The Outcast Hours Read online

  I walk around the glass table and sit down. The sounds of Sunset Boulevard at midnight float up from far below as the old guy slowly lowers himself into the armchair opposite me. Engines, and car horns, and the thudding drone of a hundred basslines from a hundred clubs and bars. Laughter, and shrieks of delight. Running footsteps. Squealing tires.

  But up here it’s quiet.

  I wonder how long it will take someone to notice I’m not where I’m supposed to be and come looking for me. Julia is in reception and Jason and Luis are somewhere between here and there, but everyone has their own schedule and nobody really checks on you on night shift. If you fuck up and forget to do something you’ll hear about it, but not normally until the next morning.

  So for now, at least, it’s just me and him up here.

  We’re alone.

  Barker settles the pistol on the arm of his chair. His finger isn’t on the trigger, but it’s close. The barrel is pointing at my chest and I feel a tightness there, like it’s projecting some kind of weight against my skin.

  Stay calm.

  “What’s your deal?” he asks.

  I shake my head. “My deal?”

  “Your story, son. Your fucking narrative.”

  “I work in a hotel,” I say.

  “I see that, you fucking smartass,” he says. “What do you really do?”

  I smile, despite myself, because I realise what he’s getting at. It’s a really common question in this town, where everybody wishes they were doing something other than what they’re doing, wishes they were somebody other than who they are. I don’t know if every cliché comes from something true if you go back far enough, but the ones about people who work in Los Angeles definitely do, in my experience, at least. It genuinely feels like every waitress is an aspiring actress, every barista has a screenplay in the trunk of their car, every bartender is just this close to getting a beat on Kendrick Lamar’s new mixtape.

  I’ve never taken an acting class, I’ve never written a screenplay, and I wouldn’t have the slightest idea how to work a mixing desk. I sometimes meet people at parties and when they ask me what I do they look totally incredulous when I tell them I work in a hotel. Then they ask me the same question Barker asked me. “Yeah, but what do you really do?” And I tell them the same thing I’m about to tell him.

  “I work in a hotel.”

  He smiles at me. “You’ve got a pretty wide fuck-you streak running through you, don’t you?”

  Yeah. Too wide.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe. I guess.”

  “Yeah, I see it right there in your face,” he says. “I could see it from fucking space. It ain’t a criticism, so we’re clear. There are worse things to have. Especially in this shithole town.”

  He fiddles with the cuffs of his shirt. For a second, his hand is maybe a foot away from the pistol and I imagine myself leaping across the table, grabbing it from the chair arm and rolling away out of his reach. But I don’t move.

  Of course I don’t.

  Barker looks back up at me, and replaces his hand on the gun. “You have to understand,” he says. “It was a different time.”

  “When?” I ask.

  “Before,” he says. “Things were simpler then. Better.”

  “OK.”

  “People were civilised,” he says. “They knew how to act. How to behave. Things were straightforward.”

  I shrug. I have no idea what he wants me to say, and I’m pretty sure he’s going to keep talking anyway.

  “Don’t get them pregnant,” he says. “Actresses, I’m talking about. That was the golden rule. And if you did, then you had to do the right thing. Pay for the scrape. Send a car. You know?”

  “A friend of mine is an actress,” I say.

  He nods. “Working?”

  “Sometimes. Commercials mostly.”

  “Good money in commercials.”

  “She was up for a movie once. The casting director told her the part was hers if she blew him.”

  “Did she?”

  “No.”

  “Did she get the part?”

  “No.”

  He shrugs. “There you go, then.”

  “What?”

  “You make your choices,” he says, “and you live with the consequences.”

  I frown at him. “You don’t think that’s a fucked-up way to behave?”

  “I think it’s how the world works,” he says. “Or used to be, anyway.”

  “You know what a power imbalance is?”

  “Get the fuck out of here with that shit,” he says. “I get enough of that woke crap from my assistant.”

