Ryan Jahn - The Last Tomorrow

‘No,’ Eugene said, ‘thank you.’

‘You might as well. It’ll spoil soon, anyway.’ Then the man laughed the mad laughter Eugene had heard so many times before. Spittle flew from his mouth, clung to his tangled beard.

Eugene turned and ran, ran down the corridor to the stairwell, pulled open the door, stepped through, and the door slammed shut behind him.

When the door slammed he woke.

And now he lies here in bed, staring at the ceiling, his heart thudding wildly in his chest. He wonders what time it is. He feels lost. He feels like he felt the first time he slept away from home as a child — a week at his grandfather’s — and woke up in unfamiliar surroundings, recognizing nothing.

He reaches to the night table and grabs his watch. He blinks at it in the darkness, holding it close to his face, as he isn’t wearing his glasses. His hope is that it’s nearly four o’clock. He knows it won’t be later, he’s up by four every morning, but he hopes four o’clock is near. After a few moments his eyes adjust and he can see the time. It’s just past midnight, two minutes past, and he knows his sleep is over despite the fact he tossed and turned till at least eleven.

After he talked with Evelyn yesterday there was nothing for him to do. He was filled with adrenalin from the confrontation, but there’d been nothing in it to expend the energy. They had a conversation, came to a tenuous agreement, and he left. He came back here. He listened to the radio. He listened to the radio and he thought. He thought about Evelyn’s plan. It was simplicity itself. It was a hammer. Frame for murder the man who committed the murder. It shouldn’t be difficult.

But they need to get into his room and find out what evidence is still in his possession, perhaps plant further evidence, and that means getting a key. Evelyn has promised to do so. He’ll call her hotel room at eight to see if she got it, but eight is almost eight hours away, and already he feels as though he’s waited too long. He remembers thinking recently that he didn’t understand boredom. He still isn’t sure he does, people who get bored must think themselves very poor company, but he understands something that lives right next door to it. The emptiness of waiting for something to happen. The nagging at the back of the mind from which nothing can distract you. Could be something as simple as a letter in the mailbox or as catastrophic as the bomb, the point is the wait. The empty hours in which distraction is an impossibility. The time between each tick of the clock carries in its short span an entire day — a day filled with the sound of the sea, like your ear to a shell — and nothing in it but nothing.

He looks at his watch again. It’s still two minutes past twelve. He throws the watch across the room. It hits the wall and falls to the floor. He will lie here and go back to sleep and he will not think of the time. He won’t think of time at all. He won’t get up and find the watch. He won’t obsessively check it. He’ll lie here and close his eyes, like this, darkness on top of darkness, the cover of eyelids over the cover of night, and he’ll picture sheep jumping over a brick wall, a red brick wall, two feet high — one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve. . twelve-oh-two. Maybe it’s twelve-oh-three by now. It almost has to be. He should find out.

He gets to his feet and walks through the darkness to the place he heard the watch land. He sits on his haunches and feels for it blind, his fingertips moving across the coarse surface of the carpet, occasionally brushing over a strange and suspect crumb. Eventually he finds it. He gets to his feet. He looks at the watch.

Twelve-oh-two.

It doesn’t seem possible. A single fucking minute hasn’t passed? He’s almost able to convince himself it’s broken, but the second hand is moving, tick, tick, tick, around the face of the watch.

He stares at it. And stares at it.

Twelve. . oh. . three.

2

The next eight hours are a shiftless nightmare. He tries to sleep on his back. He tries to sleep on his stomach. He sits on the edge of the bed and stares at the wall. He sits on the opposite edge of the bed and stares out the window, waiting for the blanket of night to be pulled away. But it doesn’t happen. The black remains black. He counts down from a thousand. He wishes he had a bottle of booze. If he drank a pint of something hard he might manage to get a little more sleep in. He does as many push-ups as he can, seventeen, and as many sit-ups as he can, thirty-two, and tries again to sleep. He fails again. There’s grime on his back from lying on the filthy carpet to do sit-ups. He gets to his feet and brushes crumbs from his back. He lies down again. He puts the pillow over his head. It smells like sweat and pomade. He rolls to the other side of the bed, where the mattress is cool. This helps not at all. He feels sweaty and sick.

This night will clearly never end. It will never fucking end.

3

At seven thirty Eugene steps into the shower. He washes himself. He dries off with a coarse white towel that smells of bleach. He gets dressed in a pair of dry khaki pants and a white T-shirt and a short-sleeve button-up shirt and a cardigan sweater. He combs his hair. He brought only the shoes on his feet when he left his apartment, so he slips into them despite their being wet. They make a squishing sound and water leaks through the seams and runs down over the lip of the sole to the beige carpet.

With his shoes on and his laces tied he gets to his feet.

He’s tired and disoriented when he steps into the daylight at seven fourty-five. His eyes sting and feel grainy, as if he’d spent hours at the beach on a windy day. But he’s glad daylight’s arrived and he smiles as he squints at the blue, blue sky.

He heads to a diner on Hollywood Boulevard, finds a payphone in the back, and drops a dime into it. It falls into the empty change receptacle, sending out a hollow clink as it hits, then settles. He dials the Fairmont Hotel. A woman at the switchboard picks up and, after a brief exchange, patches him through to Evelyn’s room.

‘Hello?’

‘Did you get it?’

‘Eugene?’

‘Did you?’

‘I had to bribe one of the hotel girls.’

‘What if she talks?’

‘She won’t.’

‘How can you know that?’

‘The one thing hotel workers know how to do better than anything else is keep their mouths shut, Gene. Silence is a commodity they can sell, and they do.’

‘Okay, what’s next?’

‘Next we find out what we have to work with. I’ll meet you at noon to give you the key. By then I should have some idea how I’m gonna get Lou out of his room. Where are you staying?’

‘We’ll meet somewhere else.’

‘You don’t trust me?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Fair enough. Where do you want to meet?’

‘Schwab’s.’

‘I’ll see you at noon.’

The line goes dead.

Eugene pulls the telephone away from his ear. He looks down at it. It was nice to hear her voice, and he wants to trust her, but he doesn’t.

He hangs up the telephone, drops it into its cradle.

He doesn’t trust her, but she got the key, so their plan moves forward.

His plan moves forward, anyway. Too bad he doesn’t yet know what his plan is. Too bad he doesn’t have the slightest clue. Well, he has another four-hour wait on his hands. He can think about it then. He can think about it over breakfast and a few cups of coffee. He’s starving. Thinks he’ll have some eggs over easy, a fat steak, and some well-done hash browns.

He walks to a booth and sits down.

Maybe with a full stomach he’ll be able to think.

1

Sandy watches the deputy at the counter scrawl his signature across a form in order to take custody of him. Then the two of them, he and the deputy, walk side by side down a white corridor, through a metal door, and into the crisp morning air. Though the rain has stopped, it stopped last night while Sandy slept, small pools of glistening water still dot the ground, marking its low points, leveling the earth. The puddles reflect blue sky and wispy white clouds and bursts of glistening sunlight like jewels.