M55 (2 page)

“
Ha ha,” I laughed the most
unconvincing laugh in history, “well being killed by you might not
be so bad…”

I regretted it the instant I said
it. What does that even mean?

Well, nothing to do now except stare
at our terminals in terrible, awkward silence. We stayed that way
until three in the afternoon, when the police arrived.

“
Afternoon,” the first officer said,
poking his head through the door. He didn’t knock. “I’m looking for
the workplace of a Mr. Peter Hoover. This the right
place?”

I thought Jen would answer – she was
closer – but she didn’t even look up.

“
Yeah I uh…hey, what’s this about?”
I said. I stepped around Jen and stopped a few feet away from the
officer. I was about to shake his hand. Is that normal? Is that a
normal thing to do with a cop? Or is that like considered a
threatening action or…

“
This is it,” he yelled to somebody
on the other side of the door, then stepped in and stood off to the
side.

A fat man in a dark blue windbreaker
trudged in, looking like he was expecting bad news from a doctor.
He puffed out his cheeks and stared in every corner of the room
before looking at either me or Jen. He put his hands in his pockets
and sighed.

“
Uh is everything…?” I just trailed
off.

“
Turble,” the fat man said. I
thought he might’ve just burped.

“
What?”

“
Sherriff Turble. That’s me. I’m
Turble.”

He sighed again, and fished through
his pockets for something but apparently didn’t find it. He just
gave up and let his hands dangle by his sides.

“
Hi,” I said, “I’m-”

“
Peter Hoover,” Turble said. His
voice sounded like somebody had knocked the wind out of a Bassett
Hound. “He works here.”

“
He does,” I said, though I wasn’t
sure it was a question.

“
Beat up a waitress,” Turble said,
and he pinched the bridge of his nose and exhaled
loudly.

“
What?” Jen blinked. It was the
first time she’d looked up from her terminal all day. “What
happened?”

“
Peter Hoover beat up a waitress,”
Turble said again. He went to make a gesture, it was almost a
shrug, but he quit on it before it even got started. “Got him in
lockup.”

Turble turned to leave.

“
What? Is that – what do we do about
that?” Jen called after him.

Turble said something like,
“ahhhhhdungimmadambou-” as he walked away.

The other officer stepped out from
behind the door.

“
Hoover couldn’t remember the number
for this place,” he said, “for his phone call. Couldn’t even
remember the address. Just said it was ‘the space place.’ We had to
come down here to let you know where to see him, when to post bail
and all that. Sherriff Turble, he doesn’t like doing
stuff.”

The officer smiled at Jen before
leaving. The son of a bitch.

…

Peter looked like he’d withered
since we’d last seen him. Though maybe that was just my own mental
association after seeing him sitting on that little plastic bench
in his cell, all alone. His head was down in his hands, and he was
saying something over and over, too soft to hear. He looked up at
us through red, swollen eyes. He’d been crying. I couldn’t imagine
Peter crying, but this didn’t look much like Peter. It looked like
somebody had freeze-dried what Peter used to be so he’d fit into a
smaller package.

“
Hey…hey, guys,” he said. He laughed
a little. “Had a rough night.”

“
What the hell happened, Peter?” I
said. I wrapped my hands around the bars. I shook them a little. I
didn’t expect them to feel so solid.

“
I just…I couldn’t sleep last night.
I couldn’t think of anything else but that fucking waitress, you
know? The one from yesterday morning, at the café? She didn’t
refill my coffee. Not even once.”

“
So you attacked her.” Jen
said.

“
Yeah,” Peter answered, even though
what Jen said — it didn’t sound like a question. It sounded like
she was finishing his sentence. “I just, it kept going round and
round in my head. And I kept getting angrier and angrier about it.
And it’s like, she can’t get away with that. You know? People can’t
get away with stuff like that. It’s the principle of the thing. The
principle!”

Jen nodded.

