Slices (24 page)

He
stopped outside a bakery — they had tables and chairs outside
for customers, and he sat down heavily, folded his arms on the table,
and rested his head on them for just a moment.

“Can
I get you something?”

He
sat back up, looked at the girl’s annoyed and suspicious
expression. She probably thinks I’m homeless, he realized.

“Oh
— sorry, no, I’m — waiting for someone,” he
said.

“Yeah?”
She looked young. Hell, she probably hadn’t even been born yet
when it had happened.

“He
should be here soon,” James said, hoping the lie sounded
convincing. “I’ll — I’ll call him again.”

He
pulled the phone from his pocket, and thumbed through his contact
list until he found Darryl’s name. He hesitated for just a
second, and pressed the button as the waitress walked away. He almost
didn’t want to put the phone up to his ear, listen to it
ringing, didn’t want to hear a voice he hadn’t heard in
over twenty years.

He
didn’t even know exactly what he was going to say. Maybe he
really should ask Darryl to come here and meet him. The last time
he’d tried having a conversation like this on the phone, it
hadn’t gone very well.

Three
weeks ago, and he was in a cheap hotel room, somewhere on the road
between his new hometown and his old one. It was hard to tell that
this wasn’t a dead space — the wallpaper, the television,
even the towels in the bathroom, none of them looked like they’d
been replaced any time since the 70’s. But it was cheap, and
that was the important thing, to make what little money he had last.

He’d
been fired from his last job, the last job he’d been able to
find. Fired wasn’t what they called it. He’d been “let
go.”

It
was a fast food place, serving what white people thought of as
Mexican food, and he’d been “let go” because he
wouldn’t go in the walk-in freezer any more. He just couldn’t
shake the conviction that someone was going to lock him inside by
accident. Or on purpose.

Looking
back now, he thinks the cold is what did it. That it shocked
something in his system, feeling it all over like a million needles
reaching down into bone. He’d always had moments when he could
see things that weren’t there anymore, ever since the accident
— and seeing the “MISSING” posters on telephone
poles long after they’d been taken down was the worst part —
but ever since the first time he’d stepped foot in the deep
freeze, let that heavy door swing shut behind him and seal him away
from warmth and people and light, that was when something woke up
inside him. Only then did he start really seeing the dead spaces,
losing himself inside them, feeling the even deeper, numbing cold of
time standing still.

The
cold was leading him home. Had led him here, so far, to this room
that belonged to no one, where he’d sat watching movies in
snowy black-and-white on the ancient TV, with his phone sitting in
his lap, working up the nerve to make the first call.

He’d
found everyone online, tracked down a couple of names and addresses
and phone numbers, given over his credit card number to websites he
didn’t really trust to find the rest. His friends, from when he
was a child.

Not
all of them, of course. One name missing.

He
made himself dial the number for the first name on the list —
Kevin — and smiled tight all through the opening pleasantries.
“James, man, Jesus, how have you been? How long has it been? So
good to hear from you! What have you been doing with your life?”
And he sat on the edge of the bed, back straight, one hand pressing
the phone to his ear and the other arm wrapped around his chest, hand
clutching the opposite shoulder, and he made all the right sounds,
all the right replies, until he finally found an opening for the
question he needed to ask.

“Sorry,
what did you just say?”

He
repeated it a little louder —

“Do
you remember when we built a time machine?”

Laughter.
“When we built a
what?”

“You
remember.”

“No,
man, I don’t know what you’re talking about.” There
was amusement in his voice — he was waiting for the punchline.

“It
was out at that old, run-down house in the woods, do you remember?
The old Sunderland house. We weren’t supposed to go out there,
we knew we’d get in trouble for it, but we went all the time
anyway? Remember the house? All the walls had fallen in, and —
”

“Oh,
yeah. Yeah, I do remember. Man, I hadn’t thought about that in
— ”

“And
there was — there was all this old junk, and we used to haul it
around to play on — like that washing machine we said was that
weak spot on the Death Star — ”

“Oh
yeah! And we’d throw rocks at it and try to get them through
the door. Yeah. Man, how do remember all this?”

