–:–:– — / 0:28:10 BVST
I grabbed Tommy by the sleeve and pulled him from the crowd. We made our way to the control room.
I need to know.
A desperate itch had landed, and I needed to see her.
Tina had been in the ballroom before. I distinctly remembered it. Still, I wanted proof.
Who else would’ve left the letter for me?
“Tommy, you any good on a computer?” I said, hoping he wouldn’t be one of the dumber billionaires. He had made his fortune in computer games, so there was a chance.
“I’m okay. You know most people don’t believe it, but I was the programmer on my first three games.”
I did believe it. My nephews loved those games. But that was before they found the cult. Or the cult found them.
That would’ve been before TomCoFun, Inc., was founded, I figured.
We entered the control room.
Tommy stopped.
“Is this the whole thing?”
I know the feeling.
He shook his head.
“Smaller than you thought it would be?”
“Yes, by like a lot,” Tommy said.
I pulled the chair out for him.
“Sit, please. This is the…”
“Video camera workstation,” Tommy completed.
“You’re thinking Teddy was murdered?”
What?!
His question froze me like a Zen koan.
Several seconds slipped by without a word.
I shook my head.
“No. That was clearly a suicide. I don’t care about that. I mean, I didn’t mean, I meant…”
“Dude, it’s okay. I get it. It’s not like he’s really gone, right?”
I nodded at this.
“Hell, he’ll be back in just under three hours, thirty-two minutes.”
Twenty-eight minutes! That’s all the time that’s passed?
I felt flustered and out of my depths. This was not the utopia I’d signed up for, helped codesign, finance, plan, and execute.
“You know, Tommy, I’m starting to question the wisdom of this whole enterprise,” I said sitting in the room’s only other chair.
“Yeah, me too. This place is looking a whole lot less like heaven than I thought it would.”
I sat there for a beat.
“We were fools. Weren’t we? Trying to engineer a heaven?”
I didn’t have an answer that would satisfy Tommy, so I just shrugged.
“So, the video?”
“I’m not concerned about the engineer. I need to see Tina.”
He flinched as if I’d struck him.
“Dude! She’s gone too?”
I shrugged.
“Oh fuck, man. I’m sorry.”
I did not know how to respond. So, I opted for honesty.
“Yeah. She even left me a Dear John letter. She propped it against my wineglass,” I said, tapping my coat pocket.
“I got you, man,” Tommy said, his fingers flying across the keyboard, scrolling through menus, searching for Tina in the video footage.
I leaned back, figuring it would take him a few minutes.
“Got her,” he said a few seconds later.
I jerked forward, both eager and anxious as hell to see my lover again, if only digitally.
Tommy had paused on her when she first stepped into view.
“You need a minute, brother?”
“No, I’m good. Play it.”
I’m not good at all.
My god, she was so strikingly beautiful. Tall. Lean and curvy. She was wearing the white silk suit I loved so much. With the blue silk blouse. Her long hair slowly whipped as she jerkily lurched forward the twenty yards to the street. She reached the sidewalk and then turned to the parking lot.
“You know for a bunch of rich people, you would’ve thought we might’ve sprung for better cameras,” Tommy said dryly.
Tommy paused it right after she exited the footage.
That’s it.
It didn’t feel like a ‘that’s it’ moment at all.
“You sure you don’t need a minute, boss?”
Boss? What the hell?
It was inevitable that the others would look to me for guidance considering the engineer’s absence.
A memory then.
The engineer had tapped me on the shoulder, right when Tina had walked in earlier. That was the last time I’d seen either of them.
“Keep playing it, Tommy.
“You got it, bo…”
“Maybe cool it with the boss stuff? Please.”
He looked sheepish like I’d caught him doing something bad.
“Sure. No problem, man.”
The video played.
For a long time, nothing happened.
Tommy clicked the video slider control and hurried the playback along.
“There,” I said, seeing a figure in a gray suit quickly enter, zip to the street, and disappear in a second.
“Yep,” Tommy said.
He slid it back and let it play at normal speed.
“You know, I don’t even know his name. I always just called him the engineer.”
I couldn’t tell if Tommy was asking his name or not. I was too shocked to answer if he was. I knew the guy’s name, of course, but I was ready to shut down. Hard.
Tommy detected my befuddled state and continued without me.
“I only saw him at the few meetings we had. You know the ones where everyone attended,” he said, wagging an index finger toward the door. Behind which lay twenty-nine others and one corpse.
“I mean, why would he do it? You know what I’m…”
“Tommy! You feel like having a drink?
He looked at me. It wasn’t like me to interrupt people when they spoke. It was one of my pet peeves when people did that to me.
“You buying?”
A joker.
“Sure,” I said.
I knew the party supplies would be replenished in a few hours. As would Teddy, now forevermore 38 special. One thing I didn’t know, none of us knew, was whether we’d remember all of this. Still, we budgeted for a lot of alcohol. A lot of drugs, both legal and not so much so. We were forging our own universe, our own country, our own republic. In it, there was no such thing as illegal drugs. So, we had some good stuff at our hands.
“I must warn you; I’m planning on drinking as much of our stock as I can.”
“You not worried about a hangover?”
I started to answer, but Tommy remembered, and it was then I decided I liked him better than Maguire. In fact, he became my favorite billionaire in the ballroom.
God, I hope I remember this.
I wondered if that would be a good thing or a bad thing. If I didn’t remember maybe, it wouldn’t matter, and everything would happen the same. But I’d love to put some four-hour blocks between me and here, I thought, patting my coat pocket that held her last letter to me.
(to be continued…)
Stories by Shawn 