Ex-Purgatory: A Novel Read online

  He turned his head and his hair rustled against the pillowcase. It was long enough that he could feel it bunch up around his ear. He needed to get a haircut.

  George rolled over and stretched his legs out. At six feet he was just tall enough that his feet hung off the edge of the mattress. On the plus side, he was thin enough that the bed was spacious enough for two, even though he hadn’t shared it with anyone in a while.

  The alarm went off again. His ten minutes were up. Sunlight was creeping in through the blinds. If he delayed any more, he’d be late for work.

  He sighed and rolled out of bed.

  George made it to his car right on time—parked a block over from his apartment because of street sweeping—but somehow he’d caught the edge of rush hour. Traffic was piled up all along Beverly and he hit every light between his apartment and campus. The crosswalks were packed with people strolling along and taking their time. There was always someone in the road when the lights turned green and it always delayed him just enough that he missed the next light.

  It’s early morning, he thought to himself. Shouldn’t anyone out at this hour have somewhere to be? Somewhere they need to get to?

  He couldn’t find any music or news on the radio. The only thing coming in was some self-help show. A man with a thick Spanish accent was talking nonstop about old relationships. George tried to tune it out for a while and then just shut it off.

  Traffic got worse the closer he got to work. There were a lot of extra cars on the road, and while he sat at a red light he noticed a fair amount of them were packed full of boxes and gym bags. There were a fair number of pillows and stuffed animals, too.

  All at once, his mistake hit him.

  It was moving day.

  He’d heard that different schools had different names for it, but the principle was the same. Three days after freshman orientation, all the returning students … returned. All at once, all on the same day. Thousands of them. With their families and cars and pickups and sometimes even moving trucks.

  There wasn’t going to be a scrap of parking anywhere on campus. Nowhere near where he needed to be, anyway. He’d have to find street parking and hope for the best.

  How the hell had he forgotten it was moving day? That was why he’d set the alarm early, so he’d have time to take the subway.

  He tried to turn and his car fought him for a moment. The transmission growled and the wheels felt like they were turning in mud. The last time he’d been at the garage the mechanic had mentioned tie rods, which had something to do with the wheels. George hoped that whatever they were, they could stay tied for a little while longer. His next paycheck had to go to rent, but the one after that could be car repair.

  Three blocks from campus he found a space on a permitted street. He’d have to move it before four o’clock, which would mean ducking out early and asking someone to cover for him. The door stuck as he tried to get out. Extra repairs weren’t in the budget, so he begged the latch to work and the door opened on the next try.

  It took him another ten minutes to get to campus. He checked the time on his phone twice while waiting for the light to change at a crosswalk. The crowds of people pressed in around him. A man on his left grinned at him and showed off a mouthful of smoke-yellowed teeth.

  The light changed and the crowd surged across the street. George pushed past most of them. According to his phone, he had five more minutes. He broke away from the crowds on the sidewalk and cut across the swath of grass.

  A man headed across the lawn away from the physical plant and toward George. The man had a severe limp, or maybe he was just stumbling-drunk. His headphones blared so loud George could hear the tok-tok-tok of the bass line ten yards away.

  After another few steps, George realized the man’s clothes were dotted with stains. The stranger’s face was pale, as if he’d just thrown up. He was probably homeless, which meant George was supposed to call campus security.

  He glanced around. Most of the students and parents were back toward the dorms. Maybe he could just give the man a warning and save him getting hassled by the rent-a-cops. “Hey, buddy,” he said, “I think you need to get out of here.”

  The man staggered straight at George. He didn’t say anything, but the dull click from his headphones got louder and louder. George still couldn’t hear anything except the bass line.

  “Seriously,” George said, “if security finds you here they’ll toss you off campus, and some of them are kind of jerks.” He pointed over the man’s shoulder. “Head back down into Westwood and they can’t touch you.”

