by Rowan Massey
I did.
I broke free of all the murky weirdness of the world, and things turned crystal clear like cold, bottled water. My body was gone and forgotten. I was a part of the sky and the ground. A part of everyone was a part of me.
Thank you. Oh fuck, thank you!
I looked around, and all the colors blurred, turning gray, then exploding into existence again, in a beautiful rhythm. It all went on so long it might as well have been months. I didn’t know if it would ever stop, so as usual, I said my silent goodbyes to Spitz, Veronica, even Nando, just in case I didn’t survive this one.
But my trip started to slow down, blurs became people, some of them familiar. I saw one guy I really loved to watch dance. He was amazing. He was a tall, skinny dude with tangled hair down to his ass. I tried to dance the way he did, in unison, but it seemed complex, and I didn’t have any music left in my own head.
I looked all around, but Spitz was nowhere in sight. Seeing over everyone’s heads to get my bearings was always impossible, but I’d learned the tops of the trees, and I could see that I’d moved over to the far end of the field.
We had a system. When we got separated—which was usually—we went to the street side of the field and walked along back and forth, until we ran into each other.
I cut my way to the edge in a long angle, not really wanting to be outside of the crowd. I still felt amazing. I was grinning at everybody who would look at me. A few volunteers passed me and smiled back. One tried to hand me a wet cloth for my face, but I waved him away. They were all gray-haired and carried red, plastic boxes on their belts for picking up needles. There were rarely needles here, but they did it anyway. Sometimes they picked up glass. All their kids had died here. That’s why they did it.
“Wally,” someone said behind me, “going up or down?”
I turned, and the doc was looking at me with his chin down. Such an old man. So serious. I gave him a grin.
“I don’t know what down is,” I said.
He smiled a little, but he never smiled like he was actually happy. “Will you do a questionnaire with me?”
I rubbed at my neck. He was always wanting to talk to me and Spitz because we’d been taking fielders for so long. He did science about us.
“Sure,” I said. I might have said no if I’d been “going down”.
“Thanks. Let’s sit over there.” He gestured over at a clear patch of dirt, and we walked to it and sat cross-legged. I took my back pack off and hugged it.
“Are these the same questions?” I asked.
“Some of them. Is that okay?”
I shrugged so he took his pen off his clipboard and held it ready.
“How happy do you feel on a scale of—”
“Ten. Always.” I said, like always.
“I just ask to make sure nothing has changed. Do you ever feel as if ‘ten’ and ‘zero’ gain new limitations? As in, getting higher or lower than you’ve ever been before?”
That was a new one.
“Nope.”
He wrote it down. It made me laugh to myself. He actually wrote “nope”.
“Do you remember my name?” he asked.
I tilted my head and scratched it. The blood was getting itchy.
“I know who you are. I haven’t gone retarded overnight.”
He shook his head. “I don’t think you’re stupid. I just don’t know if you know my name. All the kids just call me ‘Doc.’”
I shrugged.
“Atul Sardana. Just call me Atul, if you like.”
Yeah, right. I grinned and held my hand out for a shake. “Nice to meet you.”
He shook my hand, just humoring me. I’d known him for over two years.
“What’s your full name?” he asked.
“I have no idea,” I lied, and stuck my tongue out at him. I ended up licking the piercing on my lip, playing with it. Spitz and I had made the loops out of wire and pierced each other for Christmas.
Doc had asked me that before, of course. For no reason, I kept my name to myself. I just liked having one secret, even if it made no sense. A lot of kids did that.
“What else?” I asked, pointing at his clipboard.
“Did you have any new experiences?”
“Nope.” Another old question.
“Are you afraid of death?”
“No. Are you afraid of life?” I smirked.
“Sometimes.” He was smiling but seemed serious about it. I felt bad for him.
“Why don’t you just take fielders, instead of having to ask this stuff?” I asked, half serious.
“I can’t,” he said, after a moment. “I wouldn’t be able to do this research objectively.”
I didn’t know exactly what objectively meant, and he could tell I was lost without my having to ask.
“Without taking sides,” he explained.
“If you say so.” I poked a finger into the dirt, making a little pile of it. He had a side. If he didn’t like to think he did, that was fine.
“Let me show you something.” He took a paper from under the other papers on his clipboard and gave it to me. It was a circle with a lot of little pie slices in it. Each piece had a shade of red, blue, yellow, and so on. Every slice was labeled with the name of an emotion. There were a lot of them, and it didn’t make any real sense to me.
“All the stuff on the top half are bad,” I noticed.
“Do you think you could tell me all the ones you’ve felt in the past week?” he asked.
I looked at it for a little bit, then folded it so that the top was hidden, and handed it back to him. He took it from me and was quiet. His head was down. He stared at it like it was making him sad. I almost wanted to pat his back and tell him it was okay, whatever the problem was. Life was probably weird sober.
