(Albany, 12/20/12)
In the labyrinth of fluorescent lights and numbered doors beneath the subbasment of the Erastus Corning Tower, the Signalman sits behind his desk and thinks the unthinkable. When you come right down to it, that might as well be the first and only line in his job description, if men like him ever were given the simple courtesy of job descriptions. The stark black hands of the round white clock hanging on his office wall, right next to a portrait of the president, say it’s twenty-five minutes until midnight. Tick-tock, tick-tock, and now it’s even less than that. He takes out the antique pocket watch that goes with him everywhere, the antique silver railroad watch that once was his great-grandfather’s, and he checks the clock on the wall against it. The two are in all but perfect accord, give or take a handful of seconds, and what the hell difference is that going to make, when all is said and done. He closes the silver watch and lays it on his desk next to the MacBook Pro sitting open in front of him. The Signalman glances up at the water stain directly above his desk, like a bruise or a carcinoma marring the interlocking tiles of the dropped ceiling, and he thinks about the great, wide world above. Tonight, he can feel all the weight of it, crushing and absolute, inarguable as his own mortality, those forty-four stories of steel and glass, concrete and Vermont Pearl marble pressing down like God’s own paperweight to hide a billion dirty secrets. To hide him and all his cohorts, Albany’s little army of invisible tin men—now you see them, now you don’t—soldiers in neat black suits and narrow black ties and black fedoras just like the one Frank Sinatra wore in Tony Rome. Somewhere out there, some think-tank asshole probably still believes this makes them inconspicuous.
He spares another glance for the clock on the wall.
Tick-tock, hickory, dickory, dock.
Via the laptop’s screen, the Signalman is afforded a perfect satellite’s-eye view of the coast of Maine, of Penobscot Bay and the place where Deer Isle ought to be, but isn’t anymore. Instead, there’s only an oily looking smudge, a roiling, hazy smear to demarcate the brewing of an apocalypse.
The Signalman cracks the seal on a fresh bottle of J&B Rare, and he pours himself two fingers, then says what the fuck and fills the glass almost to the rim. But he has time for just one sip before the door opens, and it’s Vance (no knock), and she wants to know if he’s made the call, and if he hasn’t, what’s the holdup? After all, here it is, his hour come around at last, and, by the turn of an unfriendly card, the honor and the horror and all the liability fall to him. His sentence, his encumbrance, his murdered albatross to wear.
“Come on in,” he says to Vance, and she hesitates, then steps into his office and pulls the door shut behind her. She looks up at the clock on the wall.
“It’s getting late, sir,” she says. “You know that, right? They’re waiting.”
“Don’t worry,” the Signalman tells her. “The end of the world never starts without us. Read your contract. It’s right there in the fine print. You want a drink?” He points at the bottle of J&B, then takes another sip from his glass. “Come on,” he says. “Sit down. They’re more inclined to call it alcoholism when I drink alone.”
Again, Vance hesitates. She’s a new hire, siphoned off the FBI’s Seattle field office just a couple of years back, and this is the first time she’s been around when the balloon has gone up. The poor kid’s still getting her sea legs. It’s not like she hasn’t seen some bad shit. She has, or she wouldn’t be here, standing in his office, trying to decide if sitting down for a whiskey with the Signalman is such a good idea right now, all things considered. It’s just that there’s bad shit and then there’s bad shit, and Mary Vance’s idea of bad shit is some KKK neo-Nazi skinhead motherfucker from an Idaho militia detonating a dozen barrels of ammonium nitrate, Tovex Blastrite gel, and nitromethane before she catches up with him. Mary Vance’s nightmares are populated with domestic terrorists and serial killers, not little green men and extradimensional invaders.
“I insist,” he says, motioning to a chair with his glass.
So, Mary Vance sits down, and the Signalman takes another glass from a desk drawer, and he pours her a drink and passes it to her. She stares at the glass, then glances at the clock again.
“Jesus,” he sighs, “will you please stop doing that? If you don’t, I’m going to get up and pull the damn thing off the wall.”
She apologizes and takes a sip of her whiskey, then sits staring at the floor.
“It’s not the end of the world,” he says, though even he would have to admit there’s nothing especially convincing about the way he says it. “It’s a goddamn mess, sure. It’s one for the ledgers. It gets a goddamn gold star by its name, no doubt about it, but it isn’t the end of the world. It never is.”
Vance doesn’t look like she believes him.
“You want to hear a joke?” the Signalman asks her.
“Not especially,” she replies. “Not if I have a say in the matter.”
“Good and Evil walk into a bar,” he says.
“So, I don’t have a choice,” says Vance.