  The man kept limping toward George. The bad leg dragged behind him, like it was too heavy to move. A bruise on the side of his neck stood out against his pale skin. He was trying to talk, moving his jaw up and down, but he wasn’t making a sound. Nothing George could hear over the bass line from the headset.

  “Man, come on,” he sighed, “don’t make me …”

  The headset cord swung away from the man’s body with the next lurch. He didn’t have an iPod. It wasn’t plugged into anything. His eyes were chalk white. Three of his fingers ended in dark stumps. He bared yellow teeth at George and took another lumbering step forward.

  George jumped back with wide eyes and raised a fist.

  The man stumbled back, too, and held up his hands, fingers spread. Ten fingers. “Whoa,” he said. “Calm down, dude.”

  George blinked. The man stared back at him. His eyes were pale blue, not white. His headset cord hung low and looped back up to the phone holster on his belt. The spots on his clothes were a subtle pattern in the fabric.

  “Sorry,” said George. “It looked like you were … Sorry.”

  The man shrugged his backpack higher onto his shoulder and shuffled past. One of his shoes had a double-thick heel, the kind to correct an uneven leg. It gave him a shambling gait.

  George watched him go. The man looked back over his shoulder once and didn’t look pleased to find George staring at him. He shuffled a little faster.

  The physical plant still used an old-fashioned time clock. Someone in accounting typed up new cards for them every week and set them out Monday morning in alphabetical order. He ran his finger along the rack of cards. Tuesday morning and they were already a mess. It took him just under a minute to find his.

  BAILEY George

  His parents had been wonderful in so many ways. It never crossed their minds what he’d go through every December. Or every time he filled out paperwork. Or every time he introduced himself.

  He got a moment of satisfaction from punching in five seconds before the clock ticked over to make him late. The card shuddered as the machine stamped down on it. He glanced at the red, sticky time code before he tossed the card back on the rack.

  He slipped off his jacket and clipped on his ID. The jacket went into his locker and the tool belt came out. A few moments later he was getting his assignments from Jarvis. The shift boss had a dark beard shot through with white and silver.

  The first two hours of George’s day were spent replacing fluorescent lights in one of the labs. There’d been a power surge and three dozen tubes had blown out. Someone else had swept up all the broken glass, but he was stuck pulling out the jagged ends and installing new lights. It was slow work, but at least the halls were empty and he wasn’t working around wandering students. Afterward he mopped the hallway to get any last fragments of glass or the chalky powder from inside the tubes. He didn’t mind the mopping. He thought of it as a very Zen activity, although he was pretty sure he wasn’t using Zen the right way when he thought that.

  Just before lunch was a broken sprinkler head. Someone had kicked it or hit it or something a few days ago, and now it was shooting a jet of water right at one professor’s window in the chemistry building. He’d complained two days ago and his complaint had filtered through the system and become an item George’s boss assigned to him.

  George poked and pulled at the sprinkler for about ten minutes before deciding to just
replace it. A year or two back the sprinklers would’ve been groundskeeping’s problem, but budget cuts had trimmed some departments and merged others. He still didn’t know enough about the system to do fine repairs, so he had to go for big ones.

  Lunch was a rectangular pizza slice with orange sauce and soft crust. He was pretty sure the pepperoni crumbles were just flavored soy meat. He’d read that once on the back of a frozen pizza box. The salad that came with the pizza wasn’t much more than lettuce and dressing. He ate them both and read through the first few pages of a newspaper someone had left in the cafeteria. He had a glass of chocolate milk for dessert.

  After lunch he went back to the sprinkler and installed the new one. There was a sheet of instructions in the box that helped. Nothing leaked or shook, so he called it done. He packed the soil back around the sprinkler and looked around while he wiped his hands on his Dickies.

  He’d caught the lull when all the parents took their kids out for lunch one last time before heading home. The campus was dead. A few grad students stumbled between buildings and across the lawns, still hungover from welcome-back parties the night before. The lawn was overgrown, he noticed. More grounds-keeping cuts. He’d mention it to Jarvis and volunteer to take care of it.

