A Sad Fool's Errand

“Twenty-five years, man. I’ve been looking for you for twenty-five freakin’ years. I thought it was a joke when she hired me. Well not exactly a joke. No one was laughing at anything those days. There were no jokes. Jokes were outlawed.

“But a fool’s errand. That’s what I thought it was. A sad fool’s errand. Dozens of detectives like me were hired to find dozens of people who were buried under tons of collapsed rubble. We knew they weren’t out wandering the streets. But we did our job. We looked for them. Almost as if we gave a damn.

“After a couple weeks, everyone gave up. Everyone but one guy. That guy was me. I never give up. That’s just how I’m put together.

“I don’t give up. Why? Because I really do give a damn.

“I stumbled around starting and stopping and stalling and forgetting for years. But one day, things changed. After Trump got elected for the second time, so it wasn’t that long ago. There was a universal cataclysmic shift in how the world worked. The all-knowing brave new world was suddenly fully here. We were all totally naked. All the time.

“Everything, everywhere was wired and recorded. Your computer, your phone, your TV, every store front and back porch and dive bar – they were all eyes and ears and they never slept. Face recognition. Voice recognition. Body carriage recognition. Bots everywhere. AI pouring through everything you’ve ever done or thought about doing. Even your DNA was floating around out there to be captured and analyzed and identified. And every person on the planet had their own production company in their pocket. There was nowhere to hide.

“All this stuff is archived and stored in perpetuity somewhere – the cloud, some gargantuan hard drive or a billion small hard drives or some digital place none of us has heard of yet. You can find it if you know where to look. Now I know where to look.

”So I looked there. And now I’m here.”

Fritz nodded. He got it.

I liked the guy. He looked a lot like me. We’re both about five ten, one seventy, brown hair, brown eyes. We were basically twin generic middle-aged white guys.

We were sitting in the cheap rented room where he lived in Spokane. I was on a red Naugahyde chair. He sat on the corner of the bed. The bathroom was down the hall.

“You were just going to work like any other day. And just as you got there you saw the first plane hit. And you turned around.”

Fritz finally spoke. “And I never looked back.

“I slipped onto a Greyhound bus in New York – the schmuck who sweeps the floors at the biggest restaurant in the world – and here I am now a bum in Spokane. With a different name. Was somebody else’s name back then. A guy I found in a room very much like this one.”

“You killed him and assumed his identity.”

“Wasn’t hard to do. Disappearing is not that hard to do, Sam. If you know how to do it. I know. I bet you do too.”

Yeah. I do.

I asked “Are you happier than you were in New York?”

“No. I’m miserable. My life still sucks.”

Then he asked “Are you happy? Now? In New York City?”

“I got a wife, a kid, a dog, a couple good buddies.”

“If you disappeared, would any of them come looking for you? The wife?”

“We don’t live together. She wouldn’t miss me.”

“The kid?”

“He’s grown. Haven’t heard from him in a couple years.”

“The buddies?”

“They’d think I took off somewhere. I do that all the time. They’d just keep drinking. They wouldn’t give a damn.”

“The dog?”

“Well, the dog would give a damn but he wouldn’t organize a search party.”

“You’re a free man, Sam.”

I said with a laugh “We’re always free to be who we are.”

“Or to be who we aren’t,” Fritz replied. “Or aren’t yet. You can be you. Sure. But you could also be me.

“And I could be dead. Again. Only this time for real.”

“No. Twenty-five years ago, maybe. Couldn’t get away with that now.”

“Why did you find me, Sam?”

“Because I was looking for you.”

“Why were you looking for me?”

“Because someone asked me to.”

“Bingo! Otherwise no one would ever have known I didn’t rot there in the streets with three thousand other poor sons-of-bitches.”

“You’re right. Even with all this new surveillance bullshit out there nothing ever happens unless someone starts using it. It doesn’t start itself. Somebody has to set it all in motion. Someone, somewhere has to actually give a damn.”

“You did good work, Sam. You found me. Now what are you gonna do with me? My wife won’t want me back after twenty-five years. I’m presumed dead. She’s moved on. You didn’t think it out this far, did you?”

“No.”

“Shoot me and you’ll be doing both of us a favor, Both of our lives suck but you can start a new one here. Just like I did. Maybe you’ll do more with it than I have.”

I pulled out my gun. It’s a small revolver. Plenty powerful to kill a man. Wouldn’t be the first.

I looked around the room and I looked Fritz in the eye. It was not a bad room. Fritz was right. This was no worse than my small apartment in Queens. I’d have no ties here though.

No different than back home really.

This could work.

I pointed the gun at Fritz. He looked defeated. Fritz had given up.

But not me. That’s just the way I’m put together. My life might suck but I don’t give up.

Ever.

And I give a damn.

But, hell, I could be wrong. Wouldn’t be the first time for that either.

There’s more than one bullet in that gun.

THE END

BIO: Fred DeVecca has been a free-lance writer of non-fiction feature stories for newspapers and magazines for over 30 years, mainly in the field of arts & entertainment. He was born in Philadelphia and grew up in Wilkes-Barre, PA. He has a degree in English Literature from Wilkes University and has written, produced, edited, acted in, and directed three low budget independent films. His mystery novel THE NUTTING GIRL was published by Coffeetown Press in 2017. 4 of his short stories have recently been publish ed in Men Matters Online Journal, Killer Nashville, Luminara, and Freedom Fiction Journal. He lives in Shelburne Falls, MA where he managed a revival movie house for 15 years and now enjoys reading, writing, swimming, film, music (especially rock and traditional folk), Morris dancing, making pizza, meditation, following the Red Sox, all things noir, a stimulating community of friends, walking the New England countryside, and his long-haired German Shepherd Layla.

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