“
The principle? Of not getting
enough coffee? Are you fucking insane?” I said.

Peter slammed his head right into
the bars. Right where my hand was. If I’d moved a second later, it
would’ve broken all of my fingers. A thick trail of blood ran down
his forehead.
“What did you call me?!” He screamed so loudly his voice cracked.
“What did you say? I’LL KILLYA. KIIIYAAA. KIYA MA!”

And then he was just making noises.
Barking and frothing at the mouth. He headbutted the bars again,
and again.

“
Ahhh,” Turble sighed from the door
behind us. “I knew you were gonna make more work for
me.”

…

When we left, Peter was still
scrabbling at the bars of his cell, trying to get to me. His eyes
never left mine. He screamed nonsense syllables until his voice
gave out. Jen didn’t seem all that fazed by Peter’s fit, but I
couldn’t stop my own hands from shaking. I could barely hold my
coffee cup steady.

The waitress had filled it right up
to the top – I mean, to within a millimeter. Why do they do
that?

Scalding liquid kept seeping over
the rim, running down the ceramic and burning my fingers. I set my
coffee down. Jen was staring out the window of the All Hands Diner,
watching cars pass through the rain. They plowed through the
increasingly large puddle forming in the intersection of Williams
and Washington, kicking up great arcs of cold slate water. Every
once in a while, one of those arcs would catch the passing
headlights from another car, and light up. Like tiny stars
suspended in mid-air.

“
Pretty, isn’t it?” I
said.

“
Hmm?” Jen blinked and looked at
me.

“
I said it’s kinda pretty – the
headlights in the rain. Looked like you were watching them.”
“No,” Jen said, “I was thinking about Peter.”

“
God,” I let out a breath that
practically winded me. I guess I’d been partially holding it all
this time; breathing high and shallow in my chest. “I know, right?
Why would he do that?”
“Exactly,” Jen said, “it makes no sense. Why would he beat her up?
And then leave her alive? I can’t figure it out.”

“
Yeah I – wait, what’s
that?”

“
They said he caught her all alone
while she was closing up, then hit her with a ketchup bottle and
stomped on her for a while. Then, what? He just took off? I can’t
for the life of me figure out why he stopped.”

“
Because…because he didn’t want
to-”

“
You can’t be in here,” the cook was
standing at the head of our table, his arms crossed, one hand
clutching a greasy, foot-long kitchen knife.

“
Why not?” Jen tilted her head up at
him.

“
You god damn well know why not,”
our waitress piped up from behind the cook, “your friend nearly
killed Kelly!”

“
But that’s got nothing to do with
us,” I said, trying to keep the pleading out of my voice, for Jen’s
benefit.

“
The hell it doesn’t,” the cook
said, “you university folks always come in here, looking down on
us, thinking you can use us and our town however you’d like. Well
we don’t need you. We don’t need you, and we don’t need this. You
get up and get moving the hell away from my restaurant right now.
I’ll give you three steps towards the door, and then you’re gonna
be the fucking breakfast special.”

“
Come on, Jen,” I was trying to
figure out how to save face from this. Maybe I could say something
clever at the last minute, right as we were making the door, when
it was too late for them to come after us.

‘Can’t we hash this
out?’

‘I guess we better
scram…ble.’

Damn. No good.

‘Looks like YOUR special
is…’

Jen reached up and impaled her hand
on the tip of the knife. A bright red spurt of blood shot out
across the cook’s filthy white apron. Another sprayed the waitress
in the face as Jen wrapped her hand, still impaled, around the
blade of the knife and yanked it out of the stunned cook’s hand. In
one smooth motion she slid the knife out of her own flesh and
opened a foot long gash on the cook’s arm. He yelped and leapt
backward. The waitress’ eyes roved about in her head. She was
trying to find the voice to scream. Jen was already standing up
from her seat at the booth, her eyes on the waitress. The knife
moving towards her.

