of the year and began to
progress through the recorded timeline, observing each of the
twelve disappearances individually. He found each event the same:
at 7:15 P.M. the door was there, and at 7:45 A.M. it wasn’t. There
was never more than one disappearance per year, and not all years
had one.

Felix found the twelfth vanishing door in
1970 on Christmas Day. He was surprised to see Karen as the Blue
Badge entering and exiting it each day before the disappearance,
presumably taking care of the laboratory beyond it. When the
timestamp changed to 7:45 the next morning, Karen was attending to
a different laboratory as if the other had never existed.

Felix shut off the computer monitor and
leaned back in his chair. He arched his neck toward the ceiling and
shut his eyes. He sat like that, thinking and thinking, piecing and
placing the data together, waiting for the answer to come to him.
The contract, the job, the money, Dr. Lawrence, the design of the
spokes, the doors, the food and water store, Karen’s tears, and
what she said about that other man: “Well, he’s here, just, well,
it’s complicated.” There had to be a connection.
What’s the
narrative?

He sat there, eyes closed, and he thought,
and he thought, until an answer that accommodated all of the
evidence finally arrived. His eyes shot open as the truth of things
came to him.

“Just like on Starship Love Affair,” John’s
mother muttered, poking at Kala’s hologram with her finger. “But
he’s not this small in real life, right?” Kala released an
exaggerated sigh and dissipated his visage.

John, his mother, and Ronika were sitting on
the oddly patterned green couch in his living room. John’s mom was
wedged between Ronika and her son, who’d just finished telling her
about the watch, the robot, and the hologram. He’d explained most
of what he knew about the way it all worked, and had even told her
some about the places he’d seen and visited. He had, however, left
out multiple details and never so much as mentioned the Advocates,
knowing that telling her everything would have led to nothing but
more heartache, fear, and grief for his already worried mother.

John’s mother had believed all of it, and how
could she not? Ronika was there to corroborate everything, the
small black robot from the stories was in her lap, a grumpy blue
hologram had been standing on John’s new watch until a few minutes
ago, and all of the other details seemed to fit with the few things
she’d already known. But even without the proof, John would have
had an easy time convincing her of most anything. She wasn’t
gullible, but she was in a highly vulnerable state, willing to
happily cling to almost any explanation that accompanied her son
back home.

“It all makes sense,” John’s mom said as she
leaned back into the couch. “Well, as much sense as it can. But
John, I still don’t understand how you got hurt.”

He was sitting as he usually sat on the couch
he’d grown up with, pushed back against the corner by the pillowed
arm with his feet up close to the rest of his body, knees bent and
flat against the bottom cushion. His mother noticed a particularly
mother-frightening set of small tattered holes along the denim
covering the back of his calf, circled in dried blood. John noticed
the expression it gave her.

“Believe it or not, it’s an animal bite,” he
explained. “Remember, I told you about when I ended up in Canada? I
got bitten by a badger there,” he said, closely examining his own
wound for the first time. “It’s alright, though. It hurt at first,
but it’s okay now.”

“A badger?” she asked.

“While I’m here, I’ll clean it up and get
some fresh clothes,” he said. “A shower wouldn’t hurt either.”

“While you’re here?” his mother asked
worriedly. “Are you leaving?”

John looked down at his watch. “Mom, I don’t
have a lot of control over it. At 3:14, I’m gone again.”

His mother’s face saddened. “I thought,” she
said quietly, “since you were here, I guess I just thought that
this was over. I thought maybe that’s why you hadn’t come back in
three days, that you were just waiting for all this to be over
before coming home.”

“No,” John answered solemnly. “I’m sorry, I,
um, it’s not over yet, Mom.”

“Oh,” his mother sounded. She picked up a mug
of tea from the coffee table in front of her and sipped it. It was
her third cup since her son and his friend’s arrival.

“I didn’t come back sooner because I wanted
to have the time to explain it all,” John said.

“But you came now, right?” she replied,
forcing a smile. “That’s what matters.” She placed her mug back
down on the table. “So, how
does
all of this end?” she
asked.

“What do you mean?” John replied, knowing
exactly what she meant.

“How do you stop this? You can’t just jump
around the world forever.”

“No, no I can’t.”

“I know you said you can’t force it off your
arm, but do you have some other plan? Some way of fixing this?” She
turned to her son’s redheaded friend. “Ronika, you’re smart. Have
you thought of anything?”

“No,” Ronika replied distantly. “I
haven’t.”

“But she’s been trying,” John jumped in. “And
we’re close to figuring this thing out. She’s been a great help so
far.”

Ronika smiled at John’s defense of her.

“What about the man in the watch?” his mother
asked. “If he built it, doesn’t he know how to get it off of you?
Why doesn’t he try to help?”

“I
am
trying to help him, but--” Kala
began before John silenced him with a quick push of the watch’s
knob.

“He’s trying to help, like Ronika,” John
said. “Both of them have been trying to think of something for
me.”