Based on a character of the same name from the short story, The Jaunt, by Stephen King
He reached over and toggled the Nil Switch into the off position, then turned to his desk, where he sat down and lit a cigarette, enjoying the sudden peace and quiet of the station. Lester Michaelson took a long drag from the unfiltered Pall Mall and slowly blew smoke into the air before grinning.
It was Sunday morning, and with no tours listed on the daily manifest, the whole day was his to do with what he wanted. He got up and strolled down the narrow corridor to the back of the facility, his home for 17 years.
“Punishment, they said, for criticizing the new Corporate ownership, as if you could punish a man for telling the truth,” he thought.
The irony was not lost–a piece of hardware that warped time, making travel time more efficient, and here he was, banished to a place where time meant nothing. The memory led to another.
“They called it the thermoprismatic dilator,” Lester thought, pulling a towel from the bathroom shelf. “But it was mine,” he scowled at the memory. He laughed, “Thermoprismatic dilator sounds more like a sex toy than a piece of time-saving equipment.”
He showered quickly, dressed in jeans and a worn tee, and slipped into tennis shoes—no stiff uniform or steel-toed boots today. Outside, his Tesla truck sat waiting. The thing was as quiet as the desert around him.
The air was dry, the sun harsh even this early, but Lester barely noticed. He slid into the driver’s seat, backed out, and pointed the truck south, heading out of Silver City.
Once, Silver City had been something, a town filled with people, with noise and purpose. Now, it was a skeleton, propped up by the sand and heat.
He passed the Tahoe Beer building ruins without a glance, drove the five miles to the end of the route, and turned onto U.S. 50, heading toward Dayton. He liked the rest stop there—the M—where he could grab a six-pack and a breakfast burrito without anyone bothering him too much.
Or so he hoped.
He loved pulling into the large lot and pulling up to the building. It was always busy, and it was hard not to notice one of the only antique vehicles in the area.
That was Lester’s weaknesses, antiques, and being cock-sure of himself, which got him into trouble with people.
“Don’t need anyone telling me what’s right and wrong,” he said before exiting the stainless steel vehicle.
He parked, went in, grabbed his supplies, and was back out within minutes. But as he reached his truck, he saw them: a small crowd of curious onlookers circling his vehicle like vultures over a dead horse.
“Old thing, ain’t it? What is it? How’s it run?”
Lester answered in clipped, irritated syllables. He hated questions.
Questions led to more questions, and sooner or later, someone would pry too deep. Lester did not like Deep.
He impatiently answered them as he hastily sat in the front seat and closed the door. As he pulled onto the highway, he pressed the button for the horn, and the vehicle blasted out an old-fashioned sounding steam train whistle.
Back home, by-passing the one-armed bandit and a mid-twenty-first century pinball game, he went to the back porch, overlooking the crumbling Silver City Post Office building, unfolded a deck chair, setting it next to a small table, and sat down. Lester enjoyed a beer and the burrito before taking a nap.
As the afternoon gave way to evening and that gave way to nighttime, Lester double-checked the schedule for the morning before turning in.
—
Morning came, and he got up, showered, dressed, made a cup of coffee, and walked down the hall to his desk. In fifteen minutes, a group of 35 Japanese tourists would be arriving for a tour of the Comstock. He had time for a smoke.
And such were the days and nights for Lester Michaelson. He enjoyed the quiet that followed him from room to room, giving him a chance to remember. One of his favorite recollections was his first wife, Pam.
“That was a woman,” he thought. “Too bad I was so busy, and she got tired of waiting.”
He remembered the late afternoon when he came home, and she met him at the front door and announced she was heading to her mother’s in Atlanta. That’s where his life took a shit and fell apart, landing him in the Nevada desert.
“Luck was with you,” old man Johnson had smiled, “She took only the jewelry she came with, her clothes, and two favorite cooking pans. She could have taken you for everything.”
Lester hadn’t thought of it that way, but it didn’t help his attitude, as he got mouthy with the Corporation taking the project over from the military. He had spent ten years in the Army learning the ins and outs of the process and had gotten so good that promotions followed and responsibilities increased–until they didn’t.
His forced move to the high desert had come with loneliness. To that end, he started going out to the area casinos in Carson City, Reno, Las Vegas, Boulder, and Henderson and soon hooked up with a pretty cocktail waitress from the Hard Rock in Mesquite.
Angela was a hot number, with no problem running around the station, naked, tits and ass as bare as the day she was born. At first, she was a distraction–then she wasn’t.
