Frozen, part six

He woke up on 15th Street, naked. He didn’t remember how that happened. He took clothes off of the frozen pedestrians and dressed himself, then stumbled back to the Oval Office.

There his old friend sat, the phone pressed against his ear.

“Had a bit of a bender.”

The President stared back glassy-eyed.

“Fell off the wagon, I guess.”

The President watched him.

“Some fucking advice would be welcome right now, buddy.”

The President had nothing.

“Right, I get it. I’m my own man. I have to make my own way.” He stood and shook his fist in the President’s face, “I fucking get it!”

He paced for a while. “What to do?” He repeated that to himself over and over, a comforting mantra.

Then he stopped and cocked his head towards the President. “What?”

The President finally had some advice.

“Hah!” He said, wagging a finger, “Like I haven’t thought of that. That’s what I’ve been doing.”

The President expounded on his idea.

“You think that will work?”

The President was sure.

“Well, okay.” He shrugged. “You are the leader of the free world. I’ll try your idea. What do I have to lose, eh?”

The President’s plan was simple. Go back to the office. Sit in his tattered chair. That’s what the Shadow wanted.

He hiked back down to the APA building, then up to the sixth floor and his office. He sat in his chair and spun around. The two screens of his computer were frozen in place with his last act. On one screen, the one monitored by his supervisors, the Communications Database was frozen on Barbara Smith’s personal file. The author of a self-help children’s book. Smith was a perennial thorn in his side. The most mean-spirited author out there. He had first made her acquaintance over the phone on 9/11. As the second plane flew into the towers, and the Pentagon burned, she had harangued him on the phone for being distracted during her book order call. When he told her the news, she said that was no excuse and he should complete her order. Such cold-hearted, simple-minded brutishness was beyond him.

Though, to be fair, he couldn’t remember why he had called up her information again. Had he been on the phone with her? He couldn’t remember too much about the day he froze the world forever.

Well, not forever. He could release the world anytime he wanted.

The second screen was frozen on a game of Bejeweled Blitz. Almost tempting enough to make him unfreeze the world for a minute.

“Okay, Shadow!” he called out. “I’m here. The President says you’re trying to communicate…so stop fucking wasting my time.”

Ah, time. He giggled. He had lots of time.

Then he farted, and grunted, and felt a pain in his side. Actually, not as much time as he thought. He was getting old. The devil’s in the details. He should have added “never aging” to his wish. But wouldn’t immortality be just as troublesome as age? And, after all, that’s what got him in this position. Entropy increases. The world falls apart. You’re always losing out, in the big picture.

He sat for a while, mulling this over, when the Shadow returned.

“Ah-ha, you bastard!” he shouted, pointed at the wavering thing on the floor. “Now talk!”

Instead, it bounced and bopped and moved slowly out onto the floor, back towards the glass doors and the main hallway. He followed, eyes down and fixed on the Shadow’s sexless shape on the floor. It led him out into the hall and towards the stairwell once again, and he followed it up the stairs to the 12th floor. To the roof.

The stairs opened directly onto the roof – a wide plaza with a stunning view of the Capitol over the top of the Government Printing Office, the Bureau of Labor Standards, and the old Post Office building. Union Station loomed to his left as he watched the Shadow play across the chairs and tables set up across the patio. It lingered between two tables, close to the hip-high guard rail that stood between him and a 12-storey fall.

He grinned. “Oh, no.” He whispered. “It’s not that easy.”

What would the President do if he knew the Shadow was out for blood?

“You have to talk to me, first.” He strode towards the Shadow. “You can’t be a coward about this. If you want me to jump, you have to say why!”

The Shadow wavered, then went over the edge. And he ran after it, screaming. But he stopped before he canted over the edge and wheeled backwards, laughing. He sat on a table, chuckling to himself, and then he thought – well and why not? He was an old man, now. He could never release the world. What place would he have? Everything and everyone around him hadn’t aged a second since he last saw them.

And he thought of her. He thought that, maybe, there was something else out there to be had. Something else left to do. He had frozen the world and achieved nothing. His life had become a quarter century of meaningless wandering.

