Lawrence Fisher
"Lawrence was dying. He felt his life draining from the hole in his side, and his breath running short in his chest. It didn't bother him; he was tired, and old, and sick of being both. He gave up. He shut his eyes."
The old man laughs before his voice catches in his throat and gives way to a fit of coughing. With the back of his hand he wipes a sheen of moisture from his eyes.
"I know the feeling," he says, after the coughing subsides. "But there's nothing for it. Sometimes we give up before our bodies do. None of us get to choose our end date, unless we kill ourselves, and Lawrence was in no shape for suicide."
His first thought on waking was surprise that he wasn't dead. The pain told him as much, a shit-awful ache in his bones as if he'd been inexpertly soldered together and the raw, tender throbbing of the wound in his side that flared to white heat when he tried to sit up. He fell back against the pillow and watched drops of clear liquid fall from an IV bag next to the bed. When he flexed his hand he was barely able to form fist. He shut his eyes, disgusted at his own weakness.
"Bastard should have aimed for my head," he said. His voice was little more than a light croak.
"You're awake."
With an effort Lawrence looked up. Hertzwelder was seated next to the window.
"Don't be fucking redundant," said Lawrence.
Hertzwelder got up and went to the foot of the bed. His face was gray with pain, and he moved slowly, favouring his left side.
"Fucker couldn't aim for shit could he?"
Hertzwelder laughed briefly and handed him a cup of water. To Lawrence it felt as heavy as a lead weight.
"Where are we?" he asked.
"Newt Run General Hospital," Hertzwelder told him.
"Never heard of it."
Hertzwelder glanced at him, but the old man had already shut his eyes, and within seconds he was asleep.
He was confined to his bed for some time, and after the first few days he gave up asking questions about where he was. He found that when he did people looked at him strangely, and spoke to him in the kind of soft, measured tones normally reserved for the elderly or the mentally ill. Hertzwelder showed him maps on which the town of Newt Run was clearly labeled, not 100 miles from the capital, but to Lawrence they looked like fakes, cheap replicas printed off of a home computer. He knew that Hertzwelder wouldn't lie to him, but all the same he had never heard of Newt Run. His doctors thought he might have suffered a mild stroke as a result of his injuries. That at least would explain the memory loss, but as far as Lawrence was concerned he hadn't forgotten anything. The town shouldn't exist, although if saying so meant he'd grown senile or was suffering from dementia, he was prepared to swallow his tongue. The only thing that mattered was his granddaughter.
"Where is she?" he asked, as soon as it became clear that she was not in the hospital with him.
Hertzwelder hesitated, frowning.
"We don't know," he said at last.
"You don't know?"
"But she hasn't been admitted to another hospital, not here or back in the capital."
"What about that woman, or the copy editor?"
"The editor's dead. So is Fawkes. There's no sign of the woman."
"And the other?"
"I'll find Stevens," Hertzwelder assured him, but as if he was humouring a petulant child, and for the first time Lawrence considered the possibility that it wasn't only the maps that had changed.
In all he spent two weeks in the hospital, but while his body recovered, his mind did not, at least as far as Hertzwelder and his doctors were concerned. Lawrence remained disoriented, and easily confused. When Hertzwelder drove him the short distance from Newt Run to the capital, the old man recognized nothing, neither the highway nor the wide stretch of country that lay beyond the mountains. He did not even know his own home, a two bedroom condominium that he'd lived in for years, and he was shocked by the number of demonstrations that clogged the city's streets, the gutted buildings and torched cars that lay like blackened carcasses on the road.
He was in no condition to work, and Hertzwelder took over management of the company. The younger man seemed to relish the idea, embracing his new position with an enthusiasm that Lawrence found oddly disconcerting; Hertzwelder had always been more comfortable in the field than behind a desk, but then it was clear that this was not the same Hertzwelder. He was more like an actor than the genuine article, and Lawrence found he no longer trusted him. As a result, despite Hertzwelder's assurances that everything possible was being done to locate Sarah, Lawrence decided to start looking on his own.
