Confound Interest

by Zuku Saki

Part 1 appears
in this issue.

conclusion

It didn’t take long to reach Forest Hill Road but once I got there I heavily examined my mental clarity, for all along the road were high-rise buildings, not mansions as I recalled. I kept walking, recognizing many of the cross streets but not the buildings. After burning several more calories I finally arrived at 454. It was a brick high-rise building, stretching at least twenty stories high.

The automatic doors parted for me as I approached, a lovely welcome for a most unpleasant place. The reception area looked as if the cleaning crew had gone missing several months prior. A tubby, ethnically ambiguous man stood behind a desk, his frowzy facial hair serving as a historical account of every bit of food he pushed through it in the past forty-eight hours.

“Can I help you?” the grunt said, the movement of his mouth practically invisible. To this I produced the index card from my pocket.

“Ah. Another one.” The man shook his head as he looked me up and down. “This is what you do. Take the elevator around the corner to the sixth floor, you’re the third room on the left.”

“Is that where my wife is?”

“Sure. Anything you want.”

Just outside the building stood Fred Prestaine, his hands and face up to the glass trying without success to read the grunt’s lips. It was truly to no avail as Fred knew that he wouldn’t be able to read the monster’s lips after a shave and intensive speech therapy, let alone as is... he could never do anything cool like that.

I rounded the corner and found the elevator the grunt spoke of. I got in and pressed six. The walls of the elevator were made of mirrored glass which was covered in smears, cobwebbed fractures and finger prints. It turned my stomach, a visualization of germ excrement from countless filthy derelicts compounded over the course of years. The sixth floor didn’t come soon enough.

A very troubled Greggory James was there to greet me. “You the new guy?”

“What?”

“The new guy,” Greggory tried to look past me to see if anyone was behind me. “Are you him?”

“I don’t know. I have a card... somewhere...”

“Yeah, yeah that’s you. Welcome, welcome.” The odd little man started walking down a small hallway, looking back at me every few seconds to make sure I was following him. He led me to a small doorway. “This is you.”

“What? What is this?”

“Your room. This is where you’ll stay. I’m over there.” Greggory pointed down the narrow corridor.

“This isn’t my room. This isn’t my place, either. What the hell is going on?”

Greggory sighed. “You didn’t watch the film?

“What film?” I asked.

“The one at the center.”

“What center?!” The oddity of my situation was beginning to dawn on me and the frail-looking Greggory seemed like a fine venue to release my frustration. I grabbed his neck and pinned him against the wall. “Who are you, where the hell are we, and where is my family?”

Greggory looked at me calmly, his voice altered in pitch from my grip on his neck. “My name is Greggory James, we’re in an apartment and your family is probably dead.”

Surprisingly enough my initial reaction to his last statement was to let go of my grip on Greggory’s neck. I was frozen in shock. This moment of shock lasted just a few seconds before I suddenly punched him in the face, his head snapping back and hitting the wall. He slid down to the floor, unconscious, and I suddenly regretted what I did, not because I knocked him out but because I might have needed to press him for information. To find out what was happening to me.

* * *

The downstairs lobby was hosting a meeting of the minds unlike any other. The building’s front desk beast was asking Fred Prestaine whom he was here to visit. Fred twitched, fumbling for that duffel bag like his existence depended on it. In a way, it did. As far as most of the world was concerned, Fred didn’t exist. He was just another social security number, another address, another apartment number. He was nothing. He opened his mouth a few times before the first words came out.

“The man who just came in... he was tall with messy brown hair...”

“You don’t know his name?”

“Well... I know him.”

The beast stared at the nervous weasel. It didn’t matter, as at that point I was exiting the elevator on the ground floor. I turned the corner and saw Fred. Fred froze and looked at me, and then at my bag, and then at me again. The beast turned to look at me. And then at Fred again.

“What are you doing here?” I asked the timid man-child.

“I wanted to ask you some questions,” Fred ad-libbed after a moment of seemingly deep thought.

Fred looked to the front desk grotesque nervously and then back to me, the adrenaline pounding through his veins visibly imaginable on his face. He reached into his coat and pulled out a handgun, one of which I had never seen before. The gun was completely white and shaped differently than a standard handgun, with a handle longer than the barrel. Although I didn’t recognize it as a weapon by sight at first, I could tell he meant it to be a threat solely by the sudden wave of confidence that swept over him as he held it, a dangerous emotion to be combined with pumping adrenal glands — especially in such an ordinary and weak man like Fred.

“Hand over the bag.”

“What? You’re gonna rob me with a gun from the bottom of a box of CrackerJack?” I thought the little fellow had truly lost his mind, trying to rob me with something that didn’t even resemble a weapon.

“It’s real. MV-930 automatic pistol,” spoke the grunt for the first time since I returned to the lobby. “I used to have one of those as a kid,” he reminisced of his most likely horrifying childhood.

“Cracker what?” Fred asked, the hand holding onto the gun beginning to tremble. “Never mind that, just hand over the bag.”

“Or what, you’re gonna shoot me? There are cameras here,” I fibbed. “You won’t get away with it. Go ahead. This whole day has been one giant nightmare anyway... everything is just too surreal to actually be happening. Shoot me.”

Fred looked around the room for the cameras I spoke of. “Where are the cameras?” he addressed the beast viciously, poking him in the chest with every last shred of mustered up confidence. Obviously Fred missed out on family trips to the zoo while growing up, where all little boys learn for themselves that it is not wise to poke a dormant bear with a stick.