  I can’t help myself. “You mean you did, right? Before you killed him?”

  He grimaces. “Watch your mouth, son,” he says. His voice is suddenly low. “You want to know what a real power imbalance is? When one man’s got a gun and the other one doesn’t. So just watch your fucking mouth.”

  He turns his head and stares out across the city for a long time. I don’t say anything. I just watch him. His eyes have clouded over, like he’s not really here anymore. Like he’s somewhere else. Or some time else, maybe.

  “I never hurt anyone,” he says, eventually. “That’s the honest truth.”

  “Maybe you don’t think so,” I say. “But that’s not a thing you can know for certain.”

  He grunts. “So fucking smart. Smart enough to be working dead shift in a hotel. You think you’re hot shit or something?”

  “I don’t think that,” I say, honestly.

  “There was a time when you’d have known my face soon as you saw me,” he says. “When I wouldn’t have even made it up to this fucking pool because the manager of this shitbox would have grabbed me in the lobby and given me the best suite in the place for nothing. You believe that?”

  “Sure.”

  “Yeah, sure. You don’t know your history, son. That’s your problem. You don’t know the men who built this fucking town.”

  “Jack Warner?” I suggest. “Louis Mayer?”

  “Smartass,” he says. He smiles at me and I almost smile back but then I look at the pistol and reality punches me in the gut, hard.

  I’d sort of let myself start to think that this was just like one of those times some asshole stops me on my rounds at some godforsaken hour of the morning and decides he really, urgently needs to have a conversation with me, right then. It happens pretty often, and my heart always sinks because they’re never the people you would ever actually choose to talk to: they’re the people who want to complain about how the Jews still run all of Hollywood, or how social justice warriors are castrating America, or who mention George Soros within about thirty seconds.

  Assholes, like I said.

  But inside the hotel, down in one of the long corridors, I can listen and nod and if I’m really not feeling their bullshit I can kind of tease them on it because I know that if shit turns south, if they suddenly decide that actually they don’t want some uppity minimum wage kid giving them mild shit, then management will have my back because their tolerance for assholes is not a whole lot higher than mine. Unless they’re famous, of course, but that pretty much goes without saying in this town.

  Here, though? Right now, in this moment?

  This is different.

  This is fucked.

  Barker takes a phone out of his pocket and starts tapping at its screen with fingers that don’t look like they bend anymore. And again, his hand is away from the gun, and again, I don’t move a muscle. I instantly rationalise it to myself: it’s a dumb play, he’s not going to shoot me anyway, better to just let this play out, you don’t provoke people who are clearly in the middle of a crisis.

  But it’s all bullshit.

  I’m too scared to make a move.

  I’m fucking terrified.

  “What’s your email address?” he asks, and despite everything, I have to fight back the urge to burst out laughing. Because he asks the question so casually, like we’ve just met at a pa
rty and had a cool conversation and he has to head home but wants to connect with me later.

  “Why?” I ask.

  “I want to send you something,” he says. “Bear in mind that when a man holding a gun asks you a question, you can assume it’s pretty fucking rhetorical. So just tell me your email address.”

  I tell him. He types one-fingered into his phone, then I feel the familiar buzz of a notification in my pocket.

  “Read that,” says Barker. He sits back in his armchair as I take my phone out, his hand resting back on the pistol. I open Mail and expand what he sent me. It’s a forward of an email that was sent to him this morning. I don’t recognise the name of the sender, but her address is from one of the trade newspapers that everyone in this town pretends to read every day.

  Dear Mr. Barker,

  I wanted to give you a heads-up about a story we’re going to be running on Friday. It concerns a number of allegations that have been made to me about you over the last month or so. If you’d like to make an on the record response, I’ll include it in both the print and online versions of the story.

  Best,

  Jenna Walker

  I glance up at the old man.

  “Go on,” he says. “Read it. The whole fucking thing.”

