I need time.
I need space.
I need quiet.
I look at the boards for the farthest quietest place I can get to tonight. At 2:00 in the morning there’s a train going to Rockport, Maine and something sounds…right about that. I buy a ticket, a painful $92.00 and call Liesel. She puts up a fight, but in the end tells me she loves me and to come back soon. I promise I will. She promises to be kind to Clark if he shows up, not that she could be anything but. She also agrees to talk to Tim at the bookstore, to let him know that I’ve had a family emergency, maybe with luck I won’t be fired when I get back. I wait for six hours in an uncomfortable seat in the lonely station. When my train is finally called I get on and curl up in the seat and fall asleep. Exhausted and painfully sad. It takes more than ten hours and includes a stop in Boston and one in Portland. At the Portland stop I actually almost get off the train, but resist. Something is bubbling about inside me, all anticipation and nerves and it’s hard to stay in my seat. Halfway between Portland and Rockport it’s all I can do not to jump off the speeding train. My brain wants me to move so badly. But I gut it out, and the intensity lessens as I get closer to Rockport. When I finally exit in Rockport, something about the place feels right, even though I don’t know what that means. But not as right as whatever I felt an hour behind me. Something is picking at my senses, pulling me to it, perking me up and tugging on me from the outside to the in. On a main street filled with sweet houses and shops, and quiet as a tomb, I turn southwest, the way I’d come, and start walking. I do something I can only describe as following my nose. Drawn forward as if there’s a fishing line tied to someplace deep inside me and someone, or some thing, at the other end is reeling me in. I hitch a ride with a trucker and go half an hour southwest along the coast, following the tug of the line, which gets stronger and tighter with every mile. I get out when he makes a right that takes us inland and the tug lessens. I walk a good four miles southwest again, following the imaginary line, when someone else picks me up. We go another half hour along the coast in that direction, but whatever magical marker I’m being drawn to, we must pass it. The intensity is like a fist inside my chest and then it’s like it just unclenches. When I get out of the car, the nice driver, a man in his 50s with a big head of salt and pepper hair, seems concerned.
“You sure you know where you’re going Miss? There’s not much out there,” he says, worry heavy in his voice as he looks past me to the quickly darkening road I’m headed toward.
I smile back at him and without thinking say, “It’s okay, I’m from here.”
•
Cops are staked out all over the place.
I have no idea how long they’ve been there, but none of them actually notice me when I casually walk by on a separate block and then scale the back of a building across the street from Liz’s office building. I don’t know why the hell they bother to come so early if they don’t even know what to watch for, or how. I don’t know why cops think they’re so clever. It’s just like in the movies and on crappy TV shows where they think they’re blending in and they’re just the most obvious damn things in the room. I mean, who are they kidding with those white earpieces with cords tucked into their jackets? I can see those things from a mile away, even without my freaking super-vision. They’re shuffling newspapers and sitting in cars, waiting for buses but never getting on, sweeping the street like curious janitors, and they even have a girl that looks about my age on rollerblades and with an iPod that’s probably not an iPod, plugged into her ears. She actually might have fooled me, but since she rollerblades constantly around the building and back again, over and over, on a loop, she’s as easy to make as the rest of them. There are also two cops in the empty office next to Liz’s, and one pretending to be a patient in the waiting area that I get a look at a few times when Liz opens the door to her office. The ones in the office next to Liz’s look out the window constantly with binoculars, but never once, in four hours, bother to look my way.
Morons.
I harbor brief fantasies about a policeman massacre. Maybe in the papers they would call it the Policeman’s Ball of Blood…or Massacre in Venice? I could kill them all and just kind of bathe in their blood. It would be quite a sight. It would certainly solidify my reputation, assuming Liz has told them about all my victims, assuming they have confirmed the names and details. They must have, or there wouldn’t be thirty cops here. But part of me still fears cops, or if not cops then at least the government at large. It’s ironic that my inability to be killed – as my little tests continue to prove – has actually made me fear the government more, not less. Visions of being strapped to a table and experimented on have only grown in my imagination. My tests are fine – those are on my terms, but someone else’s tests? No way. It’s a fear strong enough to keep my fantasies of a policeman massacre as just that, a fantasy. At least, for now.