Free The First by Jason Mott Page B

sometimes manifests itself among coworkers.
    Surely this was all that was happening now.
    Just then the elevator chimed its soft resonating ding. “In the Hall of the Mountain King” spilled out. Shortly thereafter someone screamed.
    Startled, Edmund turned just in time to see Melanie Johnson collapse on the floor. She was an older woman, known mainly for her friendliness and for the rum balls she brought to the office each holiday. Her eyes were locked on Edmund, her thick red hair framing her terrified face like a halo.
    Edmund looked around. Far off, at the opposite end of the office, people were staring at him. “Call a doctor!” he shouted, pointing near the elevator where she had fallen. He fanned her face with a magazine he found on a nearby desk. “Melanie, wake up, dear,” he cried nervously. He looked around for a blanket or jacket to put over her.
    Just then the elevator chimed once more. The doors opened, and inside the elevator were a host of Edmund’s coworkers. “I think she’s just fainted,” Edmund said.
    One woman in the elevator covered her mouth, her face slowly transforming from that of surprise to an expression of outright horror. “It’s okay,” Edmund said, still kneeling beside Melanie. “We’ve called for a doctor. Just give me a hand. Can I borrow your jacket to cover her with?” He extended a hand.
    Seconds passed and still no one moved. The elevator doors tried to close, but someone standing frozen in the doorway caused them to reopen. “Well, don’t just stand there,” Edmund said. “Help me!”
    Just then the woman who had been covering her mouth issued a bloodcurdling scream.
    * * *
    In the first couple of hours it had been considered little more than a hoax. It was assumed that Edmund had faked his death in order to gain some strange type of fame. But then people from the hospital began to come forward, telling their stories of how Edmund William Blithe had been utterly and irrevocably deceased, his body so broken and crushed in the bus accident that there was no possibility of a hoax. They had dental records, and the morticians and funeral staff came forward to confirm that Edmund Blithe was dead, his earthly body drained, embalmed and interred.
    Still, somehow, almost exactly one year later, Edmund showed up for work at the accounting firm that had employed him for the past seven years.
    It was those initial images of him—standing outside his office building among the scrum of reporters and policemen and confused coworkers—that tormented Emily the most. Edmund looked overwhelmed. Like a child caught in the middle of a stampede, hoping simply for something or someone to hold on to.
    Emily spent that first day making phone calls and getting bounced from one unhelpful person to another. It went the same way every time: she called, she asked for information, they asked if she was Edmund’s wife, she said no, they apologized for not being able to help her any further. It was a script she knew by heart.
    She saw on the news that he was being held somewhere outside D.C. Why they’d taken him out of North Carolina without even allowing him the chance to contact his loved ones Emily struggled to understand. A spokesman for the local police on the television said that Edmund was being moved “for the safety of everyone involved.”
    “What does he mean ‘For the safety of everyone involved’ ?” Emily asked her mother over the phone. She paced back and forth in her apartment, in front of the television.
    “I’m sure it’s nothing,” her mother said. She was one of those vintage Southern women, the kind who refused, as a matter of decorum, ever to admit that anything was out of hand.
    On the television the news announcer seemed to be grappling with the very same question. She looked offscreen to her cohost and asked what the government meant by the statement. “People are afraid out there,” her cohost said. He was a well-tanned, dark-haired fellow with a hard