Free Man of the Hour by Peter Blauner

way they moved, swinging their arms and shoulders. As if they were born to rule the wide open spaces. He could never be like that. His steps were small and careful. He’d known confinement for too long. Even today, he felt his collar choking him. But the more he tried to relax, the more he found his legs locking.
    Don’t feel anything.
    He tucked the bag under his arm as he walked by a band of laughing, singing girls in matching blue Nautica jackets and entered the lobby. He saw the blue plaster walls and the Celebrate Diversity Week posters. That familiar awful ammonia smell hit him. Trust in God and think like a gun. This would be the hardest part, getting through the metal detector. He turned, expecting to see the guard who’d let him in without a pass last week, a sluggish, sleepy-eyed Puerto Rican guy named Miguel who’d actually been in his class a few years back. But today, there was someone new; an alert-looking fiftyish black man wearing a blue blazer and gray slacks with sharp creases, carefully checking student ID cards. Nasser looked at those sharp creases and felt his heart jam.
    Merciful God! This hadn’t been anticipated, though it should have been. Unlike Miguel, this guard would surely check his ID and make him write his name down on the visitor’s sheet, leaving a direct trail of evidence for the police. They’d find him right away and drag him off to jail with all the abeeds and the Spanish criminals.
    All at once, the lobby didn’t seem as vast as it once had. It felt as cramped and claustrophobic as a phone booth. His breath stopped in his throat and his intestines seized in torment. He had to get out. Without thinking, he turned toward the big square of sunlight pouring in through the front entrance and walked out. The steps down to the street seemed to go on for miles and miles, like the slope of a mountain.
    He imagined he could hear the clock ticking in his bag, while down below the crowd on the sidewalk had thickened, with hundreds of kids leaving. For the first time, he noticed a burly man with a video camera and a slender, blue-suited lady with a microphone talking to a group of students over by a wrought-iron fence twenty feet away. Other kids were behind the woman, pushing one another out of the way trying to be photographed, grinning stupidly and waving. A television program. Somebody had actually come here to make a television program, perhaps because the governor was visiting. There was a chance they’d already taken his picture. Nasser looked at his watch again and saw he had a little over six minutes. His heart throbbed in time with the jerky quartz movement of the second hand. That was not scared, what he was before. This was scared.
    He turned and started to walk around the side of the school, heading for the back entrance. He remembered there was a hatch for an old coal chute near the doors. But as he came around the side, he saw dozens of students lounging on the back steps, smoking, drinking from brown paper bags, kissing each other blatantly. No, this was no good either. Now that he finally wanted to be invisible among the kids, everyone was looking at him. Maybe he’d never been invisible after all.
    He ran back around to the front of the school, knowing he probably had less than five minutes. Panicking. He was absolutely panicking. The hadduta would blow up in his hands. The camera man and the lady with the microphone were setting up on the front steps of the school, in order to interview students with the amusement park skyline in the background. The carpenters were still banging away at the wooden stage nearby, leaving no opportunity to slip the bag under the slats without anyone noticing. And just to complete the nightmare, here was Mr. Fitzgerald, his former teacher, coming out through the front entrance, trailed by that Jew, Mr. Rosenthal, and two dozen ill-behaved students from his sister’s class.
    This was the greatest mistake of all. They were supposed to be gone