1.l.
He had been
following this woman, this Tanya Jefferson, for what seemed like hours. Maybe it was.
He wasn’t quite sure. He had not
only accepted her claim that his name was Don Jones, but he thought he could
recall some moments of Don Jones life as well.
“Look, I know
this is only the first of many exit signs that you will be installing today,
but I need to know the location of the actual exit, the one that all these
signs eventually lead to,” Tanya said to the maintenance man.
“I don’t
know. I guess you could follow me as I
work and we’d get there eventually.”
“You don’t
know where the exit is?”
“There’s the
employee exit, but that’s through a restricted, ‘employee’s only’ area.”
“Take us
there, then.”
“Can’t. Employees only.”
“Come on. We’ve been trying to leave for–”
“Does he have
a schematic or something?” Mr. Jones asked.
He was shocked by the sudden appearance of the intelligent thought.
“All I got is
this Plan-O-Gram and I’m not supposed to skip ahead. These things are rarely correct, but if I get
the pages out of order I could never hope to get the job done right,” the
maintenance man said.
“What’s your
name?” Tanya asked.
“Jed.”
“Look,
Jed. We really need to get out of this building. So please, give me the Plan-O-Gram. Just for a second.”
“But–”
“I know it
makes you nervous,” Tanya continued, her voice velvet and honeyed, “but I used
to create Plan-O-Grams for a multi-million dollar corporation so I know what
I’m doing.
Jed
hesitated.
Tanya smiled,
pleasant and reassuring.
Jed handed her
the small stack of unstapled papers. He
bit his lip and asked, “So when those things are being drawn up, are the people
actually on site?”
“You’ve
probably seen dozens of these things, Jed.
I think you know the answer to that question.”
“Yeah. I always pictured a room with a bunch of
suits sweating it out over some graph paper, chewing on the erasers of number
two pencils. Never once having been at
the location they were planning out.”
“Oh Jed. It’s worse than that. Computers.
We plugged numbers into a computer and the computer calculated where
things ought to go. We didn’t even
double check the figures before we sent the plans off to the printer and I
think the measurements came from early blueprints, nothing from the actual
site.”
“Seriously?”
Tanya
nodded. “And we always held back the
final copies as long as we could so it would appear as though we spent a great
deal of time and effort working out every last detail.”
“I knew it!”
Jed shouted. “Always knew it was some
sort of bullshit like that.”
Tanya passed the
Plan-O-Gram back to Jed then grabbed Mr. Jones by the wrist and dragged him
down the hallway.
“It’s just up
ahead,” she said. “Right around the
corner.”
Mr. Jones’s
felt a stabbing pain in his temple and his vision flickered between color and
black and white. The familiar face of
Franklin D. Roosevelt replaced the image of the hospital corridor as the color
disappeared.
Seconds later
he saw the hallway and Tanya again.
Then black and
white. FDR in a large office.
Color. Tanya in front of him pointing toward a door.
Black and
white. A man in tights, his briefs on
the outside and a domino mask obscuring his face.
“Ew,” Mr.
Jones said.
Color. Tanya opening the door.
Natural light
surged into the corridor and a silhouetted form stepped forward; the piercing
light unable to illuminate his obscured, shadowy features. Tanya jumped back, narrowly avoiding a
roundhouse kick from the shadowy man.
The exit door closed and the man’s face became discernable in the
antiseptic glow of the hospital fluorescents.
Mr. Jones’s
vision strobed between color and black and white but the face he saw remained
the same in both fields of perception.
Somehow he recognized the man.
Deal Breaker.
Dan? Was that it? Deal Breaker Dan?
Then Mr. Jones
was completely overtaken by black and white imagery.