3 a.m. (Henry Bins 1) (20 page)

Matt walked to the front of the room,
settling in directly in front of the flat screen. That second Y,
that extra Y that someone had decided to tack onto the old reliable
lettering that had been imprinted on my DVD player, that
unnecessary Y that was causing me more grief and anxiety than the
Bar exam I’d been studying for, was still visible, clinging to the
right edge of Dr. Matt’s lab coat.

Matt cleared his throat and in a voice a
hundred pounds heavier than his body, he told us his name was Dr.
Raleigh. He had a disarming manner about him and you could almost
feel the collective pulse of the room drop a hundred points. He
said, “Now I’m sure you have plenty of questions and over the next
couple days, I will try to answer most, if not all of them.”

“
Where are we?”

Twelve heads turned and stared at the black
man who had blurted out the question we’d all been thinking for the
past three days. At least the question I’d been thinking for the
past three days. I couldn’t be certain how long each of my
classmates had been here.

Everyone whipped their heads backwards and
bore their eyes into Dr. Raleigh. He gave a wry smile and said,
“The truth of it all is that no one knows—”

I almost heard myself yell, “What? What do
you mean nobody knows. What kind of lame answer is that?”

If I did say these words aloud they were
drowned out by a woman bursting into tears and someone—I think the
same black man—jumping out of his seat and screaming, “Nobody
knows! My ass! Where the fuck are we?”

“
He wasn’t
finished.”

I looked at the young girl. She was staring
at the black man, her video game held in one hand. “He wasn’t
finished,” she repeated.

The man sat down. The room went silent. I
found myself fighting back a smile.

Dr. Raleigh looked at the small girl and
said, “Thank you. You’re right, I wasn’t finished.”

He waited for her to acknowledge him, but
she was already back to her video game. Already in the process of
stealing a car. Or killing a hooker.

Dr. Raleigh looked up and said, “As I said,
nobody knows what this place is, or where it is. The truth is that
it doesn’t matter. This is, for all intents and purposes, the same
as where you came from. Where we all came from. It’s the same
Earth. Same solar system: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter. All of
them. The food is the same, the weather is the same, TV is
basically the same, the buildings look almost the same, the cars.
Most things are the same. There are, of course, some small
differences, but we’ll get to that later. The only major difference
between where you are now and where you were is, everyone here has
died.”

I noticed he didn’t say
that everyone here was
dead
. For all of us, all thirteen of
us, plus Dr. Raleigh, we were very much alive. Not ghosts, not
replicas of our old selves. This wasn’t heaven or hell, or some
sort of purgatory. We were the same exact person on the same exact
Earth and with, as far as I could construe, the same exact
problems. Only we had died. Only the seven-year-old girl next to me
forgot to take her insulin and she’d died. And I couldn’t shake the
image of Joni Isaac bending over to get her notebook and I was
jerking off in the shower and I slipped and hit my temple on the
water spigot and I’d died.

I looked around the room. My comrades didn’t
seem to feel as relieved about the prognosis as I did. For the most
part, faces were still stricken, eyes still puffy, heads still
down. But then again, most of these people had families. Families
they would never see again. Kids, they would never play with again.
Other than me, the teenager, and the young girl, there was a good
chance everyone in this room had children they would never again
lay eyes on.

For the first time in my life, I felt lucky.
Lucky I only talked to my parents for six or seven minutes once a
year, five of those minutes spent listening to my father talk about
how his portfolio had grown in the last quarter and his recent real
estate purchases throughout Fort Lauderdale. Lucky my only sibling
was twenty-five years older than me, with a family, and a job, and
didn’t want to be a part of her accidental little brother’s life.
Lucky I moved out the day I left for college and never looked back.
Lucky I never took a dime of my father’s millions. Lucky I was a
loner.

No, I had no idea what any of these people
were feeling. How could I? How could I possibly know what any of
these people were going through? I couldn’t. Couldn’t even scratch
the surface.

