Thomas World (30 page)

Despite everything that's happened, this makes me smile. I push the pound button and move on to the next message.

“Thomas, you aren't here. I don't know if you got my message from before but I thought you would at least let me know if you weren't going to be here. Is everything all right? I saw your computer. What happened to it? Will you please call me? I want to make sure you're all right.”

Third message:
“Thomas, I called William, on the off chance you might have gone to work. He told me you showed up drunk and then spent the entire afternoon in the parking lot, passed out. Honey, I don't know where you are or if you are getting these messages but will you please call me? Please let me help you, okay? Please call me. I love you.”

“Lot of messages?” Runciter asks.

“Yeah.”

I feel horrible. Gloria is worried sick. I need to call her. I look away from Runciter and move on to the next message.

“Hey, I haven't talked to you in a couple of days now.”

This is Sophia.

“Are you avoiding me, Thomas? Ha. I know better than that, but I also saw you haven't been on your Facebook page in a couple of days. Where the heck are you? I need some answers, buddy. Call me. Bye.”

Next message. Gloria again.

“Thomas, baby. You must not be getting my messages. I've been calling around the hospitals. I've called all your friends. I went to a couple of the bars where you sometimes go and couldn't find you. I don't know what else to do. Please call me when you get this. What happened at the house? You left it in such a mess. Were you looking for something? And what happened to your computer? You left a bottle of rum on the kitchen counter and William said you tried to get some files off your computer. He said you were a mess, baby. Please call me back and let me help you. I'm staying at Juliana's house tonight. Please, Thomas. Please. I'm sorry about what happened earlier but please call me. I'm so worried. I love you. Please call me and let me know you're okay.”

“End of messages,”
the voice mail greeter tells me.

I disconnect the phone and hold it for a minute. Do you realize how good it feels to know Gloria is worried about me, that she still cares for me? I do not deserve her. I am a jerk. I ignored her when she tried to help, I've let her drift away from me for years. And then tonight I kissed another woman. How am I going to tell her the truth? Where do I begin?

I don't want to call her just yet, though, not when Runciter can hear. I'll have my car in a few minutes. As soon as I leave the impound lot I'll go home and call her from there. I'll get my bearings and be in a familiar place, alone, and I'll be able to tell her what's going on. What is
really
going on.

I hand the phone back to Runciter.

“Everything all right?” he asks.

“Everything's fine.”

“Are you sure?”

“It's fine, really.”

“Anyone looking for you last night?”

I can't tell if he's fishing for information or just trying to be nice. I'm too tired to figure it out.

“No,” I say, looking out the window. We're driving through a part of town I don't see very often. Most of the houses here are in various stages of decay, lawns are un-mowed, cars are ancient and showing signs of rust. There are pawn shops and laundromats and check-cashing stores and auto repair shops operating inside old corrugated steel buildings. We pass an industrial bakery and a large, squatty building that turns out to be a furniture store.

“This used to be a nice area of town,” Runciter says. “These houses are all built so well…someone could come in here and make a fortune turning them around. There's a lot of history here just crumbling away.”

“Yeah. It's too bad we let it get like this.”

“Where do you live?”

“South side of town.”

“New neighborhood?”

“Fairly new. My house is two years old. How about you?”

“I live a little closer to downtown.”

“Old neighborhood?”

“Yeah. My house turns one hundred next year, actually.”

“Oh, wow.”

I expect him to go on about his house, tell me the history, and then sell the idea that old houses have more character and people who live in new neighborhoods have no soul. But instead he doesn't say anything for a bit. We just sit there, riding in silence.

“So,” Runciter says, “what happened with those FBI agents?”

“They asked me questions.”

“Okay. You don't want to talk about it. I understand.”

I imagine what I must look like to this guy, him giving me a hand with my car and phone and everything, and me barely willing to talk to him. He must think I'm a total prick. I don't want to be a prick.

“They had the wrong guy. They thought I was someone else.”

“Who did they think you were?”

“I don't know. They thought I was a spy of some kind.”

“A spy? You get thrown into the drunk tank and the FBI shows up almost immediately and thinks you're a spy? Amazing.”

“I know, right?”

“How long were you in the cell before they showed up? An hour? Two? That isn't very long. Something about you set off a trigger. Law enforcement doesn't move that fast, at least not around here.”

“I wouldn't know. I've never been arrested until tonight.”

“Well, it strikes me as strange. What did they ask you? Who were they after if not you?”

I don't know how to lie without creating some elaborate story, and I think I already made it clear I don't have that kind of energy.

Finally I say, “When they gave me the breathalyzer test it wouldn't work. So they took blood to analyze my alcohol level and that didn't work either. They thought I was doing it on purpose.”

“Well, were you?”

“How would I do something like that?”

“That isn't a ‘no.'”

“No, I wasn't doing it on purpose.”

I can see downtown through the windshield and I wish the cab driver would go faster.

“You don't feel like answering all these questions,” Runciter says. “Do you?”

“I'm just really tired, man. I'm sorry. I haven't slept since yesterday and I didn't sleep very well then, either.”

“Well, I didn't feel like answering your questions, either, buddy. You grilled the hell out of me last night.”

“I'm sorry for that. I was still drunk. I wasn't making sense.”

“Yeah,” Runciter says. “I've been thinking about that. I've been thinking about those questions you asked me.”

Our downtown is a collection of moderately sized office buildings. The tallest one is maybe sixty stories. One of the buildings is an almost perfect replica of the old World Trade Center buildings, except there is just one of them and it's half the size of the originals. All in all it's a very non-descript downtown. The morning is foggy and gray and you can't see the tops of the tallest buildings.