  There was a poster on a nearby bus stop for a clothing store. George had never been into fashion, but something about the poster caught his eye. A blonde and a brunette flanked a stunning woman with dark skin and ebony hair. They all wore half-buttoned shirts and tight pants. The dark-skinned woman was barefoot. She looked familiar, and George was pretty sure she was the current “name” celebrity supermodel.

  He just couldn’t remember her name.

  His Nextel walkie chirped. “George, you there?”

  He pulled it free from his belt. “Yeah, what’s up, Jarvis?”

  “Bad news, m’friend. Somebody just broke a lobby window over at Birch Hall.”

  “How the hell’d they do that?”

  “Backed an SUV into it trying to get close to the door,” said Jarvis. “You drew the short straw.”

  “Dammit.”

  “Sorry. Mark’s grabbing some plywood. He’ll meet you over there and y’all can get it cleaned up.”

  George kept his finger off the button and sighed. Mark was a new hire this year. He’d been some level of film producer or development person—George wasn’t sure which—who’d been let go after the economy started to dive and his last three movies in a row had tanked. After eighteen months of looking for work, the man had bitten the bullet and taken a job on the maintenance staff of his alma mater.

  On one level, George admired the man for being able to swallow his pride. On another level, though, he couldn’t stand listening to him complain about “how far he’d fallen” and the constant comments about “life at the bottom.” In fact, George was pretty sure he was going to have firm words with Mark about it sometime soon.

  After all, this was his life. He didn’t need to listen to anyone badmouthing it.

  THREE

  GEORGE WIGGLED HIS fingers and settled his glove a little better on his hand. He reached up and grabbed the curved piece of glass. It was stuck in the frame of the big wall-to-ceiling window. The jagged point at the end made it look vaguely like an Arabian sword, one of the ones from the old Sinbad movies. A scythe? A scimitar. It was like a glass scimitar was buried in the frame.

  Half the window had broken away. A collection of other glass swords and spikes hung in the window frame now, each a foot or two long. George had been doing this job long enough to know some kid—young adult—would end up stepping through the opening in the rush of moving day. And once one of them did, it would become a new doorway. At least, until someone got cut. Or worse. So his first priority was getting all the glass out of the frame.

  He’d set up a few cones and signs from the dorm’s supply closet and leaned a broom across them as a low barrier, but there were just too many people for it to do anything. A few hundred students were trying to move into the building, and most of them had at least one other person helping. There were close to a dozen bodies within five feet of his ladder at that moment.

  The half-dozen shards on the ground had been easy. Now George was balanced on the ladder. He tried to lever the piece of glass away from the frame without breaking it or slashing up his gloves. Or his hands.

  He pushed down on the shard’s edge and felt the glass resist. The weight of his arms settled on it, then he added his shoulders. It was slow work, but rushing it would just break the glass and make a mess.

  The sword-like shard tilted and slid free from the rubbery seal. George imagined it felt a lot like pulling someone out of quicksand—a slow, hesitant release. He got one hand under the two-foot piece of glass. His feet shifted on the ladder to keep his balance. The sword came away in his hands and he worked his way down the ladder.

  George set the shard in the trash can at the base of his ladder. As he did, someone walked by and tossed a Taco Bell cup into the container. The paper cup popped open. Ice clattered and clicked down the glass.

  He sighed and headed back up the ladder. The next piece was broad, stretching across the top of the frame. It probably weighed close to six or seven pounds. It also had a crack in it, which meant it would break apart when he tried to lever it out. The wide shard reminded him of a guillotine blade, waiting to drop. It would’ve been the first to go, but he’d needed to work out some of the big pieces around it.

  He got one hand and part of his arm under the bulk of it and put pressure on the other side. That way, if it popped out or shattered, most of it should go away from the door, at least. The blade of glass resisted for a moment, then eased out of the frame.