“And
there was — the day we built the time machine. We had, like, an
old hose for a cable, and we found the guts of an old television and
a microwave, and other stuff, and we piled it around — ”
His voice caught. “Around an old refrigerator.”

Silence.

“Kevin?
Are you still there?” No sound but faint white noise. “Did
you hear what I just said?”

“Is
that was this about? Is that why you’re calling me?”

“Yeah,
but, listen, it’s not what you — ”

“Because,
because I don’t know what you’re thinking, that was a
long time ago and we were just kids then, and we didn’t know
what the hell we were doing, and — look, if this is some kind
of blackmail thing, you can just — ”

“No,
no, I’m not — I just want to know if you think — ”

“I’ve
got a wife. And kids. I’ve got a life now, and if you think you
can just come back out of nowhere and fuck with me, you can just fuck
off.”

“No,
just listen, please listen — do you think there’s any
chance — ”

“Just
forget you know this number, all right? Don’t call here again,
or I’m calling the police.”

He
hung up. James sat there with the silenced phone, feeling the biting
dead cold creeping in at the corners of the room, his unvoiced
question still echoing in his head.

Do
you think there’s any chance it might have worked?

Thirty
years before.

They
went to school together, the five of them. James and Kevin, Darryl
and Chris. Oh, and Andrew. Drew was a year younger than them, still
in second grade while they were in third, a world of difference, but
they let him tag along when they played after school because they
just simply got tired of trying to tell him not to.

Drew
was always nervous about coming along to the old ruined house —
there were always stories, from the kids who said it was haunted to
teachers who said child molesters hung out in those woods, and the
warnings never made the woods any less attractive — just made
the kids who played there sharply aware that if anyone caught them
doing it, they’d be in Trouble, and Trouble was the last thing
Drew wanted.

But
the lure of the old house, and all the junk around it, was too much
to resist, and so was the company of older boys who were at least
willing to tolerate him.

And
they did tolerate him, because he did think of cool shit to do
sometimes, even though he was just a little kid. Clever, was what
grown-ups called him. His friends were all interested in
science-fiction, laser guns and spaceships, and James would cover his
notebooks with elaborate space battles rendered in ballpoint ink, but
Drew was the one who would make robots out of tin cans and bottlecaps
and screws, turn them in as art class homework, and get A’s for
it.

So
even though the other kids acted like they didn’t want him
around, James had noticed that half the time, whatever they were
playing was Drew’s idea.

Like
this time, when Darryl had asked “Whatcha doin’?”
and Drew had answered “building a time machine,” and
everyone else went along with it.

They
gathered the pieces for it, started putting it together, arguing over
what should go where, talking about where they would go when it was
finished. James wanted to go to the future — see what the
twenty-first century was like. Chris wanted to go see dinosaurs, and
Kevin just wanted to go kill Nazis.

James
found, in what used to be part of the garage, an old car battery,
buried under piles of newspapers that had been half-destroyed by wind
and rain. He had been trying to look through them, see if he could
find somewhere in the past they could go, but all the headlines were
lost and unreadable. But the battery, now — that, he could use.

He
hauled it back over to the refrigerator — it took him a minute,
car batteries were way heavier than they looked.

Drew
had just stepped inside the refrigerator’s open door, and was
going over some imaginary checklist with Chris.

James
set the battery down around the back. “This will be the power
supply,” he said to whoever was listening, and started to
attach it to the metal grill on the back with an unbent wire coat
hanger.

No
one else was really paying attention to him. But they came running
when the spark from the battery knocked him back on his ass.

And
that has to have been when Chris let the refrigerator door swing
shut.

“Oh,
shit, oh, shit,” Kevin said, “are you okay?”