“
Yes.”

I looked up. Dr. Raleigh was looking at one
of the menopausal fifty-something women. She had her hand
raised.

Dr. Raleigh said, “You have a question.”

She sniffed a couple times and said, “They
must have a name for this place. They must call it something.”

“
Actually they do.”
 He cleared his throat and said, “Welcome to Two.”

Chapter 2.

Orientation

Dr. Raleigh said he was
going to show us a short movie and if we still had questions after
the movie, he would answer them. The lights dimmed and SONYY faded
from the screen. The last movie I’d watched was the
Adventureland
DVD. I was
a movie fanatic, going to the theater once or twice a week,
sometimes with a buddy from law school, sometimes with a girl, but
mostly by myself. It’s sad that I wouldn’t necessarily miss my own
father, but I would miss Matt Damon.

The TV came to life, showing exactly what
I’d expected, a long-distance shot of Earth. And Dr. Raleigh hadn’t
been lying. It looked the same. Six continents. Four oceans.

A voice over began.

“
As you can see it is the
same Earth as you remember. And as far as our scientists can tell,
it behaves as such. But is it identical?  Probably not, and
for no other reason than a different group of people inhabits this
Earth. It would be foolish to think we would have the same impact
as our fellow humans had on the past Earth. And how long have
people been here in Two? Well, for as long as people have been
dying.”

The planet faded and small clips began
running. A series of businessmen and women hustling and bustling
into a metropolitan high-rise. A bunch of Asian people wading
through rice paddies, their faces partially hidden under large
straw hats. A professional football game. One team looked like the
Patriots, the other had the colors of the Raiders, but there was a
different emblem on the helmet. The Patriots were killing them.

I recalled what Dr. Raleigh had said, “Most
things are the same. There are, of course, some small
differences.”

The stadium was packed. People were still
screaming. People still had beers and hot dogs in their hands. The
Los Angeles Raiders look-alikes still sucked.

A voice-over began, “The population of Two
is 2.4 billion people. Roughly, one third of the 6.6 billion people
living on the past Earth. It is not known how people come to be
here. How they are chosen. Or if they are chosen. There is no
pattern.”  They ran a clip of every group of people you could
imagine—white, black, Russian, Muslims, Christians, Koreans, Jews,
militants. “No race, no religion, no sect, has a greater percentage
of its dead that come to Two.”

They showed news coverage of the recent
election. A reporter was asking a wrinkled old man, who had to be
in his nineties, about the new president. Underneath the old man
was the caption, “Ex-president John F. Kennedy weighs in on
president elect Jonathan Hart.”

I could hear the two old men in the back
rustling. I had a feeling this had hit home with both of them.

They showed clips from a tsunami that had
hit India and a bunch of soldiers unpacking aid relief supplies.
They showed clips of war. It appeared there was still fighting in
the Middle East. A news correspondent spoke of the fighting. A
couple countries had different names. Harazz. Jerualamabad.

They showed a clip from
the Olympics. The 2008 Olympics were held in Chile. They ran the
trailer from Heath Ledger’s new movie,
The
Flyaway
.

After another ten minutes of short clips
they cut to a man. He was standing on the steps of a government
building. I thought I recognized him, some local actor or news
reporter who had been in a plane crash when I first moved to
Colorado. He said, “As you can see, our world is the same as the
world you are used to. I’m standing here on the steps of the
capitol building in beautiful Denver, Colorado. As you can see it
resembles the capitol building you have seen or even visited in
your previous life. Of course it couldn’t be identical. It was
built by different people.”

I took a second to digest this. I’d assumed
that all these buildings, take the capitol for instance, had been
here. But that wasn’t the case. People had died, then people had
built a capitol building. It was only natural the people who built
it would want it to resemble the capitol building they remembered.
That’s why it was similar. But not identical.

