There are two ways I know of to lose track of the days. The first involves a lot of pain, hunger, cold, death, and brief-to-extended periods of unconsciousness. Sometimes you’re out for hours, sometimes entire days. You can never really be sure.
The second is almost exactly the opposite, except for the death and hunger. You can have so much going on that it all seems like one unreasonably long day. Even the sleeping seems active. Sure, you’ll hear the date on the radio or see it on a calendar, but whatever you hear or see are just numbers. They’re just numbers and blocks of time named after gods or goddesses or seasons. Sometimes our measurements for time just don’t cut it. It’s all relative. It’s like Einstein, only not so scientific.
A day can feel like a year, and a year can feel like a day. There’s just no defining it.
I knew damn well it was the end of the summer, and I was aware that, whether I was paying attention to it or not, time was moving forward. I just couldn’t decide if it was moving too quickly or too slowly.
Either way, the Weather Channel said it was August 14th and to expect rain, lots of rain, this evening. They also did a story about some small town in Kansas that was pretty much destroyed by a tornado. Three dead, a bunch more injured. (Pat Robertson ran a story about it, too, incidentally. He said that God was no longer watching over this town because the schools were teaching intelligent design. So much for judge not, I guess.)
I thought about all those people who no longer had homes. No schools, no bars. I thought maybe I should go there, volunteer, offer my help to people with worse luck than my own. It would be perfect. I could get away from everything and do something good, all in one go.
Then someone knocked on my door, and the do-gooder thought bubble burst in a puff of smoke.
It was Mr. Hanlon.
“Mr. Eliot,” he said as he passed by me and into my living room.
“Hi, Hr. Hanlon.” I ducked back into the bedroom for a pair of jeans and a t-shirt. “What brings you up here?”
He was inspecting the place, not like tossing a jail cell or anything, but just looking around, trying to find something different, out of place, the way you find differences between two pictures on the back of a cereal box. “Mrs. Greenly, downstairs, said she heard some sort of commotion a couple nights ago. Breaking glass or something like that. I’m just checking to make sure everything’s ok.”
“Oh. You should check out the kitchen, then. I got home and there was glass everywhere. And a rock. I think someone threw a rock though the window.” I felt horrible, lying to an old man. That’s the problem with these kids nowadays. No respect for their elders.
“Probably those kids that have been spray-painting their names and cuss words on the dumpster and the wall around back. Little bastards.” He took a look in the kitchen, saw the table drilled to the window frame, and turned around with his hands held out in front of him. “What’s that all about?”
“Oh. I just wanted to make sure nobody came in. Sorry. I get a little paranoid sometimes. I’ll take care of the holes in the wood. Wood putty or something.”
“I should probably get the windows replaced, anyway.” He walked/hobbled back out of the kitchen and down the hall, then stopped, his head poking into my bedroom. “Mrs. Greenly said she also heard a lot of thumping and crashing and screaming from up here, too. She said it sounded like a fight.”
My room looked a little like that town in Kansas. I hadn’t had time to clean up after the night Angela had stayed, so the fallen bookshelf and its books were still on the floor, the leg that broke off my desk chair was still sitting on my nightstand, the chair on its side, and all sorts of random crap was strewn about the room. Yeah, it was a fun night…
“Looks like there was a fight in here,” he said. Then something caught his eye, and he bent over, slowly, to pick it up. “Looks like my kind of fight,” he said, holding up a condom wrapper and smiling.
He had to have been the coolest old guy ever.
I actually blushed. “Yeah. She did a number on me.”
He dropped the wrapper. “Well, try to keep it down next time, ok? I can’t keep walking up those steps just because Greenly hasn’t had sex in so long she’s forgotten what it sounds like.”
“Yeah, sure. Sorry, Mr. Hanlon.”
“And I’ll get that window fixed tomorrow.” He headed for the door. “I almost forgot. You had a visitor last evening, around seven-thirty. Strange fella. Talked kinda funny. Only had one arm.” He stopped like he wanted me to tell him who this strange fella was.
No way. “What did he say?”
Hanlon got the point. “He said today’s Thursday, and you know where to find him.”
Hmm. Thanks.
“You’re not doing anything stupid, are you? Or illegal? You’re not running drugs in my building, are you?”
If only it were that simple. “No, sir. No drugs.”
“If you say so. Get that table off the window tomorrow morning. I’ll have someone here in the afternoon.” And he left to do battle with the steps.
No, sir. No drugs. Just something incredibly illegal and monumentally stupid.
