Ex-Purgatory: A Novel (19 page)

“Just a minute, hon,” he said.

She smiled. “I’ll be right outside if you need me.”

Christian Smith stepped into the hall and the door closed. The President gave the blonde another look and she took a half step back. Then he focused his attention on George.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t intend for this to be so crude. I didn’t want them yanking you out of your life. You probably didn’t want to be yanked out of it, either, did you?”

“No,” said George. “Not really.”

The President had the face of a young man. The shape of it, the tone of his skin. The past few years had aged him, as it always aged the men who’d held office before him, but he’d managed to hold off the worst of it. Some of his very few detractors accused him of dyeing his hair, which the First Lady always laughed about.

Just above the collar of his shirt, George could see the scar. The war injury the President couldn’t hide. An insurgent had stabbed him in the throat and a Naval corpsman had kept him alive long enough for a field hospital to save his life. It made his voice sound older.

“Mr. Bailey,” said the President. He wrung his hands. “May I call you George?”

George nodded. He wasn’t sure what else to do. After half an hour of near panic, his mind was blank.

“George, I have a problem,” said the President. “This may be hard for you to believe, but we have reliable intelligence there’s a terrorist cell operating here in the southwest United States. We believe several members of it are here in Los Angeles. And we think you’ve had contact with them.”

George shook his head, but the President held up his hand.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “We know you’re not involved with them. Not deliberately. But we need your help if we’re going to beat them, George. Can I count on you to help us? To do your duty as a citizen of this great country?”

“Of course.”

President Smith beamed. “I just need you to answer one question for me, okay? It’s very important, George. Your answer is going to tell us how much they know, and how we need to adjust our plans.”

The commander in chief dropped to one knee. It made him shorter than George, so he straightened his back until they were eye level with each other. The two men looked at each other for a moment before he spoke.

“Do you know who I am?”

George blinked in confusion. “Of course I do,” he said. “Sir. Mr. President.”

The President shook his head. “No,” he said. “I mean, past that.” He leaned in and looked George in the eyes. “Do you know who I am?”

A splitting headache sprang up in the back of George’s head, the worst one yet. It felt like someone had driven a nail halfway
into his skull, and now that someone was just tapping the nail hard enough to make it shiver in the bone.

“I … sorry,” said George. He blinked a few more times. “You’re … You’re John Smith. You’re the President of the United States.”

Smith smiled. It was the smile from dozens of photo ops and press conferences. It was a wide, well-practiced smile. “And you’re sure of that?”

The hammer tapped the nail a few more times and George’s skull trembled. His eyes got wet. “Yes,” he said. “Of course I’m sure. I voted for you.”

“No doubts at all?”

Something splashed in George’s lap. A drop of red. His nose was bleeding. “Sir,” he said, “Mr. President … I’m not sure what you—”

“I asked if you had any doubts. Do you have any doubts, George? Have we ever met before? In any other capacity?”

The idea of having met the President and forgotten it would’ve been funny most of the time. Right now, with the nail ringing in the back of his skull, the idea almost made him scream. His nosebleed had become a thin stream across his lips. Any more and it would be gushing.

“No,” he whispered. The sound of his own voice made him wince.

The President’s smile grew at the edges. “Of course we haven’t,” he said. He patted George on the cheek. “Let’s try to remember that.”

THE ALARM WENT
off and George woke up.

He felt well rested. His head didn’t ache. The bed was firm but comfortable.

His fan was silent.

He’d met the President yesterday. The President of the United States. He and the First Lady had been very apologetic about the misunderstanding, and grateful for his help. George didn’t think he’d told them anything important, but they seemed to think he was some kind of great American hero.

It gave life a degree of clarity.

The ride to work was as slow as usual, but he didn’t mind. It was just part of life. Same with the pedestrians and the swarms of homeless people. To think just a few days ago he’d been seeing conspiracies and monsters. His radio was on the religious channel again. He didn’t even waste time looking for another station. He just shut it off. The radio blurted out, “C’mon, man, gimme something,” before he twisted the knob.

George reached the time clock five minutes early and couldn’t find his card. He searched behind a couple of the others, looking for his last name in bold print. It wasn’t there. He grumbled and started a new timecard, knowing it would get him a lecture from accounting.

The clock snapped down on it like a set of hungry jaws.

Jarvis’s eyes bugged a little when George stepped into the office. “Hey,” said the supervisor. A long moment stretched out before he added, “I didn’t expect to see you.”

“Why not?”

The salt-and-pepper man’s gaze darted left and right, as if he thought someone was hiding in the closet and behind his messy bookshelf. “The feds were here yesterday looking for you.”

George sighed and nodded. “Yeah, I know. It’s okay, they found me.”

“The NSA,” said Jarvis.

“It’s okay,” he repeated. “They found me. We talked. Everything’s okay, it was just a misunderstanding.”

Jarvis showed no sign of hearing him. “They took everything. All your assignments, my log book, your employment history. They even went up to accounting and got all your old timecards.” He shook his head. “They interviewed pretty much anyone who’d ever talked to you. All of us, some professors, even a couple of students.”