The man continued, “In case you are
wondering, you are in Denver right now. You are sitting in a Two
Adjustment Facility or TAF.”

So, I was still in Denver.
Just a different Denver. I thought of that old Andy Garcia
movie,
Things to Do in Denver When You’re
Dead
.

Right.

“
You will remain at the
TAF for five days, whereby the staff will decide whether it is safe
for you to enter Two.”

This didn’t sit well with
me. A bit too
1984
for my taste. I’d basically been on my own since I was
thirteen and now you were telling me that after having my body and
brain poked and prodded, they were going to tell me if I was suited
for reentry.

I gave a quick glance at the door. If I made
a break for it, could I make it outside? Or would I be tackled and
sent God knows where? No, better to show I was a well-adjusted
young man.

Anyhow, the movie lasted only a couple more
minutes, then the lights flickered on.

Dr. Raleigh walked to the front of the room
and said, “Well, I hope that answered most of your questions. At
least for now. Over the course of the next five days many more of
your questions will be answered. Does anyone have any other
questions right now?”

I looked around. No one raised their hand. I
had plenty of questions, questions about how the little girl’s PSP
came with her, and questions about the cut on the side of my head,
and how if you died of cancer, did you still have cancer, and
questions about why one of three people who died came here and
where did those other people go.

I had so many questions. But like all the
others, I kept my questions to myself.

⠔

The door opened and two men walked in with boxes. They quickly went
around the room and handed a box to everyone. I opened my box and
found a turkey sandwich on whole wheat, an apple, a bag of almonds,
and a bottle of water. The exact lunch I’d gotten for the past
three days.

The men exited and Dr. Raleigh said, “I
thought we would have a quick bite to eat and each of you would go
around the room and tell us a bit about yourself. Where you lived,
your family, and how you died. This might be hard for some of you,
but I can assure you it is the first step to adjusting to your new
surroundings. Some of you may still be in denial and it might help
some of you accept the fact that your old life is gone.”

For the next twenty minutes, the only sounds
were those of lips smacking, the seals of bottles coughing, and the
crack of apples skins piercing. Finally, Dr. Raleigh said, “Okay,
who wants to start?”

No hands shot up. No one
wanted to be first. And especially, not
moi
. I didn’t enjoy public speaking.
Not a good attribute for an aspiring public defender. My chest was
starting to tighten and I could feel the blood racing through my
veins.

Dr. Raleigh began looking about the room. I
wondered if anyone else was dreading that he might look at them,
point, and say, “Why don’t you start us off?”

He raised his eyebrows a couple times, but
he didn’t point at anybody, nor did he say, “You there, tell us how
you died.”

After thirty seconds, the young girl next to
me said, “I’ll go. I don’t mind.”

You could feel the entire room exhale. The
average person would rather be in a room with a snake than stand up
and talk about themselves in front of a group of strangers. And if
the average person was anything like me, they would rather be
bitten by said snake before they would stand up and recount how
they died jerking off in the shower.

Dr. Raleigh said, “Why don’t you tell us a
bit about yourself, then you can tell us how you died.”

She shrugged and said, “Okay. My name is
Berlin.”

“
Berlin? Like the
city?”

Berlin rolled her eyes. “My mom was this
crazy hippie. Don’t ask.”

A couple people laughed. Including me.

She went on, “I’m seven. Like I said, my mom
was this crazy hippie and we moved around a lot. My dad is some guy
my mom met in Chicago. His name is Jack. Jack doesn’t come around
all that much. Like not at all. I saw a picture of him once. He’s
not bad looking, which is a plus. I mean, I’m lucky I don’t have
red hair or something. But I guess, if someone else had been my dad
and not Jack, I wouldn’t be here. Not here, like this place, I
probably wouldn’t have been born. Some other little girl would have
been. Or boy. I’m not really sure how all that works.”

I noticed everyone peering at young Berlin
the same. Everyone thinking the same thing, a bit profound for a
seven-year-old?