  “Hey, George,” called Mark. “How they hanging, big man?” He dropped the sheet of plywood he’d been lugging and let it crash against the ladder. The fiberglass legs wobbled and tipped, just for a second. George shifted his weight. His arms tensed.

  The shard snapped with a bang. George heard the zip of fabric coming apart and felt the cold glass slide along his forearm. The first thought in his head was all the morbid tips he’d heard about the “right” way to slit your wrists, going up and down instead of side to side. The huge blade whisked down across his thigh and cut off the thought.

  Half of the guillotine shattered on the pavement, turning into crystal confetti that pitter-pattered across the ground. The second half hit a beat later, slowed by its passage through George’s uniform, and added to the hail of glass. People shrieked. Mark grunted in surprise. George bit back a swear and grabbed at his arm.

  “Job opening,” cackled one student.

  “Jesus, guy,” shouted an older man. “There’s kids all around here.”

  “Be careful, for Christ’s sake!”

  “Sorry,” said George. “Everyone okay? Nobody hurt?”

  A few more parents muttered at him. He shot Mark a look and hopped off the ladder. “What the hell?” he growled.

  The other man looked at him, baffled. “What?”

  George shook his head at the plywood. “What were you thinking?”

  Mark had been an athlete in high school and college. He was one of those people who’d never quite outgrown the jock mind-set of “the quarterback can do no wrong.” He looked from the plywood to George, then to the ladder, and then to the glass-covered ground. “Are you saying this is my fault?”

  “You threw a sheet of plywood against the ladder I was working on.”

  “It’s not my fault you’re a wuss who freaks out three feet up in the air,” said Mark. He grabbed the broom. “At least man up and admit you made a mistake. You’re just lucky nobody got hurt.”

  “Yeah, well—” The sensation of the glass blade sliding down his arm and across his thigh echoed in George’s mind. He felt the cool draft inside his Dickies. His pulse quickened and he glanced down.

  The pants were open across his thigh, just below where the pocket ended. He could see skin and leg hair. But no blood. He’d been luc
ky.

  He held up his arm. The shirt sleeve was slashed open from his elbow all the way to his wrist. It was a smooth cut. Like his pants, the fabric of the shirt had parted between threads without a single hitch or pull. Even the cuff of his glove was cut. The blade of glass had gone right through the doubled-over canvas hem. He’d written his name on the cuffs ages ago, and the cut went right through the A in BAILEY.

  His forearm wasn’t even scratched. No blood at all. He flexed his fingers and they moved in the glove without any trouble.

  George wiggled his fingers again. He’d had cuts that were so clean they were almost invisible. They’d stay shut for a few moments before opening up and gushing blood. He made a fist, squeezed it, and hoped his wrist wouldn’t fall apart.

  Nothing. And it had been three minutes since the glass had fallen. He poked at his forearm with his other hand and stretched the skin back and forth. Then he poked at his thigh.

  “Damn lucky,” he said aloud.

  Mark glanced up from his half-assed sweeping. “Eh?”

  George held his arm a little higher and flapped the edge of the cut.

  Mark looked at the sleeve for a moment. Then his eyes bugged. “Fucking hell,” he said. It got a couple of angry looks from parents. “You’re damned lucky.”

  “I know.”

  “Another quarter inch and I’d be using a mop right now instead of a broom.”

  “I’d like to think you’d be using the truck to get me over to the Med Center.”

  “Yeah, well, okay. But then I’d be mopping you up.”

  George squeezed his hand into a fist again, but his forearm remained whole. The memory of the glass on his skin was so vivid, he was sure it had cut him. Maybe it had just been panic, like Mark said.

  He shook his head and rolled the sleeve up. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s pull the last of this stuff and get the board up.”

  “Why don’t you just knock it out with a hammer or something?”

  George waved his hand at the crowd in the lobby and brought it back to the door. “Because I don’t want to put a piece of glass in someone’s eye on their first day back.”