I was scheduled to work at noon. Angela didn’t answer her phone, and it was almost ten, so there was no time to go looking for her. No time to tell her that Walter had stopped by my apartment. No time to ask her what I should do.
So I cleaned my room instead. I re-hung the bookshelf and reorganized its tenants. I drilled the leg back onto the chair and folded my clothes. Made the bed.
I fixed up my room because something had to be fixed. Now. And if I couldn’t fix anything important, I’d just have to make due.
After the room was back in order, I took a shower and thought about how the bedroom had gotten to be such a mess in the first place. It was a good shower, a long, hot, dirty shower, and when I came out of the bathroom, Pearson was on my voicemail. “Don’t come to work today. Walter says you’re going to meet him this evening, so I got Eli to cover your shift. Remember what we talked about. See you tomorrow.”
It’s good to know there are people who can leave clear, concise messages. Too many people just ramble on and on, making no sense. Of course, his directness was the only good thing about that message. I was a little worried about the actual content. If he was giving me the day off, he must have known something was up. I was getting tired of being out of the loop.
On the plus side, now I had time to find Angela. Time is important when you have to find someone based solely on their place of employment. It doesn’t sound too difficult, but you have to take into consideration how many Barnes and Noble’s Booksellers are in the Greater Pittsburgh area. The phone book said six. I called a few of them, but couldn’t make any headway.
So I called Virginia and left a message begging her to be careful about who she talked to and not be alone at night, and I sounded like my mother. I left a nagging message for Virginia, and I began my search.
Three stores and five books later, I found Angela reorganizing picture books in the kids section. This was in the South Hills. This was close to neighborhoods with big houses and Lexus convertibles in the driveways.
She was leafing through Silverstein when I tapped her on the shoulder, picking The Giving Tree off the floor when she spoke. “What are you doing here?”
“I have to talk to you.”
“You could have just called and asked for me, you know.” She did not sound happy to see me.
“I tried. Is there some policy about not being helpful when someone calls this place?”
“There might as well be.” She pulled me behind a tall shelf stocked with kids’ science books full of experiments to Make Learning Fun!
People want to know.
And they want their kids to know, too.
“You shouldn’t have come here,” she whispered. “If anyone sees us together, it’ll be bad. Very, very bad.”
“It’s ok. I made sure nobody was following me. I’m not an idiot, you know.”
“Oh. Well I guess you’ve already thought about what would happen if someone was following me, then.”
Oops. “Is someone here?”
“I don’t know about right now, but those Italian guys, Conicella and Cansellini, they’ve both been in here today. And one of those rich-bitch wives, but I couldn’t tell you which one it was. They all look the same to me.”
“Well, at least no one’s in here now.”
She shook her head. “Yeah. At least, not inside the store.”
If you’ve ever realized you’re a total idiot, you’ll know about how I felt at that moment. “Oh. Right. Sorry.”
She rolled her eyes. “Well, there’s nothing we can do about it now. What did you need to talk to me about?”
“Your uncle stopped by my apartment and talked to my landlord. He wants me to meet him at James Street tonight.” I did a horrible job of hiding my concern.
I could see the wheels turning in that pretty head. “He wanted to take me there for dinner. This can’t be good.”
“Yeah. That’s what I was thinking. What should we do?”
“I don’t know.”
How could she not know? I needed her to know. I needed it. I’d somehow landed myself smack in the middle of the lions’ den, and I needed some divine intervention, here. She was my only shot.
“Look,” she said. “I said I don’t know. This is a new experience for me too, you know.” She moved some books around on the shelf next to my head. “Well, the tavern is a public place, so he can’t do anything to us there. I guess we just go and see what he has up his sleeve.”
“We just go?”
“You have a better idea?”
“No,” I said, defeated. “Shit. No, I don’t.”
“Ok then. I’m thinking he’s just, I don’t know, feeling us out. Trying to get a sense of whether we know each other. We’ll just have to do a good job of acting like we don’t.” She was calm. I don’t know how, but she was.
I, well, let’s just say that transcendental meditation has never been my thing. “What if he already knows we do?”
“He doesn’t. If he did, he’d have dealt with it by now. I’m sure he’s suspicious, though.”
“At least the man’s consistent.”
“Right. Now, you have to go. They’ve been coming in all day, and if they see you, we’re dead. So please, please be careful.”
“I will. And just so you know, I got a complaint from the lady who lives beneath me about the other night. Seems we kept her awake.” I couldn’t resist.
She smiled. She couldn’t resist, either. “I should hope so.”