“I
think — so, yeah.” He was having a little trouble forming
words. His hands were tingling and numb, and the length of his arm
felt like it was burning, still. But all of it was fading, the moment
moving on.

“Guys?”
James could barely hear Drew’s muffled voice. “Guys,
what’s going on?”

“Can
you stand up?” Darryl said urgently, reaching a hand down to
him.

“Oh,
man. We are going to be in so much trouble,” Chris was saying,
already tearing up. “We are going to catch so much shit for
being out here.”

“I
think I’m okay,” James said, climbing unsteadily to his
feet. “I’ll be fine in a minute.”

He
let go of Darryl’s hand, and Darryl looked around disgustedly
at what they’d built. “Fuck this. This was stupid,”
he said, kicking the television innards. “Let’s get out
of here.”

“Guys?
What happened? Can I come out now?” James could hear Drew
banging on the door from the inside, flat-palmed. “Guys?”

“Come
on,” Darryl said, dragging James by the arm, and the others
followed. James kept looking over his shoulder at their time machine.
He was tingling all over now, light-headed, and each moment seemed to
overlap the next.

“What
about Drew?” he asked.

“Fuck
him, too,” Darryl said flatly. “Let him find his own way
home.”

But
he never did, of course.

“We
were just kids then,” Darryl was saying now. “Kevin’s
right about that.”

They
were talking quietly in Darryl’s living room, James sitting on
the edge of the uncomfortable-looking fold-out bed that had been a
couch a minute ago.

“So
you never told anyone?” James said. “Not even — ”

Darryl
glanced down the hall, toward the room where his wife was reading a
bedtime story to their son. “Not even Susan.
Especially
not Susan. What would I tell her? Besides, we don’t know what
happened. Not really.”

“Oh,
come on.”

“We
don’t. Not really. I mean, no one ever found a — you
know, his body, or anything.”

“Did
you ever go back and check?”

“Did
I — No.” Darryl smiled a weird, lopsided grin. “No.
Nobody did.”

They
had all stopped playing there, after that day. When they got to
school the next day and realized that Drew wasn’t there, and
the day after that, and the day after that. They talked about it,
argued about it, agreed to play dumb if anyone asked — too
scared they’d get in trouble, scared they might go to jail if
the worst had happened.

“Maybe
he did get out,” Darryl said. “Maybe he ran away.”

“Bullshit,”
James said. “You know how it is with those old refrigerators. I
mean, I’ve read about this. They used to have mechanical
latches. No way you could push the door open from the inside,
especially not a little kid. Hundreds of kids died like that
before they changed how they made them. Hell, it still happens
sometimes. Kids still die, just like Drew did.”

“We
don’t
know
that,” Darryl said again, struggling to keep his voice down. “I
mean, come on, somebody would have found the body by now. Okay, maybe
he didn’t run away, maybe, somebody kidnapped him, or
something. We left him there alone and somebody took him.”

“And,
what, do you think that’s
better?”

“I
don’t know. Maybe.”

“Is
this how you live with yourself?”

Darryl
smiled that lopsided smile again. “Yeah. Yeah, it is. This is
how I live with myself.”

James
leaned forward and said urgently, “Don’t you ever think
about it? What it must have been like? Alone in the dark, four walls
close around him, do you think he thought we were coming back? Did he
think maybe it was a joke? Or did he realize we just didn’t
care, do you think? Do you think he starved to death, or ran out of
air first? Did he pound on the walls, did he scream, did he beat his
fists bloody, or do you think he just sat down and gave up? How can
you not think about this?”

“I
don’t think about it because I have to get on with my
life,”
Darryl hissed. “Okay, you’re right, we shouldn’t
have left him there, it was wrong, for all I know we’re going
to hell for it, but I can’t think about it every day! It was
thirty fucking years ago and there’s nothing we can do to
change it!”

James
didn’t say anything for a second. Then he said, even more
quietly — “What if there is?”

“What
d’you mean?”

“Do
you remember what the refrigerator was? What we were playing it was,
I mean?”