“Do you have a job, Wally?”
“We collect cans, bottles, and plastic, and all that. It sucks.” If we didn’t find enough, we didn’t eat, and there were a lot of people collecting. Lucky for us, we always found enough money for our drugs. Otherwise, we would be dead because withdrawal always kills you when you’re a fielder. Some fielders sold tats and piercings, cigs, sugary drinks, or just pick-pocketed. Spitz and I had done all of that.
He nodded and looked me in the eye for a few seconds, waiting for something. I was used to the way he did that with everyone, and I just looked at him back. His brown eyes matched his skin, kind of the way the colors on his emotion wheel moved into each other; red next to orange, orange next to yellow, and so on.
“I’d like you to work for me,” he said. “Do you think you could do that? Show up on time every day and pay attention?”
I laughed and leaned away. What did he think I could do for him?
“Want me to ask people questions for you?” I asked.
“I don’t think so. You wouldn’t always be doing anything, to be honest. I need someone to be there just in case something needs doing, and to do the smaller jobs around the lab to help me save time.”
Me? In a scientist’s lab? I laughed again, feeling shy, and shrugged my shoulders up to my ears.
“Can I still come here every day?” I asked, and felt stupid.
“Of course. You wouldn’t be a slave. And I don’t want you to die.” He smiled at me like I was a dumb little kid. “It’ll be every day. Five dollars a day and a meal. How does that sound?”
“What could I do with the money?”
“It’ll be yours. I have no say.”
I nodded. I knew that. I was just thinking out loud.
“Okay,” I said. “When?”
“Tomorrow at noon. That way you’ll be able to come to the field at the usual time. It’s four to six hours a day. You’ll get five dollars so long as you show up.”
“And a meal?”
“And a meal.”
“Deal.”
He wrote down his address on a little piece of paper, and I stared at it a second. That was the fancy area of Emporium. Wasn’t it unofficially against the
law for me to go near those nice houses? I didn’t say anything, just stuffed the scrap of paper in my pocket.
I spotted Spitz and jumped up and waved. He waved back, grinning big, and jogged over. When he got to me, he barely slowed down before crashing into me and giving me a big hug. I squeezed him back. Because of the way fielders worked, sometimes it felt like we hadn’t seen each other in a year. It didn’t matter that we knew it had only been a couple of hours. He let go, slapping me on the back. I told the doc I’d be there the next day. He said he’d be expecting me and walked away.
“Don’t you get annoyed with that guy?” Spitz asked me.
“No, why? He’s not bad. He…” I hoped Spitz would be okay about the job. I already felt weird for planning to leave him on his own for six hours every day. I hoped he would be able to hang out with his girlfriend and just be glad about the money. It was enough to buy our fielders and food every day. Our ribs would stop showing for the first time ever.
“He what? Did he try to touch you?”
“What the fuck, man!” I made a face. “No.”
“You have a crush on him?”
“Oh my god. He’s old. I do have eyes in my head.”
“Then what?”
“He’s giving me a job. He just wants me to do the easy stuff in his lab.”
Spitz stopped walking and stared at me. His eyes got wide.
“Dude, please don’t,” he said. “What if he gets weird with you, and you’re locked in some building with him? He’s trying to creep on you.”
I raised an eyebrow. “That’s not going to happen.”
Some shit had happened to him a year back, and I couldn’t blame him for being paranoid about men, but Dr. Sardana wasn’t a creep.
He made a frustrated noise and shook his head.
“Whatever, Walls. I think it’s a bad idea,” he said.
“Five dollars.” That got his attention. “We’re gonna eat. Like, not vitamin soup. Real food.”
“Shit, okay. Go get felt up. I’m starving.”
I punched him hard in the shoulder, and he came back at me fast. We fought in our usual way, hurting each other enough to leave a few light bruises, but not really fucking each other up. In the end, he kicked the back of my leg, and I fell on the ground, some kind of plastic crinkling under me. My tail bone hurt, and my bag slipped off one shoulder.
“Fight me like you really mean it,” I groaned, and he laughed. I managed to smile and laugh a little too. He helped me up and brushed me off.
“How are you the first one to get a job?” he said. “I’m the smart one. You’re the pretty one. That’s why I’m worried, man. Just seems weird.”
We walked towards the dead bodies. I’d almost forgotten about them.
“I think it’s just because I’m nice to him and answer his questions every time,” I said.
He sighed but seemed less upset the closer we got to the dead people. I was with him on that. It was a familiar thing to see bodies laid out on the ground, arms and legs straightened out by volunteers. We could be next, right beside these, and sometimes that was calming. Who knows why.
There were two of them. Two guys. One of them I’d never seen, but the other was a fielder. I didn’t know his name.
