Chapter 18
Shane ran to the nearest sink, thrust his hands into its basin. The sink’s sensor flashed red and the faucet squirted a cupful of lukewarm water. And then it shut off, hardly having moistened his hands.
“Don’t fuck with me now,” Shane said, moving his hands up and down in front of the sensor. “Do not fuck with me right now!”
The sensor flashed again. The faucet squirted another short blast of water. Shane rubbed his hands together desperately, scrubbing the rubber-gloved fingers of his left hand over the bare palm of his right. Polo Shirt’s blood, which had begun to turn tacky like syrup, thinned with the water and smeared over Shane’s skin. A few drops fell into the sink, bright pink against the white porcelain.
Shane moved his hands up and down in front of the sensor desperately. The red light flashed, but the faucet gave no more water.
“Fuck!” he shouted, striking the faucet with the heel of his left hand. The light blinked again, but still no water.
He ran to the back of the room, grabbed the handle to the janitor’s closet. It was locked, and the key was probably scattered on the lobby floor with the rest.
“Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” he shouted, kicking the handle with each epithet.
On the third kick there was a loud cracking sound, and the handle moved with his kick, pointed straight toward the ceiling.
Shane grabbed the handle, wrenched the door open and swung it so hard that it slammed against the wall and cracked the nearest mirror. He dove toward the janitor’s sink, twisted the hot water tap on full with his left hand, thrusting his right hand into the faucet’s stream.
“FuckFuckFuck!” he said, watching the water spray over his hand.
He grabbed a can of powdered cleaner from the shelf, shook it onto his wet hand. He scrubbed the powder to blue paste, scouring his skin. And then another panicked thought came into his head: what if the powder was abrasive enough to tear his skin, giving Polo Shirt’s blood an entryway that it hadn’t had before.
“Fuck,” Shane said, almost in a whimper.
He washed his hand carefully, thoroughly. He held it in the stream of water as the water turned scalding hot, and he held it there for another minute, until the heat was unbearable.
And then he looked at his hand in the dim light, examined the pink skin for cuts or scrapes. His heart sank when he turned his hand over, and saw that his knuckles were chapped and scraped. Was the damage deep enough in his skin to let Polo Shirt’s blood mix with his own? Would he get infected, too?
He stood there for several minutes, until the steam from the sink started to thicken the air of the closet, and moisture gathered on his face like sweat.
“Well,” he said, “nothing you can do about it now, but hope.”
He felt a hollow emptiness in his chest, a void of hope, but he took a deep breath and tried to ignore it.
And then he left the bathroom and made his way down the hallway, toward the cleaning company’s lounge.
Despite the way the world itself seemed to be falling apart, the cleaning company lounge looked the same as it always did: uncomfortable, uninviting, stagnant. Shane made his way around the table, went to Terrance’s locker. He took hold of the lock and jerked it, but it didn’t open.
It was a combination lock, and Shane had no way of knowing the combination. He didn’t feel like trying to figure it out, either. He started looking around the room for something he could use to break it.
His eyes fell on the time clock. It was a heavy, clunky cube, about six inches to a side. In the time he’d been working for the cleaning company, he’d grown to hate the damned thing. Shane had been reprimanded for being late more than for anything else, and it was this time clock, and the little numbers it printed on the time cards, that provided the proof of his lateness.
He walked over to the clock, picked it up. He looked down at its face, the hands for the hours and minutes, the second hand a little twitching splinter of metal that never stopped.
“Little fucker,” he said, speaking to the clock. “Sitting there like some small god, controlling time. Ratting me out again and again.”
He lifted the clock, held it with both hands, testing its heft. He could feel the subtle vibrations made by the clock’s internal gears, the second hand ticking almost like a tiny heart.
“But Terrance beat you,” Shane said, a sudden wild grin splitting his face. “Terrance found out how to make you dance to his tune. Terrance never showed up on time, not a day in his life, but you always punched his card with four o’clock on the dot.”
Shane looked at the time cards in their rack on the wall, lost in a moment of thought.
“How the fuck did he do it, anyway?” he said.
He shook his head, looked back at the clock’s face.
“Guess I’ll never know,” he said. “Not like you’re gonna tell me, anyway. Your time is up.”
Shane reached out, took hold of the clock’s power chord, jerked it out of the wall. The second hand, the relentless twitching little hand that had spelled so much trouble for Shane, stopped.
“Eight fifty seven, and thirty seven seconds,” Shane said, “the end of this little god’s reign.”
He walked back over to Terrance’s locker, gripped the clock with both hands, and smashed it down against the lock. It took him a couple tries, and he dented both the clock and the locker itself, before the combination lock snapped open.
Shane tossed the clock onto the table, pulled the lock loose and tossed that too. He opened the latch, paused a moment, thinking of Terrance. He swung the locker open.
Terrance had folded his jacket and left it on the floor of the locker. The jacket was dark denim, and there was a little scrap of yellow paper sitting on top of it: a post-it note, folded in half so its tacky strip was stuck to itself.
Shane reached down and picked up the post-it note. He turned the note over, puzzled for a moment by what he saw there.
And then comprehension hit him.
“Son of a bitch,” he said. “That clever son of a bitch.”
He started laughing, a sudden tears flowing from his eyes.
The note had two things printed on it, one above the other, both lined up right against the edge of the post-it note. Shane recognized the prints—they were fragments of time marks made by the time clock. The first fragment was “57 a.m.”, and the fragment directly beneath it, which had been printed upside down, was “5:”.
Terrance had shown up at 4:57, covered the minute section of his time card with the post-it note, and punched his time. The “4:” went on his time card, the “57 a.m.” went on the post-it. Then he’d pulled the card out, moved the post-it to cover the hour section, and waited three minutes. One more punch, to get the “:00 am” on his time card. And there you had it, four o’clock on the dot.
“Terrance,” Shane said, wiping the tears from his eyes, “you were a fucking genius.”