“
No!” I shot out of my seat and
grabbed her wrist. She dropped the knife. I hustled her out the
door before anybody could gather their wits and react. I was trying
to get to her run with me towards the observatory, but the most
she’d manage was a hurried mosey.

“
Come on,” I urged her, “pick up the
pace.”

“
Why?” She said, a bit of a giggle
in her voice.

“
Because they’ll kill
us!”

“
Not if we kill them first, which I
was about to do if you hadn’t stopped me. Why did you do that? It
was stupid.”

“
Why?” I spun around and pulled her
wrist to my stomach, drawing her close. I grabbed her jacket with
my other hand, shaking her there. “Because you can’t kill
people!”

“
Sure you can,” she laughed, “it’s
actually really easy.”

“
You shouldn’t!” I screamed into her
face.

Her expression fell. Her thick
eyebrows swept together. Her thin lips quivered. She looked so
lost. I didn’t even know what was happening, but it was happening.
I pulled her in the remaining few inches and kissed her, hard. I
poured all of my fear, and worry, and confusion, and pent up lust
into that kiss; I poured out the accidental touches as we both
reached for the same printout; I poured out my furtive glances —
visions of her chewing her hair in the sickly green light of her
terminal; I poured out the way I felt about her tiny earlobes and
emptied every sleepless, masturbation plagued night into her. I
poured it all out. I left myself nothing.

When I finally opened my eyes, hers
were staring back into mine, wrought with concern.
“What’s wrong?” I said.

“
I’m spurting blood all over your
crotch,” she said, gesturing to where I’d pinned her injured hand
against my belly.

Sure enough, my slacks were soaked
through. I looked like a vampire who had pissed himself.

“
Let’s get back to the focus room,”
I said, my one true moment utterly defeated. “I think something’s
going on with that signal.”

…

We made it to the observatory
without further incident. Hardly anybody was out in the downpour,
though it was barely mid-day. We’d left the lights and the
terminals on, and the door unlocked. In my haste, I’d even
abandoned my tea right there on my desk. It was cold and bitter —
appropriately like puddle water — but I belted it back
anyway.

I would need it.

I steered Jen into the kitchenette
and bandaged her hand with our cracked plastic first aid kit. The
paper slips surrounding the band-aids had gone slightly brittle
with age, but gauze is gauze, and alcohol is alcohol. With that
done, I hauled her chair to my terminal and sat her beside me. She
had seemed to go almost catatonic after the kiss. I chalked that up
mostly to shock, and only a little to my own personal charisma. She
was clearly overwhelmed by it all. I studied the printout of the
signal, but it meant nothing. Just a line executing a pattern of
spikes and dips on a sheet of paper.

“
Does this mean anything to you?” I
showed her the printout, waggled it in her face as gently as
possible. “Does it…say something to you? First Peter starts acting
strange, then you – something’s going on and it started
here.”

No response. She wouldn’t even make
eye contact.

I got up, plugged my headset in,
slotted in the tape with the signal on it, and listened. Nothing
exceptional, just an ululating bass tone interspersed with some
clicks and squeals. I played it backwards, and heard backwards
squeaks and clicks.

Well, what did I expect? The devil’s
voice commanding me to kill? Jesus, what was I doing? I was
supposed to be a scientist, and yet at the first sign of distress I
started chasing extraterrestrials. How childish. The girl must be
doing this to me. I needed to get my head on straight and think
this through rationally. That was my strength. So, what common
denominators did Peter and Jen – and only Peter and Jen, out of all
the inhabitants of this entire miserable town – share that could be
responsible for such dramatic changes in behavior? Nothing, save
for the signal, this room, and me. Could it have been something in
the room itself? A chemical leak of some kind? We used no chemicals
here. There’s no other lab even close to the observatory. The
harshest thing around is printer ink, and I doubt that causes
murderous urges. Another question: Why am I apparently exempt? So
the question actually becomes: What commonalities do Peter and Jen
share that I-