He quickly learned she had a champagne taste and out-spent his beer budget. It caused fight after fight, leading her to leave for lengthier periods, going to god only knows where.
Tired of the endless arguing, he refused to give her money, save for a couple of dollars each pay period. She returned to waitressing and then bartending.
“Kept her out of my hair,” he remarked.
And soon, his second marriage was on the rocks and sinking. Angie threatened divorce three, then four times, promising to destroy his life in the process.
He knew she was the sort to live up to her promise. So she had to go, and she did, to part unknown.
—
At first, it was subtle, the sudden movement he would catch at the periphery of his eye. Then, whatever it was would remain long enough for him to turn and look towards it before it vanished.
It left him angry at first. Once, he threw a cupful of coffee at the thing and had to clean up the mess and patch a hole in the wall.
Then, it frightened him into thinking cheese had slipped off his cracker. He stayed awake much of the night, lights on in every room, removing any chance the dark mas had at forming in a dark corner.
The lack of sleep took its toll, and he nearly made a mistake that could have cost the lives of several dozen people arriving on vacation. That’s when the big bosses from the Corporation came to the station.
They found a once-tidy building nearly wrecked. There was trash stacked, creating narrow paths leading to and from the living quarters and down the hallway, to which the entrance was now masked by a filthy drop cloth hung like a curtain.
Lester Michaelson was also wrecked, unshaven, uniform dirty, and wrinkled. It looked like he had not eaten in days, perhaps a week or more, and he wreaked of stale cigarette smoke.
He was placed on medical leave immediately and removed to a hospital in Ojai, California, near corporate headquarters. Technicians came in and poured over his logs, examined the machine, and searched the station, including his living area.
“We can’t find anything wrong with him physically,” a doctor said.
“How about mentally?” came a follow-up question.
“Normal,” was the answer.
“Emotionally?” another question came.
“All we can get out of him is that he can see her at the periphery of his eyes,” the doctor said.
“Her?” someone asked.
“Yes, like a ghost or a spirit, as best we can gather from him,” the doctor returned.
Six months of hospitalization did nothing to resolve what the medical establishment called hallucinations. Still, Lester struggled to sleep, sitting up, arguing with nothing, yelling at the air to stay away.
—
“How are you doing, today, Lester?” the Head of Security asked.
“Same as always,” Lester said.
“We found an anomaly,” the Head of Security said.
Lester answered, “Yeah?”
The Head of Security looked to his left at another security executive, who asked, “Where is your wife?”
“Atlanta, as far as I know,” Lester said.
“Not Pamela, Angela,” the Head of Security said.
Lester smiled and looked down, “Gone.”
“Gone where?” came the question from the other executive.
Lester continued to look down.
“We already know the answer, Lester,” the head stated. “We just need to hear it from you though.”
Lester looked up and smiled, relieved, knowing he would no longer be tormented by his shadow darting in and out of the corner of his vision.
“I put the bitch through the machine, the Nil Switch off,” Lester said.
The two men shifted in their seats, understanding.
“Was she asleep?” one said.
“Did you use Jaunting Gas on her?” the other asked.
“No,” Lester answered coldly, “She was tied up, wide awake, and screaming when I pushed her through, turning the Nil Switch on.”
The two men sat facing Lester for some time, absorbing what they had just heard. Each man knew that to turn on the Nil Switch was to condemn her to eternity in whatever lay beyond the leaded vail that lines the entrance, protecting the operator from time-expansive particulates.
After his confession, Lester stopped talking. Not even his attorneys, the best the Corporation could afford, could get him to speak.
He sat silently in court, staring into a far corner as if he could see something the jury could not, his face wearing a rabid smile. He refused to participate in his trial, even when the doctors testified he was sane.
After nearly three weeks, the jury convicted him, and the judge sentenced him to death. Once back at the prison, this time on death row, where he never spoke again.
Nor did he speak when the warden asked if he had any last words. Instead, Lester Michaelson stared into a corner to his right and smiled.
—
Slowly, the light of the nearly white execution room disappeared. The voices and the sound of the machines, the one monitoring his heartbeat and the other slowly pushing the kill juice into his left arm, vanished, overtaken by silence and darkness.
As he awakened, Lester met a cacophony of noise he only knew from movies and documentaries — a freight train. He could feel what he could only think was a desert wind, hot, dry, and hard.
Then he saw it, all of it, eternity, which included his wife Angie, still alive, hair white, eye bulging and bloodshot, tongue half-chewed and bloodied, reaching for him.
Lester Michaelson welcomed it.
The Old Blog in the Desert 