One of Us Read Free

the world where people apparently cared about defective appliances. I pulled my jacket on and started shouldering my way through the people around me. A pathway opened up, lined with sullen faces, and I slunk toward the door, feeling incredibly embarrassed.
    "Wait, Hap! Wait for me!"
    At the sound of the clock's little feet landing on the ground, I picked up the pace and hurried out, past the pair of armed policemen moonlighting as guards in the passageway outside. I clanged through the swinging doors at the end, hoping one of them would whip back and catapult the machine back over the bar, and stomped out into the road.
    It didn't work. The clock caught up with me, and ran by my side down the street with little puffing sounds of exertion. These were fake, I believed, little sampled lies. If it had managed to track me down from where I'd flung it out the window (for the last time) in San Diego, a quick sprint was hardly going to wind it.
    "Thanks," I snarled, "Now everyone in that fucking bar knows my name." I swung a kick at it, but it dodged easily, feinting to one side and then scuttling back to face me.
    "But that's nice," the clock said. "Maybe you'll make some new friends. See: Not only am I a useful timepiece, but I can help you achieve your socializing goals by bridging the gulf between souls in this topsy-turvy world of ours. Please stop throwing me away. Hap. I can help you!"
    "No, you can't," I said, grinding to a halt. The night was dark, the street lit only by stuttering yellow lamps outside Ensenada's various bars, restaurants, and rat-hole motels, and I felt suddenly homesick and alone. I was in the wrong part of the wrong town, and I didn't even know why I was there. Someone else's guilt, my own paranoia, or just because it was where I always used to run. Maybe all three—and it didn't really matter. I had to find Laura Reynolds, who might not even be here, before I got shafted for something I hadn't done but remembered doing. Try explaining that to a clock.
    "You've barely explored my organizer functions," the clock chimed, oblivious.
    "I've already got an organizer."
    "But I'm better! Just tell me your appointments, and I'll remind you with any one of twenty-five charming alarm sounds. Never forget an anniversary! Never be late for that important meeting! Never—"
    This time the kick connected. With a fading yelp the clock sailed clean over a line of stores selling identical rows of cheap rugs and plaster busts of ET. By the time I was fifty yards down the street, the mariachi band was at full tilt again behind me, the businessman's voice soaring clear and true above it, the voice of a man who knew who he was and where he lived and what he was going home to.
     
    I'D ARRIVED IN MEXICO late the previous evening. That, at least, was when I'd woken to find myself in a car I didn't recognize, stationary but with the engine still running, by the side of a patchy road. I switched the ignition off and got out gingerly, feeling as if someone had hammered an intriguing pattern of very cold nails into my left temple. Then I peered around into the darkness, trying to work out where I was.
    The answer soon presented itself, in the shape of the sharply defined geography surrounding me. A steep rock face rose behind the car, and on the other side of the road the hill disappeared abruptly—the only vegetation bushes and gnarled gray trees that seemed to be making a big point of just what a hard time they were having. The air was warm and smelled of dust, and with no city glow the stars were bright in the blackness above.
    I was on the old interior road that leads down the Baja from Tijuana to Ensenada, twisting through the dark country up along the hills. There was a time when it was the only road in those parts, but now it's not lit, in bad repair, and nobody with any sense drives this way anymore.
    Now that I was out of the car, I was able to recognize it as mine, and to dimly remember climbing into it in LA much