Ryan Jahn - The Last Tomorrow

‘My God.’

Barry takes a swallow of his beer. ‘That’s what I said.’

1

Eugene steps into the hotel room, feeling a strange vibration within him, a sort of dissonant internal buzz. He can hear it as well as feel it, this discord within, echoing in his skull. He looks to his right. A cop on the floor, dead. He lies on his side, head tilted down, arms limp in front of him, one hand turned up, the other turned down, a pool of black blood beneath him. His uniform shirt is bunched up under his armpits, untucked, revealing a bleached undershirt and beneath that bare white stomach. His eyes are open. They’re blue. The bare stomach is somehow the worst part. You never see a man naked in that way, with his clothes pulled away and rumpled, unless he’s been assaulted, and it’s usually drunk fellows who’ve been rolled by hoodlums. It reveals a vulnerability that, somehow, is both terrifying and embarrassing. You see your own vulnerability in it and must look away.

Two instincts war within him. The first and most basic is the instinct to flee. Blood, death: they make him slightly dizzy. The shock makes him feel as though he’s stuck within a nightmare. His heart is pounding in his chest despite his stillness; it’s telling him to get ready to move, and fast. But something else pulls him further into the room, a deeper survival instinct perhaps, hiding behind simple curiosity. What’s going on here and what does it have to do with him? It must have something to do with him, he was brought here, and if he leaves now he won’t get any answers.

A man can warm himself even beneath the blanket of certain doom.

He walks further into the room, looks to his left, and sees a gun on the carpet. A revolver. Then beyond it, and beyond an open door, another corpse lying on the white-tiled bathroom floor. Blood and brains are splattered on the back wall, running down it, sliding down it, thick and gelatinous as cold chicken fat. More blood running along the grout lines on the floor as if the areas between the tiles were a maze and the blood possessed some sort of primitive intelligence.

No one in the room is living but for Eugene.

Everything about this is wrong. There’s nothing to discover here but death. But running is not the thing to do. He needs to call the police. He needs to call the police and tell them what happened, every last detail, even if it means the district attorney becomes aware of him. This is obviously bigger than anything he can handle on his own.

He turns around, looking for a telephone.

But a piece of paper on the floor catches his eye. A crumpled piece of paper mostly hidden beneath an armoire. He walks to it, not sure what he’s doing, why he’s walking to it — you need to call the police, Eugene; stop fucking around and call them already — and leans down to pick it up. He flattens it out and looks at it, an H.H. White Creamery Company stock-request form. His name is written on it, in his handwriting. He turns back around to look at the gun on the floor, a.38 Smith amp; Wesson revolver with a six-and-a-half-inch barrel. He’s not a gun person, doesn’t give a tin shit about guns, but he recognizes it all the same. Recognizes it because he has one just like it. He set it on his dining table next to his typewriter case early this morning before the sun had even touched the horizon. He set it down and tore open an envelope. Within the envelope was a typed note, the typed note that told him to be here, to be here now. Is it possible Evelyn took it, picked it up from where he left it and stowed it away in her purse? He knows that it is. From the moment he got the note his mind was on only that and what it meant. She could have grabbed a freight dolly and wheeled out his refrigerator without his noticing.

He thinks of meeting Evelyn. He thinks of her evasive responses when he asked why she was in town, what kind of business her father was in.

He doesn’t want to believe what he’s beginning to believe. He likes Evelyn, or once did. Her liked her a lot. He thought they shared something. He knows they shared something. You can’t fake moments like the moments they had, moments where electricity seemed to spark between them. He hopes such moments can’t be faked, anyway, and knows he never experienced anything like that before. Part of him believed such experiences were mythological, simply the stuff of bad poetry. But since he met her his idle fantasies of the future have had her in them. And yet he knows he’s been framed and believes he knows by whom.

He needs to collect the evidence against him and get out of here.

He needs to do it now.

Outside: sirens wail.

He walks to the window and looks out, looks down to the street to see two LAPD radio cars screeching to a stop in front of the hotel, doors swinging open, uniformed officers stepping from their vehicles.

He shoves the paper into his pocket. Then grabs the gun and stuffs it down the front of his pants, untucking his shirt to hide it, hoping no one notices the shape of the gun under its fabric. If he stays calm, calm and collected, he might be able to walk out of here. Walk out of here and get rid of this evidence. Then he can find out why this was done to him. He knows Evelyn was part of it, he’s sure of it, and the more he thinks about it the more certain he becomes, but he’s also sure she didn’t do this on her own. There were others involved. He needs to find out who, who and why, and he needs to find out how to fix it.

But now isn’t the time to be thinking about such things.

Now is the time to be getting the fuck out of here.

He steps into the corridor, his foot sinking into the bloody puddle. He looks left. The cops will be coming up in the elevator. He needs to find the stairs. He turns right and walks, hoping he isn’t actively working to pin himself in. He feels sweaty and nervous and though he’s innocent he’s certain guilt is written across his face.

Innocent or not, he feels guilty.

At the end of the corridor he finds a white door. He thumbs a paddle and pulls, revealing a stairwell. He steps into it and starts down, gravity making it easy. And the worry pressing upon him.

The stairwell has a damp, dusty smell to it, like the smell of impending rain.

He trudges down, wondering what he’s going to find when he reaches the bottom and pushes through the last door, but he doesn’t have to wonder long, because soon enough he’s pushing through it.

He’s at the end of a corridor very much like the one on the sixth floor. At the other end, the hotel lobby. It looks calm. The uniformed police are probably upstairs now, about to discover the bodies he just left behind. He might be able to get out of here with no trouble, get out of here and get to his milk truck and drive away. He can worry about what happens after that once he gets there, because if he doesn’t get there, there won’t be any after that to worry about.

He walks down the corridor, hoping there are no cops at the front.

Nervousness and fear begin to take him over. He was not made for this sort of thing. There are born soldiers, and their home is the battlefield. There are born spies, and their home is Moscow. He’s a born dreamer, and his home is nowhere in this world. He doesn’t know how to tolerate this sort of stress, and though he tries very hard to maintain a placid expression he can feel small muscle twitches on his face and throughout his body. He imagines he must look like a man being electrocuted while simultaneously trying to walk.

He steps into the lobby, barely maintaining control, and looks left to the front door. He can see sunshine. A bellhop standing just inside the door, hand on a rolling cart. A doorman outside. But no cops.

He heads toward sunlight telling himself to just act normal despite the fact he feels jerky and stupid and unnatural. Just stay calm and wear a blank expression. Blank faces are forgettable as unmarked paper.