The Signalman shrugs, and he reaches for the half-empty pack of Camel Wides lying on top of a stack of printouts stamped with catchy, ominous, Secret Squirrel watchwords like Eyes Only and Burn After Reading and Cosmic Top Secret. He takes a matchbook from his shirt pocket, free matches courtesy a dive bar on Jefferson Street called the Palais Royale. A pretty chichi name for a dive bar, but what the hell. He’s been going there every night now for the past two weeks, ever since he got yanked from his usual digs in Los Angeles and dropped into the Ant Farm, as the men and women in the black suits have been known to call the offices below the subbasement of the Erastus Corning Tower. The Signalman lights his cigarette, then drops the spent match into an ashtray that needed to be emptied yesterday. One of the few perks of working this far below the radar is that no one gives a shit if you smoke. No one gives a shit if you drink yourself to death or pop oxycodone or snort enough coke to keep Colombia happy for a year, just as long as it doesn’t get in the way of the work. There are no drug tests in Albany and there aren’t any no smoking signs, either.
“Of course you have a choice,” says the Signalman. “You always have a fucking choice, Vance, and it’s no skin off my nose. I was just trying to lighten the mood, that’s all. You want the gloom and doom pure and undiluted by levity, have it your own way.”
Vance frowns and takes a swallow of her scotch.
“No, it’s okay,” she says. “Sure, tell me a joke. Good and Evil walk into a bar. What then?”
“No. Screw it. The moment’s passed,” and he takes a long drag on his cigarette and blows smoke rings at the water-stained tiles overhead, at everything above, at God in his sumptuous gold-plated Heaven, if that’s where the fucker really lives. “It wasn’t very funny, anyway. You smoke?” he asks and offers her a Camel.
“No, sir. I don’t smoke.”
“Kids these days,” he mutters and steals a peek at the clock.
“It’s getting late,” she says, her eyes following his. “They’re waiting.”
He nods, then asks her, “You know what I wanted to be when I grew up?”
“No, sir, I don’t.”
“Anything but this,” he says. “Anything in the whole goddamn universe but this right here. You know what the population of Deer Isle, Maine, was before Sunday, August 12 arrived and turned that place into a Stephen King novel? Just under two thousand human beings, Vance. By now, I figure they’re mostly fucking dead. Or worse. But we know some of them are still alive. A hundred, at least. Maybe twice that number. We’re still getting a couple of shortwave ham broadcasts coming out of Stonington. The transmissions are staticky and intermittent, but they’re there, people asking for help, over and over and over. People wondering if anyone on the outside is still listening. People who, you gotta figure, by now they’re starting to think maybe they been marked out as, I don’t know, let’s say sacrificial lambs, offered up to appease the gods. And after a fashion, they aren’t so very far off the mark, are they?”
Vance sets her glass down on the edge of the desk, and then she clears her throat and looks him in the eyes. “Sir,” she says, “pardon my asking, but you’re not getting cold feet, are you?”
He takes another drag and holds the smoke in until his ears start to buzz. And what if I am, Vance, he’s thinking. What if I am. Are you sitting there drinking my whiskey and imagining maybe this is your big break? I lose my nerve, I flinch, I get the heebie-jeebies and you rush in to fill the void? Do you look in my face and see a promotion? Is that how it is, little girl? Is that ambition I smell? The Signalman thinks about the loaded SIG Sauer P226 in his top desk drawer, and he thinks about the ugly hole it would make. He exhales, and the silver-grey smoke rolls towards Mary Vance like a fog rolling in off the sea.
“What you just asked me,” he says, “I didn’t hear that, you understand.”
Several long seconds pass before she nods and looks away, before she reaches for the glass of whiskey again, and the Signalman knows that if she didn’t need the drink before, she needs it now. He looks at the white clock on the wall, and then he picks up his great-grandfather’s silver railroad watch, the watch that earned him his nickname with the agents of Dreamland, with all the spooks and shadow bosses and star chambers from sea to shining sea, and then checks that, too. Both the pocket watch and the clock on the wall agree that there’s only seven minutes left until midnight. Zero hundred hours. That magic moment.
Vance finishes her drink in one long swallow. Then she wipes her mouth on the back of her left hand, and she says, “I didn’t mean anything by it, sir.”
“You didn’t mean anything by what?” he asks, and then he closes the MacBook Pro, so he doesn’t have to see the live satellite feed off that hazy, ever-expanding smear where Deer Isle used to be. “I have no idea what you mean.”
“Yes, sir,” she says. “Thank you, sir.”
“Don’t thank me yet, Vance. Could be this one really is the end, and I just did you a grave disservice.” And maybe she knows what he means, and maybe she doesn’t.
“Yes, sir,” she says. “Will you be needing anything else?”
“Just some privacy,” he tells her. “I have a call to make.”