George pictured the blond agent’s determined glare and didn’t have trouble picturing what his coworkers had gone through. “I know this sounds crazy,” he said, “but the President wanted to talk to me.”

His boss stared at him.

“I’m serious. It was a mix-up.”

Jarvis closed his eyes. “You’re not one of those kooks, are you?”

“What do you mean?”

He waved his hand at the computer. “You don’t act all sane at work and then go home and spend all night ranting in the Yahoo! comments about impeaching the President or conspiracy theories or something stupid like that?”

“What? No, of course not.”

“You on some sort of watch list?”

“No. Well, not anymore, I think.”

“You think?”

George raised his palms. “If they thought I’d done anything wrong, would they have let me go?”

Jarvis flopped back in his chair. “People were freaking out,”
he said after a minute. “They’re going to freak out more now that you’re back.”

“How so?”

“How d’you think? These days what’s everyone think when the government comes looking for your neighbor? Nobody’s getting the Nobel Peace Prize, that’s for sure. Half the people who talked to me yesterday thought you’d been arrested and shipped off to Guantanamo or something. If they see you …”

“What are you getting at, Jarvis?”

The supervisor scratched his salt-and-pepper beard. “Look,” he said, “just keep a low profile for a while, okay? Try not to … I don’t know, draw attention to yourself. Don’t do anything weird. Maybe this’ll cool down in a couple of days.”

George’s phone buzzed. It was a text message from
Karen Q
. He deleted it without looking. “Yeah,” he said. “I’ll do that.”

“I’m doing you a favor,” said Jarvis, “ ’cause you’ve been here forever and you’re a great worker. Please don’t light yourself on fire or anything.”

“I’ll do my best.”

Another text came through. He deleted it.

His first job was changing a flickering bulb in one of the lecture halls. Not a big deal, but it needed the big fifteen-foot A-frame ladder. When that was done, Jarvis sent him to deal with a backed-up toilet in one of the dorms, and then he emptied trash in some of the other science buildings. It was more mindless work. The most challenging part was mopping up after one trash can that had received a mostly full cup of coffee.

George dumped the last bin in the dumpster. Loose papers, Doritos bags, and paper cups rained down onto the other trash. There were old clothes in the dumpster, plus a few swollen bags and some parts that looked like they might’ve been the guts of a television, or maybe an old computer monitor.

He let the bin drop and rested his hand on the edge of the
dumpster. He closed his eyes, rolled his neck, and pushed down. There was a knot in his shoulder he wanted to pop. He turned a bit more and levered his shoulder against the dumpster.

When he opened his eyes, Karen Quilt was staring at him.

She was dressed in black slacks and a blazer. She wore a tie but no shirt, and held the jacket more or less shut with one hand. The poster was less than ten feet away. Someone had put it up between his trips to the dumpster. He didn’t recognize the name along the bottom, and wasn’t sure if it was a brand or a store. Maybe both.

She looked disappointed in him.

This girl, Madelyn, she keeps telling me I’m supposed to be a superhero
.

He looked away from the poster and his eyes fell on the dumpster. It was almost full of trash. Most of it was paper, but the whole thing probably weighed close to three or four tons. His hand tightened on the edge and he gave it a shake.

The steel container trembled.

According to her we all have superpowers. That’s how we fight the monsters
.

He stepped to the side. It had the same sleeves as the one he’d lifted—that he imagined lifting—the other day, but they were lower on this model. It’d be even easier to put a hand on it and get the other one underneath. And this one was far behind the building. No one would see him.

I’m supposed to be super-strong
.

He set one hand on the sleeve and his head flared. His fingers leaped back to his temple and felt the vein pulsing there. His nose started to run, and when he wiped it with the back of his glove it left a red streak.

Another one. He couldn’t believe he’d had a nosebleed while talking to the President. Six-year-olds get random nosebleeds. It was tough to think of something more embarrassing, short of wetting his pants. At least the President and the First Lady had been gracious about it. Christian had given him some of the tissues one of her assistants carried for her, and even offered to have their medic look at him.

George shook off his glove, tilted his head back, and pinched his nose. He walked away from the dumpster, dragging the plastic
trash bin behind him. He passed the poster of Karen Quilt without looking at it.

According to the menu, the cafeteria was serving chicken parmesan. George was pretty sure it was just a fried chicken patty with tomato sauce and mozzarella cheese, but he also wasn’t sure what actual chicken parmesan was supposed to be. With the spaghetti, a pair of rolls, and a trip to the salad bar it made for a solid lunch.

He found a table with an abandoned newspaper and paged through the news. More on the President’s visit to Los Angeles. A sidebar about the First Lady talking to police and schoolchildren. As he finished his chicken patty, he found a short article in the entertainment section. Karen Quilt had been spotted with a mystery man outside her hotel. It was two paragraphs long, one of which was her bio. There weren’t any pictures. George wondered if the President had suppressed them somehow.

Either the lettuce or tomatoes had gone bad. He wasn’t sure which. He pushed the salad to one side and split a roll with his fingers.

Someone cleared their throat. He looked up and saw a young woman sitting across from him. Her dark hair was braided into a tight ponytail.

She wasn’t sitting at the table. She was in a wheelchair. It was the crazy girl.