When I’m Sixty-Four
by Todd Glasscock
part 1
It was too hot in my room to sleep. I sat up in bed and called the lobby to complain, and the desk clerk told me somebody would be right up to check the heater. This was after I sent Whatshisname a text saying I had to cancel tomorrow’s talk and book signing.
“You can’t cancel, Mr. Bass,” Whatshisname name had written back, “you’re our keynote. We don’t have anybody to replace you. And you can’t imagine how disappointed your fans will be.”
When I didn’t respond immediately, Whatshisname texted back: “You won’t get your stipend.”
A flash of sparkly light flitted across the ceiling. The light caused a certain familiar sense of unease. It could’ve been just a glint of moonlight off the window. It could’ve been something else. I shifted around on the bed to find a more comfortable position. Though I needed the thousand bucks the con was paying me to speak and sign books, I wasn’t going anywhere tomorrow. I wasn’t leaving this stifling room for any reason.
“I don’t care about the stipend,” I texted Whatshisname. Then I called the lobby again. “This is Elmore Bass in room 801,” I told the desk clerk. “Is someone coming or not? I called twenty minutes ago, and you said someone was coming right up.” A long pause, then the clerk asked for my room number again. “Eight-oh-one. Just please get someone up here soon.”
Ten, maybe twenty minutes later, someone knocked on the door, announcing herself as maintenance.
I let that person in, a woman in blue coveralls, wearing a ball cap turned backwards and carrying a black toolkit. I supposed she could be maintenance. “It’s stifling in here. The heat won’t shut off.”
She nodded and went over and checked the thermostat, then crouched down and took out a screwdriver from her toolkit and removed a side panel on the heater. Yeah, I supposed she could be maintenance, or she could be one of Them.
Yeah, I’m a science fiction writer, and I should be more imaginative when naming mysterious beings. You know, something with an apostrophe in the middle of the name, but when They first contacted me, the only thing I could think of was the old movie with the giant ants. So, you get “Them” because they bug me. I’d never seen Their corporeal form. I supposed it existed. But this maintenance woman didn’t cause me a sense of unease, so she probably wasn’t one of Them.
I watched her work from where I was standing at the foot of the bed. If she was one of Them, I couldn’t run, no matter how badly I wanted to. I couldn’t leave the room. Because, I could only imagine I’d do something stupid if I left, like leave the keycard behind and end up locked out. And They’d do something like that to get me out of the room until at least after midnight.
She kept working, checking some gauges, and I looked at my phone and then wondered again if she wasn’t one of Them, because it was about that time: 10:30. Almost showtime.
Then she tapped the side panel back onto the heater, stood up, turned and looked at me: “Loose contact. It should cycle fine now. Call us if you have any more problems. Sorry for the inconvenience.”
“No problem.”
She grabbed up her toolkit, smiled at me when she walked past and let herself out.
“Thanks again,” I said as the door clicked shut and that familiar sense of unease came over me and another flash of sparkly light zipped overhead and disappeared into the TV screen.
Yep, it was showtime. 10:30 exactly.
I fell back onto the bed, feeling slightly nauseous. Ten-thirty p.m. on December 7th alone in a hotel room, as if it was ordained. In a way, I supposed it was.
* * *
In the early months after the accident, not long after my grandson Danny was born, when They first began this show of Theirs, Delilah put up with me watching it, even though all she ever saw was a blank TV screen. She thought of it as a mild hallucination, maybe a result of PTSD and head trauma from the accident — an 18-wheeler had T-boned my Acura at an intersection — and humored me those first few months because our doctor recommended it.
And I tried to believe They were hallucinations, too. It’s not like I liked living my life in this way. Believe me, in those first few months after the crash, I tried to get rid of Them. Meds. Therapy. A white-coated professional shaman that prescribed ayahuasca and trips through the astral planes and claimed I could contact Them in their dimension and simply ask Them to leave me alone.
It was the white-coated professional shaman and astral projection that ended my marriage. Delilah grew hopeless and we went broke because I spent publishing advances, royalties, and speaker’s fees trying to reach Them.
“I’m getting closer to reaching Them. I’m sure of it,” I’d told her one morning as we sipped coffee and she slid a manila envelope with the divorce papers across the kitchen table.
“No, Elmore, you’re not. None of this is real. None of it is helping. Not the shaman. Not those things you’re trying to contact. Not an assassin that vaguely resembles that guy who shot John Lennon forty-some-odd years ago. None of it. And I’ve had enough.”
Six hours later, she climbed into a U-Haul and backed out of the driveway with all her stuff, never to be seen again.
Luckily, my son Van was long out of the house then, married, though he and his wife, Audra, had their own problems. Chief among them: their son, Danny, autistic, uncommunicative. Van and Audra were going broke trying to find ways to communicate with him. The only real connection the boy made was with me.