  There’s a PDF attached to the email. I click it open and start reading. When I’m done, I barely even feel disgusted. Because I’ve read this story so many times over the last year or so. The details change, but the underlying shit is almost always the same.

  “Is it true?” I ask. I know the answer, but I want him to tell me.

  “I don’t know,” he says. “Some of it, probably. I don’t remember.”

  “This woman,” I say, pointing at my phone. “The one whose mom acted in your movie. She says she was fourteen.”

  “What was I supposed to do?” he snarls. “Ask to see her fucking ID? She came onto me, son. It was her fucking idea, and you fucking bet her mom was cool with it. I just went along.”

  I stare at him. “Fourteen,” I repeat.

  “Hey,” he says. “Don’t you fucking take that tone with me. It was a different time.”

  “A better time,” I say. “That’s what you said?”

  “Goddamn right.”

  Barker’s face is flushed with anger, and the gun is trembling in his hand. But all of a sudden, the fear that started creeping through me when he first showed me the pistol seeps away. Because just like that, I see him clearly. It’s like someone turned a spotlight on and shined it right at him. His anger is real, I don’t doubt if for a single second, but it’s not the righteous anger of the innocent: it’s the anger that comes from being caught, and it’s not even really what’s driving any of this. What’s driving it all is fear.

  He’s scared.

  I don’t know of what, whether it’s going to jail or the end of his career or just what people are going to say about him tomorrow, but he’s so fucking scared. I can see it.

  And he knows I can.

  “Did you really kill your assistant?” I ask him.

  “Who the fuck knows?” he growls. “Her head was pissing blood when I left her. She looked dead enough to me.”

  Her head. She looked dead.

  I stand up. I don’t even know I’m going to do it, I’m just suddenly on my feet.

  “Hey!” he says. “Where the fuck do you think you’re going?”

  “I’m going to walk back inside,” I say, “and I’m going to carry on with my rounds and if anyone asks me I’m going to say that I lost track of time looking at the view.”

  “You aren’t going to do shit unless I say so,” he says. “I thought you understood the way this works?”

  “I understand,” I say. “I get it.”

  I stand in front of him. His hand is still on the gun, but now I don’t believe he’s going to use it. I don’t believe he ever was.

  “I was in line for a lifetime achievement award,” he says. His eyes are locked on mine, and his voice has dropped to barely more than a whisper. “From my guild. Do you think they’ll change their mind?”

  I shrug. He stares at me for a long moment, then nods. It’s barely more than the tiniest dip of his head.

  “Go on,” he says. “Get the fuck out of here.”

  I walk slowly past him, and along the edge of the pool. My sneakers squeak on the tiles. The lights at the bottom of the pool are blue and purple. Somewhere far below I hear the squeal of tires and a chorus of horns. The doors that will take me back inside, that will take me away from John Barker, are right in front of me. Maybe ten more steps. A dozen at most.

  I take one, then another, then another. Then I stop, and turn back, because there’s something I have to know. Something I won’t ever be OK with not knowing.

  “Are there even any bullets in that gun?” I ask.

  He’s slumped in the chair in the corner, his gaze fixed on the horizon. But he looks round at me, and nods. “One.”

  I don’t say a word. He smiles at me, a wide reptilian smile, and in it I see something of the man he used to be, the man who did the things I just read about, and a shiver races up my spine.

  “Aren’t you going to try and talk me out of it?” he asks.

  “Why would I do that?”

  He shakes his head. The smile disappears, and he looks down at the floor. “You have to understand,” he says. “It was a different—”

  I turn away and head for the doors. Part of my brain is screaming that I should run, that I should already be screaming for help or calling the police, but I force myself to walk, and I don’t make a sound.

  I’m still waiting for the shot when I step into the elevator.