And despite the fact that we are driving directly toward them, those buildings don't seem to be growing any closer.

“The thing is,” Runciter says. “I couldn't remember the answers to some of those questions. Like which teams were playing the baseball game.”

“You were drunk.”

“Sure, but this is the first week of November. You know what that means for baseball?”

“No.”

“It means it's supposed to be over. The World Series ends in October.”

“So maybe you were watching highlights? A rerun? ESPN Classic?”

“No,” Runciter says.

“No?”

“The other thing you asked me is when was the last time I used the bathroom. Now why would you ask me that?”

“I don't know. I was drunk.”

“Like I said,” Runciter tells me, “I've been thinking a lot about those questions, and something is seriously fucked up. Pardon my French.”

“Like what?”

“Like I don't know anything. I don't even know where I'm going after this. After I drop you off I don't know what I'm supposed to do.”

Hearing something like this yesterday was fascinating and a little bit frightening. Today it's depressing. Especially since Runciter has made this connection with almost no prodding from me. I don't even want to talk about this in the cab, because I'm afraid of what it might do to the driver.

Is this what I've become? A kind of carcinogen, leaving a trail of cancerous sentience wherever I go?

“I'm sorry,” is all I can say.

“You're sorry? What's that supposed to mean?”

“I—”

“When that cop brought you to the cell, you asked what his wife's name was. You were doing it to him, too, weren't you?”

“What?”

“Ruining it for him.”

“Not on purpose,” I moan.

“I'll tell you something else. I recognize you.”

“From where?”

“I'm not sure. I think I have an idea, but it doesn't make any sense.”

“Does any of this?”

“Good point.”

We finally reach downtown. The streets are empty, which is pretty weird considering today is, um, Wednesday, I think. The driver makes a couple of quick turns and Runciter tells him to stop. The fare is $29 and I hand the driver $40 before Runciter can get the money clip out of his front pocket. He tries to give me a twenty but I tell him to keep it and get out of the car. I let the cabbie keep the change. I just want him to drive away before Runciter says anything else.

We're standing beside a newer-model Cadillac, one of the new foreign car wannabes. Runciter hasn't produced a key or any other sign of ownership, but he hasn't walked away, either. There are a few other parked cars along the curb on each side of the street, but so far I haven't seen a single pedestrian. Not one.

“So where do you know me from?”

“I'll tell you,” he says, “but it has to be in the car. I'm taking you to the impound lot.”

Last night I wondered why Runciter was so intent on hanging out together. Is this why?

“Let's go,” he says. “I want to hear the whole story.”

I could find a pay phone and call another cab. I could find a bus stop. There are many ways I could get home without Runciter's help.

But what does it mean if I leave him alone now? Will I have to make this decision every time I meet someone for the rest of my life?

“I need to know,” Runciter says. “And I think you might be interested in what I have to say, as well. So get in the car. Please.”

“All right.”

He unlocks the doors and moments later we are headed south into the heart of the city.

THIRTY-SIX

“T
hat's one hell of a story,” Runciter says.

I began just where you might imagine—with the blue orb—and finished with Agents Scruggs and Smith agreeing to let me go.

“You realize they didn't have to release you so soon. They could have held you longer.”

“Yeah, but for what? I don't have what they want.”

“What I'm saying is they didn't let you go out of the kindness of their hearts. They are surely following you.”

I look around, out the back window, and see a sedan of some kind a few hundred yards behind us. It could be them or it could be anyone.

“And you believe all this without question?” I ask Runciter. “The whole damned thing?”

“What other choice do I have? If I had left you alone back at the station, where would I be now? I don't know where I live.”

This is completely ridiculous. I look out the window and notice we are finally beginning to encounter some light traffic.

“So you think, if you drove away, you would just vanish when you were out of my sight, and that would be it?”

“I'm not sure. Maybe for a while. But I think I would come back again.”

“Why?”

“The reason I remember you,” Runciter says, “is because I think we've done this before.”

“We what?”

“Your face is familiar to me, but even more than that, I get the feeling this whole thing is…well, is a rerun. I'm pretty sure this isn't first time we've met each other like this, and part of me thinks we've done it a whole bunch of times.”

I didn't think anything else could happen that would surprise me. Although now that Runciter has said it, I feel like I should have figured this out already.

But is it true? Are we on some kind of loop? Characters in a movie, and someone is watching the disc over and over?

Yeah, I know. Laugh all you want. But then give me a better idea, because I'd love to hear it.

The thing is, if this somehow
were
a film (or a story of any kind), and Runciter figured out the truth with very little assistance, and now he won't let me go because he's afraid he'll simply disappear from reality…well, what sort of film is that? He wouldn't be able to change anything scripted to happen, right? For that matter, neither could I. In fact, our knowledge of ourselves in such a story is part of the story and nothing we are consciously doing.

And yet in the past few days it seems like I have made many decisions to choose one path or another.

Think about throwing a football. Once that football leaves your hand, its trajectory and speed are known. Nothing is ever going to change that. You might say the wind could change it, but whether the wind would blow or not was already going to happen when the ball left your hand. The only thing you don't know is where the ball will ultimately come to rest, because streaking across the field is a wide receiver. How do you know if the receiver will catch the ball? Can that be measured? Predicted with any certainty? What if the receiver decides intentionally not to catch it? How can that be known ahead of time by anyone but the receiver? Was it always going to happen that way or did the receiver affect fate at the point when the ball should have entered his hands?