Because of that connection, Van and Audra humored me when it came to me rambling about Them. I made Danny happy; that made my son and his wife happy.
* * *
The TV flickered to life unaided. For a moment, the screen looked as if it were tuned to a dead channel. Then, in a gray hurricane-whirl, it resolved itself into the rerun that I hated watching. But They compelled me to watch every night, so I sank uncomfortably propped against the bed’s headboard, jaw clenched, waiting for the moment I saw myself on the screen, waiting to watch myself die.
I’d seen my death thousands of times since They started contacting me. Though some details differed, depending on which timeline the video was shot, other details stayed the same: I was always a popular science fiction writer, and my assassin was always the same person: a double-chinned blond guy with tinted glasses from the book signing I had just canceled in this timeline.
Every time I watched, it was always December 8th, and I was always about to head out from my hotel room for a walk. My assassin always pulled a .38 snub-nose revolver, as I stepped out of the hotel lobby. He fired five shots. Four hit me in the back and, as I stumbled forward in a very cinematic way and was about to fall, the grainy footage cut to the eleven o’clock news in my own timeline, which was the only timeline where I lived to see December 9th, so They told me repeatedly over the years.
They never told me why I survived in this timeline. They never told me anything, really, other than in this timeline, if I stayed put all night, I’d live; I’d make it past my 64th birthday. If that doesn’t make you paranoid, I don’t know what would.
After the news ended, I grabbed my pack of cigarillos — yes, I know, smoking is as deadly as bullets; Van reminds me all the time — got up from the bed, walked over to the window and peered through the blinds. Below me, the pool shimmered ominously under pinkish security lights.
I stared over rows of cars beyond the pool, vaguely remembering where I parked. It was possible that somewhere out there my assassin lurked, the double-chinned blond man wearing tinted glasses. I started to light up but recalled this was a nonsmoking room. I didn’t want to get some extra cleaning charge on my bill and, with vague unease, felt compelled to go outside for a smoke.
The cigarillo dangled from my lips; I could taste the tangy sweetness of the tobacco, could feel the buzz in my skull urging me to go out, get my fix. I lowered the blind, took the cigarillo from my mouth — to savor it soon — and headed for the door.
I stopped my walk of doom at the foot of the bed, distracted by the chatter on TV, the beginning of a talk show, one I’d seen before, another rerun, another show. Blood rushed to my head, my heartbeat throbbed in my ears, and I was hardly able to breathe. It was a rerun They wanted me to see, an interview with a writer vividly describing his abduction by space aliens.
This writer’s alien-abduction story turned out to be a lie, They told me. He was an aspiring science fiction writer but wrote this abduction tale as a memoir. In other timelines, this man was me, Elmore Bass. And, after I confessed my sins, I was forgiven by my fans, except for one: a true believer. My assassin. The blond double-chinned man with tinted glasses.
I crumpled the cigarillo in half, tobacco falling like snow onto the floor. I fell back onto the bed, the sense of unease drifting away.
* * *
The phone on the nightstand rang. Half-awake, I answered it, thinking it might be Whatshisname from the con calling to persuade me to do my talk and book signing, persuade me to come out of my room now that it was morning. No, sorry, can’t do that.
Only it wasn’t Whatshisname.
“Hello?” I said, sternly, ready to growl at Whatshisname.
“Dad? It’s me, Van.”
“What is it?”
“It’s Danny, Dad, he’s sick. In the hospital. It’s bad. Can you come? Please?”
So, They really were trying to lure me out. Give my assassin one more chance. Playing hardball with a sick child — my grandson — in the hospital. So be it.
“I’ll be right there. Love you. I’ll be right there.” I hung up, sighed. I guessed this was what it took. This was how They got me. They worked in mysterious ways, ways I’d never fathom, ways that weren’t mine to fathom. In the end, They knew what was best for me.
They knew everything. To hell with it. Van lived two hours from where I was staying. I was planning a visit after the con anyway. And I wanted to see my grandson very badly. Sometimes, I felt as if he were the only person I genuinely connected to. I couldn’t lose him; I had to do something or die trying.
I grabbed my coat, car keys — and hotel key card; no forgetting that — and left the room. I lingered in the hallway waiting for my assassin to pop out from somewhere brandishing his gun, maybe chase me down the hallway as he shot at me. But nothing happened.
Nothing happened when I passed through the lobby. Not even a greeting from the head-nodding front desk clerk.
Nothing happened when I stepped into the parking lot or found my car or when I backed from my space. I sighed with relief, thinking I was free and clear, when up the access road to the highway appeared blinding headlights of a car barreling my way. So that’s it. Not a gunshot. A head-on collision. I braked and braced myself.
The headlights passed by, as did half a dozen more. Behind me, tires squealed; angry drivers were slamming on their brakes to avoid hitting me. I accelerated and headed for the ramp to the interstate.
Copyright © 2023 by Todd Glasscock