“I’ve gone mad, haven’t I?” he asked the patio, the chairs, the tables, the buildings around him. “I’ve really lost it, haven’t I?”

Maybe he was ready for the next step. Perhaps that’s what the Shadow was telling him.

Here’s a theory – he wasn’t long for the world. Who knows what was going to happen. A drunk was going to take him out while he was crossing the street, or a fucking cinderblock would fall on him, or he’d fall in the shower. Whatever. Some stupid little thing that would snuff him out like a light. Maybe, when he froze the world, he cheated death. Like the President’s phone call. Maybe it was about a missile strike and he was to be snuffed out in some atomic freakout.

So the Shadow was death cheated.

No! That was part of the madness. He had years left. He had the time. He wasn’t going to die on the roof of his fucking office building. How pathetic was that. And suicide, no less. All of this, and he ends chasing shadows. No way.

He stood up and ranted in the direction the Shadow had taken, though it was long gone from his sight. He shook his fist and screamed every curse word he knew – except one.

Then he turned and headed back for the stairs.

The Shadow was there. Blocking his way.

He stomped the concrete, as if trying to scare off an animal. He stomped again, and growled, “Fuck off.”

The Shadow didn’t move. Then it lunged towards him, drawing back almost immediately. As if it were also trying to scare off an animal.

He went to walk around it, and it shifted so it was still in his path. Then it lunged and, somehow, without any sense of being touched, he found himself flat on his ass.

It all came to him in a rush. Fucking the First Lady in the ass, and the countless traffic accidents he had set up across the nation in his travels. The women he had molested and the people he had tortured, though they hadn’t felt a thing. The Shadow knew. It knew everything bad he had done. It had been after him his whole life. He heaved one of the deck chairs at it, and it easily danced out of the way. He leapt, then came down hard on top of it, only to have it dissolve around him and coalesce again right next to him. His knees and spine, jarred from the jump, almost failed him. It didn’t take much for the Shadow to knock him over again.

He crawled away from it, laughing hoarsely under his breath. He started to turn and curse it, but found himself out of breath. He moved to the far end of the roof, Union Station behind him, and First Street far below forever frozen with lunchtime traffic.

“You want me to free the world, right?” he hissed at the Shadow as it danced and weaved towards him. “You want me to let it go, right?”

The Shadow stopped just in front of him, and he felt the guardrail dig into the backs of his legs as he stood up to face it.

“You won’t get it.”

The Shadow caressed him, and he flinched away. Then it seemed to build up on itself and lunged for him again, aiming to send him falling to his death. He dove to the side, scrambling against the concrete and twisted his leg, then rolled away from the guardrail. The Shadow teetered on the edge of the guardrail, as if caught by surprise. It seemed to be a victim of its own momentum and he watched it fall, listened as it emit an eerie scream.

He realized it was the first sound he had heard in 25 years and he clamped his hands over his ears and cried out against it. Then he rose and limped towards the stairwell, moving from a limp into a weird hobbled run, suddenly panicked. He hit the stairwell and took them two at a time, breathlessly laughing. He shouted over his shoulder, “I got you, you asshole! I got you!” His laughter rose into peels of manic, hyena-like guffaws, tears rolling down his eyes, and he lunged around the turn from one flight to another. At the sixth floor landing, he put his weight on his arm as he spun and then put his twisted leg down hard. It didn’t take his weight. He was getting old. Entropy increases. It folded under him and he tumbled.

His last moments were a confused blur, replaced by a white-hot starburst as he cracked his skull and his collarbone shattered. He lay twisted on the landing just below the sixth floor, gasping for breath, feeling the world slipping away from him.

There was something he should say. Something he had to do before he died. What was it? He had a responsibility… He pressed his hands against the concrete, he tried to say the word that would unfreeze the world, but all that came out was a weird, broken sound. Like a wounded crow. Then his arms failed him and he fell flat again, beyond pain, beyond thought. The white-hot starburst turning dark and cold.