He tracked down Stevens' address in the company database and the next day he drove out to the building, a crumbling, multi-storey apartment complex which seemed to be overrun by half-feral children and reeked of burnt cabbage. The building manager informed him that while they did have a Stevens listed in the register, he hadn't been seen for more than a month.
Lawrence peered at the manager. The man seemed to be in his middle fifties, with a pinched nose and narrow, rheumy eyes.
"You wouldn't be lying to me would you?"
The man blinked, his head snapping back as if he'd been slapped. To Lawrence, he had the look of a frightened, asthmatic stork.
"Why would I lie?" he asked.
"You wouldn't. Not to me."
Lawrence took a card from his wallet and passed it across the counter.
"Stevens comes back here you call me. There's money in it."
The manager looked at the card over skeptically, but at last he nodded and stored it behind the desk. Lawrence exited the building. The short walk back to his car left him breathless.
The manager never called, and a few weeks later Stevens' apartment was rented out. Lawrence moved on to question anyone even remotely connected to Stevens and Fawkes. He spoke to their few remaining family members, as well as a long string of bitter or ambivalent women who'd spent time with them, but no one could tell him anything more than he already knew. Hertzwelder had no new information, and Lawrence's brief attempt to engage the local police was a waste of time.
He took to trusting in chance, canvassing strangers at bus stands and train stations. He wandered into parks and alleys, showing pictures of the two men as well as an old school photo of Sarah to the city's large homeless population. He grew thin, and went days without shaving. His clothes took on the disheveled, slightly threadbare look of a religious fanatic. People began to shy away from him as he approached, while others he could hear laughing as soon as his back was turned. In time, he went out less and less frequently, holing up in his condominium and pouring over newspapers that read as if they'd been penned by lunatics. He drank often, and stayed up long into the night, staring alternately at the bottle of whiskey or at his hands: pale, wizened things that he could never quite convince himself were his own. And then, almost five years after the attack, he received a call from Hertzwelder.
His former partner had put on weight since Lawrence had last seen him. His skin was tanned, while his thinning hair was neatly trimmed and combed with oil. Shaking hands, Lawrence was aware of the softness of the other man's palm, as well as the large, platinum watch he wore at his wrist.
"Please sit down," Hertzwelder told him, taking a seat behind the polished oak desk that had once belonged to Lawrence. Behind him, a towering pair of windows overlooked the heart of the financial sector.
"Business suits you Max," said Lawrence, lowering himself with difficulty into the opposite chair. He was one of a handful of people who felt comfortable using Hertzwelder's first name.
"I just continued where you left off," the other man demurred, and Lawrence was acutely aware that the old Hertzwelder would never have said anything half so vapid.
"How's your wife?" he asked, deciding to play along.
"Fine," said Hertzwelder. "Fine. She's due any day now."
Lawrence hadn't been aware that she was pregnant, and he let the subject drop. There was a pause, and H
ertzwelder cleared his throat. Abruptly he reached into a drawer and removed an envelope. Inside was a single sheet of paper with an address typed on it.
"What's this?" Lawrence asked.
"That's where he's living."
Lawrence looked at him.
"How did you find him?"
"A contact of mine fed the information to me."
"Who else knows about this?"
"No one yet. How do you want to handle it?" he asked, something of the man he had been returning to his voice.
"I'll do it myself," Lawrence told him, standing up. Hertzwelder rose with him.
"Lawrence..."
"What?"
"At least let me send someone with you."
He noted that Hertzwelder didn't offer to go himself.
"Send someone if I don't come back," he said, and left the office.
He took a cab back to his building and poured himself a drink. He moved to the window, staring out at a view he no longer recognized. A line of cars crawled along the street below, and further off he could just make out the soft glow of fires burning unchecked in the distance. A police helicopter swept its lights over the face of a neighbouring high-rise. To Lawrence it looked like a city perched on the edge of an abyss.
He finished his drink and went to bed. The next day he boarded a train for Newt Run.
It was the 18th of January.