  Ambulance Service

  Sami Shah

  Nazeem counted down the seconds. His shift started at nine and for over two decades he made it a point to never pass through the entrance until the watch hands were exactly at the hour. It was a personal victory, meaningless to everyone else, and perhaps never even noticed by the others. But to him it mattered. The night, and all it wrought, wouldn’t begin until it absolutely had to. So he stood on the sidewalk, looking at his watch.

  “Thirty-four Mashallah, thirty-three Mashallah, thirty-two Mashallah…”

  There were no Mississippis in Karachi. The street buzzed around him—people passing as they walked in and out of the chai shop next door; a legless beggar cruising in a trolley at knee level, propelled by the power of knuckles-on-concrete; a fat one-eyed dog proudly carrying a tikka bone; a juice vendor balancing pint glasses of neon-green sugarcane juice to a family of six that had arrived on a single motorcycle; and suffusing it all, an ether of mosquitos and flies.

  “Twelve Mashallah, eleven Mashallah…”

  He had been leaning against the shoulder-high cot just outside the building entrance. A bare steel crib, containing a thin mattress, suspended under a bright blue tin roof. Painted in bold letters across the roof was

  DO NOT KILL INNOCENT BABIES

  PUT THEM IN OUR CRADLE

  (DO NOT GIVE IN HAND OF ANY BODY)

  BEGUM BILQUIS EDHI

  In winter that cot stayed empty for weeks at a time, but on a stinking, fuming summer night like this, it was rare to find it so—Nazeem had long ago theorized it was harder to tolerate an unwanted child when its wailing was accompanied by the droning of mosquito hordes and sweat-soaked clothing. If he hung around a few hours, the cot would have an occupant again, maybe one still alive.

  “Three Mashallah, two Mashallah, one Mashallah,” Nazeem said. Then, “Bismillah ir Rahman ir Rahim.”

  He pushed through the saloon doors. Anjana Bibi sat just past the entrance to the Edhi Ambulance Center, lit more by hysterical splashes of color emitted by the small television mounted on the wall than by the humming tubelight. Rumor had it she was older than Allah himself, and her face certainly looked it; calcified folds of wrinkled flesh all converging to a point where a small mouth was anointed with enough red lipstick to resemble a raw wound. She whispered a g
reeting, Nazeem was sure of it. Even if the television wasn’t blaring some breaking news that was never really breaking news, she was impossible to understand, speaking as she did with the hint of a shadow of a glance of a whisper. Her job was to take donations when they were brought in, and write out a receipt, the legibility of which was remarkable given that it took her several tries to even get pen nib to find paper.

  “Walaikum-asalam Bibi,” Nazeem guessed.

  The betel nut face tightened for a second in acknowledgement, which was the signal for him to continue inwards, through the next set of doors and into the back room. White tiled floors and walls—or rather they had once perhaps been white, now each tile was the color of whatever had splashed, accrued, or settled on it over the years. Against the wall was a desk and a chair, the desk missing a drawer and the chair missing a leg. Pushed in next to them was a bed that Nazeem always said was the least comfortable bed on earth, given that its frame wobbled with every deep breath, and the mattress was so worn through his back pressed against the steel ribs beneath. Yet every time he’d needed a nap during the 12-hour shifts, that bed had carried him into the deepest of sleeps more effortlessly than his bed at home ever could. A fan spinning overhead was too close to the light next to it, shadows strobing across the room. Above the entrance he had just come through were eight framed photos of drivers who had been killed, a pleasingly small number. Standing between him and the desk, looking up at the pictures, was the kid. Barely eighteen, dressed in a crisp white shalwar kameez already with the red high-visibility jacket worn over it, and hair parted precisely down the middle. Were it not for the mustache, he would have looked to Nazeem like a toddler in grown-up clothes.

  “Bilal, right?” asked Nazeem.

  The boy startled, realizing he wasn’t alone in the room. Those nerves will loosen quicker than he thinks, Nazeem thought.

  “Nazeem sahib,” he said, straightening and practically spearing Nazeem with his open hand.