Three A.M. Read Free Page B

how he and the people who worked there took it. I guess one asshole couldn’t. At first I thought maybe it was sentimentality. Of the few government or business files Eddie housed, only one file had been tampered with, and it seemed nothing had been stolen. Some cash, but not much, had gone missing too.
    If there had still been functioning banks or insurance agencies or whatever, it would have been much easier to lock the situation down. But there was only cash, and it had been that way for years … maybe ten, eleven years, in fact. I never really understood the factors of inflation and free market economies, the bullshit that mattered in the global world I grew up in, but in the mist, a dollar was a dollar: a piece of paper I held until I spent it on scotch or stuck it in a hole next to my bathtub.
    I liked it that way. The last bills were printed well over a decade ago, so whenever you’d exchange money, you were guaranteed it would be worn, soft, and faded. It was oddly comforting. A touch of before. Seems like it should have been worthless, but we were all so damn nostalgic for some semblance of order that we bought it, so to speak. Funny what a few rectangular pieces of paper can do. Or make one do.
    I sighed, resolved to review my notes, and got my little gray plastic tape recorder out of a cabinet, setting it by an outlet next to the couch. There were only two outlets in my apartment. I plugged my sun sphere into one and whatever else I needed rotated in and out of the other. You could see where there used to be five outlets in the place, but with power as precious as it was now, a residence as small as mine got only two. Some buildings had been taken off the grid altogether and left to molder; some—mostly government facilities—were aglow at all hours of the day. Not sure who made the decisions, but the lights always came on when I flipped the switch, so why bother wondering? At least we didn’t pay for electricity anymore. My parents used to get on my case for leaving lights on or the television playing. I missed them, but was glad they died before everything changed. When I thought of them, it was in a perfect vacuum of then, never touching now.
    They both got sick, like most everyone else, and died mercifully fast. At least Dad did. I hoped she did too. I wasn’t with her at the very end. I still wondered sometimes if they had lived longer whether I would have been different. But just as soon as they were gone I joined the service, and deep down I was so fucking bitter about it all that I never thought about them for long. They were from before, after all. Thinking of them meant thinking of it all.
    So Eddie. Poor Eddie losing money and data that led to more money lost as tearful, indignant families took their files and pictures and film and videos elsewhere. I flipped on the tape recorder and pressed rewind, planning to relisten to all my notes and observations and then make a decision over whom I’d try to scare a confession out of first.
    A few photographs and documents he’d let me borrow lay littered about on the coffee table. In only one of the dozen-odd pictures was there even a trace of the fog. It was a picture of a gnarled little pine tree. The sun still fell upon the grass around the tree, but it was soft, diffuse. The picture must have been taken in the last few days of light.
    I cracked another beer and sat down to listen to my canned voice mumbling out observations and hypotheses. I reused my tapes so much, their quality was always shot and a scratchy, humming white noise played under my every word, but before long, I wasn’t paying any attention anyway. I was thinking about her. Rebecca. It’s strange how quickly you’ll start to assemble fantastic notions about people you don’t know from a hole in the ground. Before long, I was picturing things she might say and how I might respond. I pictured her smiling at me, wearing that red dress here in my shitty little apartment. Then she was