Back up on the sixth floor Greggory was just beginning to regain consciousness. As he always told people, he was an old fart but he still had some pep in him. He took a deep breath and stood up, using the wall to guide his sore body. Another deep breath and he made his way out the door and into the elevator. If he knew what was going on downstairs he surely wouldn’t have left his apartment.

The beast, in the most physical movement I had seen him participate in during the whole time I was standing there, lunged over the reception desk and several feet into the air. Fred turned to see the 350 pounds of pure beast in mid-flight.

Two shots were fired but they didn’t stop the beast’s arc as he came crashing down onto Fred. I wasn’t sure whether to be shocked at the Olympian leap of a simian monster or at the fact that Fred actually had a real gun. Maybe he wasn’t as crazy as I thought.

Greggory’s elevator ride had just come to a halt and the doors parted in front of him. He rounded the corner and walked right into the commotion. He didn’t notice. “Who do you think you are, buddy? Punching me like that? I outta get you thrown out of here, back on the street.”

I turned to look at Greggory. Fred looked at Greggory, from underneath an unconscious monster. In a just world, Fred and Greggory would be lined up as flat-mates. They seemed to be a perfect match for each other.

I assumed this was not one of Fred’s first thoughts as he looked up from his trapped position, now disarmed and immobile.

“I, uh, this really isn’t the best time pal,” I explained to Greggory.

His eyes widened. “An MV-930?” Greggory said in disbelief as he bent down to pick the weapon up. “I haven’t seen one of these things since the war.” Greggory pointed the gun around the room like a lunatic.

“What war? Middle East?”

Greggory started laughing. “Yeah, right... I wish. That musta been cake compared to China.”

“China?”

“Yeah, those brutal sons-of-bitches. Worst two years of my life.”

Greggory must have realized then that he was fraternizing with the man who just punched his lights out. He turned the gun on me. “I should just put you out of your misery.”

“What? No, no... look I’m sorry...” I tried to talk the man down. “You told me my family was dead. What did you expect me to do?”

“Well, I didn’t expect you to punch me.”

While Greggory spoke I heard a loud buzzing sound, like that of a ringing alarm clock.

He must have heard it too. “Oh no... lets get out of here.”

“What is that?”

“It’s the law, buddy. Come on, follow me.”

I didn’t know why we were running from law enforcement, but Greggory had pocketed the gun and was leading the way to the stairwell.

“Up the stairs... come on... the elevator will give us away.” Greggory was now at a full sprint, going faster than I ever imagined he could. By the time we got to the sixth floor my chest was heaving. I followed Greggory back to our shared apartment and we went in and closed the door behind us.

* * *

“Who was that?” Greggory asked about Fred.

“No idea,” I told him. “He seems to own my house,” I explained, not fully understanding myself.

“Ahh... I see.”

“Why did we run out of there so fast? Don’t we need to give a statement to the cops?”

Greggory took the gun out of his pocket and placed it on his dresser. “No, no. We don’t want to do that.”

“Why not?”

“Why not? Why would you want to? Nothing good would come of it.”

“Isn’t that evidence?” I asked of the gun Greggory now seemed to covet.

“Yeah right... evidence.” Greggory laughed. “That’s a good one. Nothing holds up in court... the cops don’t even care or try. All they want to do is find trouble and then make an even bigger mess.”

“Really?”

“Us staying down there would not have been pretty,” he explained.

I looked around at my new living quarters. Not too terrible, I thought. My world was becoming clearer to me now; my memory of the events earlier in the day were beginning to reformulate — to surface from the confusion.

“So... what’s in the bag?” Greggory asked me. I completely forgot I had the bag still in my clutches, my knuckles white from my grip.

“Oh... just some belongings.” I wasn’t a good liar.

“Right... come on, show me. It must be something good — that little man really had his eyes fixed on it downstairs.”

Reluctantly I opened the bag and removed the initial layer of clothes, showing Greggory the bag of cash.

“Those hundreds? And fifties?”

“Yeah, a lot of them.”

“He was after you for that?” Greggory asked, sounding surprised.

“Yeah... why?”

“What’s in there... like fifty, sixty grand?”

“Yeah, something like that.”

“That was in the bag you got from the center?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

Greggory started laughing, chuckling softly at first. He then escalated into a fit until he was in full body heaves, laughing so hard he was crying. “Oh man...” he started, but ended up interrupting himself mid-thought with another fit of laughter.

“What? What’s so funny?”

“Do you realize... if that had been in a bank the whole time you were at the center, you’d be a millionaire?” Greggory was attempting to calm his laughter down.

I looked down in the bag.

“But... that should cover a few months’ rent in this heap.” He was wiping the tears of laughter from his face. “Or it’s enough to buy yourself some new clothes... something that doesn’t make you look like you walked out of the two-dimensional film era.”

I stared at Greggory as if he were a madman.

His fit of laughter subsided and he wiped the tears from his cheeks. “Anyway... once the commotion clears down, we should go down to the hospital and visit that guy. Telling him the bag was only filled with hundreds and fifties will be like whiskey on a wound,” Greggory told me.

“I’m not so sure that’s a good idea, but I’m in.” I flopped down on the cot in my new room and took a deep breath for the first time in forty-five years.