Freak City Page 7

  Chapter Seven

  Jolene made meticulous copies of her list and ceremoniously handed them to Argus and Seth with instructions to carry them around in case inspiration struck. They had made no further progress that night, and Argus had packed up the contents and put them away in his room to avoid any problems from Brian or Todd or Maribel. That was Jolene's idea. She didn't really trust the others to treat this as anything other than a joke. She had visions of tearage, tramplage and crumplage and other unkind treatment of the relics at the hands of the two in particular she referred to as 'the beasts'.

  "Better safe than sorry,” she said as she helped Argus arrange the items in their package and stow them away in a drawer.

  Throughout the following day, after she once again had the house to herself, having dispatched Maribel to a customer site visit and shuffled Seth off to do something, anything, anywhere, she periodically stopped into Argus' room for a visual inspection of the package. In between those episodes she studied her copy of the list, and by the end of the day she had reached some very interesting conclusions. She found herself shelling peanuts out of restlessness and impatience for the men to return so that she could share her discoveries.

  Seth, meanwhile, was investigating nothing at all. He loped from one building to the next, checking in and checking up. As usual, he had a lot of long, friendly conversations with various tenants, most of whom were in love with him to some degree. He was just one of those people. Whatever it was that he had, agreeableness, kindness, confidence, casualness, all of that together with a goofy grin and a seeming empathy that may have been more apparent than real, he was never at a loss for company. It could be a problem sometimes, when certain tenants would phone in faux problems just so Seth would come around and visit. He never seemed to mind or even catch on. The plumbing somehow fixed itself by the time he arrived, but sure, a lemonade sounded fine. That hole in the wall that needed patching seemed to have been delicately placed there to ensure not only his presence but also that he wouldn't be put out too much. And so his days were filled with friends and acquaintances and hows-it-shakins and hows-it-hangins and a nod and a smile and a bit of tinkering here and there.

  Mr and Mrs McDuffie, his parents, were also his biggest fans. They were a well-suited pair of near-sighted balding and bright orange pants suits that had somehow managed to manage a collection of decent little buildings in decent little neighborhoods, averaging six to ten units apiece. They owned only one, along with their house. The rest they just ran for others. Mister, the father, had some of Seth's traits, the social ease and gregariousness. From the mom he inherited the others, the seeming lack of self-awareness and tendency to drift through life. It was cool. Everything was always cool. And once in awhile a thought crossed his mind, like the thought that he had driving home through the city, the thought that made him pull over and pull out the list and nod and smile and think to himself that won't Jolene be surprised that he figured this out by himself.

  For his part, Argus was more concerned about who might be watching him walk to the bus stop, wait at the bus stop, and get on the bus. There was no one as far as he saw. Maybe they took the day off, he said to himself. Just my luck. The one time I'm looking there's nobody there. The whole thing was making him nervous. That the sequence of items began on the day he was born. What could it possibly mean? As badly as he wanted the thing to be random and pointless, the harmless obsession of a crazy old coot, it was harder now to think that it could be. So he tried not to think about it at all. Nothing doing.

  Ahmed at work kept annoying him about Madam Sylvia. Mikael kept bringing it up too. Argus tried to say as little as possible, but he did spill the thing about the day he was born, and he mentioned the list, and then Mikael had to see it. Mikael practically tore it out of his hands and made off with it into the bathroom. He stayed in there for awhile. Argus was at least glad that he'd left the originals at home. God only knew what Mikael was doing in there. When he came out, the first thing he said was

  "How old are you now, twenty two is that right?" and when Argus said "yes,” Mikael shouted

  "I knew it. I knew it"

  "This, my friend,” he said, waving the list around in the air, "is a very most interesting puzzle. What is most intriguing of all is the date that is NOT on the list. Do you know what I mean?"

  Argus shook his head "no.”

  "What is not on this list is the very last day, the finality of the sequence. Look, my dear Argus, just look,” and he pulled Argus over to him and held the list in front of his face.

  "Day one, we know that, is the day you were born. The significance of the photographs or other news items with dates, of this I know nothing. I do not know if there is any meaning at all in those things. Probably yes. I would say yes most certainly likely. But what that inference would be, again I can't say. The next date on the list, do you see? Exactly six hundred days from the first. And the one after that? Six hundred more days."

  "Six hundred days?" Argus wasn't sure he was hearing correctly. "What's so important about six hundred days."

  "I have no idea,” Mikael replied, "but six hundred days and exactly is the interval between each and every date on this list. I did all the math. Six hundred days and precisely. Now, do you follow?"

  "I guess so,” Argus said. He was trying to look at the dates and do the math by himself in his head, but six hundred days is a hard one to figure. It's more than a year, but less than two. It doesn't make sense in terms of any typical sequence. There was nothing about six hundred days that seemed special. Mikael seemed to be reading his thoughts.

  "What's special,” he declared, "about the six hundred days is that if you take six hundred days, and you add it up fourteen times, and it just happens to be that fourteen is the number of objects with dates on your list ... that the very last day on the calendar will be the same as the very first day. In short, your next birthday, when you will turn twenty three."

  "Twenty three?" Argus was feeling light-headed. Wasn't the first article, dated on the day he was born, a story about somebody's twenty third birthday? And now Mikael's telling him that the date in the sequence after the last date on the list would fall on his own twenty-third? The likelihood of a random act of wildness was less and less all the time. It kind of spoiled the surprise when he finally got home, that Seth and Jolene had both arrived at the same discovery. Each of them wanted to get all the glory and credit but instead all three of them now had the same set of facts.

  "It's still pretty cool,” Seth pronounced.

  "We're definitely on the trail now,” said Jolene, but wherever that trail might be leading was still just as much a mystery as ever.