“Aw,” Spitz said, “he was a good dancer.”
That was the thing to say, but he really had been. People were coming by and taking a look. Some of them seemed a little sad, but a lot of them were faking it because they were supposed to. I wished they would be more honest and just smile down at them.
Somebody had made a paper flower from a tissue and tucked it into the neck of the fielder’s shirt. It had blood on it from the cuts that had dripped through his black hair. I crouched down by his head and touched him. I did this sort of thing a lot, and I could always feel how different it was compared to a living person—no warmth or movement at all, like a soft stone. His face was smeared with blood and dirt. It seemed right to be near him, and it was hard to understand why I’d been afraid of it being a downer earlier in the night.
I slowly ran my hands over his face. Spitz grabbed my shoulder, and gave it a warning squeeze, but he let me open the guy’s eyes so that he was looking at the sky. I could only get them to stay half open.
“Steve walks warily down the street, with the brim pulled way down low…” I sang, and stood up. I did the song much slower than Freddy Mercury. That way, it sounded more like something you should sing at a funeral. “Another one bites the dust, another one bites the dust…”
I always sang it for dead fielders. Every one. I was singing the whole thing exactly the way I wanted it to sound. I shut my eyes and pushed my voice to do everything it could to sound nice. People were stopping to listen. It was hard to tell if people liked it, or if they just thought I was a freak, but it didn’t matter.
When I was done, Spitz made me go down to the little station the volunteers kept up, and didn’t let me touch my face or head until we got there, which of course, made my nose itch. They had a lot of potable water, and a woman gave us each wet cloths to clean up our faces. She washed my hands with a lot of alcohol, splashing it over my hands, which always seemed like a waste. I could tell she was tired of seeing me every time I’d touched a body. She was grabbing my wrists in a rough way and making an angry face, so when she was done, I smiled and touched her shoulder.
“Thanks,” I said. “I’m sorry your kid died.”
She turned around, jerking her shoulder from my fingers, and started putting the used rags in a bin.
“Let’s go,” Spitz said, he was leaning against their van, almost falling asleep that way. I went over and put his arm around my shoulder so he could lean on me as we walked. He stank. We both stank like pigs, and we still had to find a place to crash.
“I want to stay here,” Spitz said, after a few blocks of walking. We were barely picking our feet up.
“We’re only halfway there.”
“I know. Let’s just stay here tonight.” He stopped and slumped into my side. “Please, man. This sucks.”
“You do this every night,” I said, and huffed. I pushed him over against a wall, and he sat against it. It was over as soon as he took his back pack off and hugged it, laying his head on the top. We wouldn’t be going any further.
Staying on this side of downtown wasn’t safe. The old projects weren’t far, along with the only clinic left that would take cash, an underground pharmacy, a couple of shelters for abused women and children, and then things like the railroad station, a party house, the list went on. There were a lot of reasons for desperate and fucked up people to be around.
But when Spitz was done, he was done. I was exhausted too. I was feeling the weight of my own bones, but I knew I had to find us a decent spot to spend the night. I went down every nearby alley, and they were all a little crowded for comfort. Looping back to Spitz, I kicked him and complained, but I was wasting my breath. In the other direction, there was a big area at the top of some steps. We never slept in plain sight though. It was tempting just because it was under an overhang, but I checked around the side of the building instead. On the sidewalk around the corner, there were plastic pallets propped up against the wall. I grabbed one like it was free gold and dragged it off in a direction I hadn’t checked yet. Pallets meant no sleeping in the crud and piss puddles; less mice and bugs running around right past your nose and into your blankets.
There was an alley with just one woman in it, and she looked passed out, so I dropped the pallet behind a dumpster and let it slam against the concrete. She had a big piece of cardboard over her. Her blanket was thick, and it wasn’t that cold. Not cold enough to die or anything. I stood there and bit my lip a few seconds before figuring, fuck it. I took it off her as carefully as I could and put it over the pallet so the holes in it wouldn’t dig into us.
Back with Spitz, I smacked him a couple times to wake him up and get him to walk. I dragged his bag behind me. He would only be slower if I made him carry it. When he saw
the pallet, he collapsed onto it and went right back to sleep. I tossed our packs over his head so they were against the wall. I laid his blanket down and shoved him over onto it, then laid down and covered us with mine.
“Spizzy,” I whined, “it’s fucking cold.”
He didn’t respond so I spooned him, arm around his chest. He hated that because he’d woken up a few times to my morning wood. I wasn’t thrilled about his dick in the morning either, but I figured he could win that one since it wasn’t as gross to me because I was gay.
He sighed like he was about to take on a huge chore and turned over, so I did too. I became the little spoon, we were sharing body heat, and I could finally go to sleep.
Chapter Two
I woke up to the sharp crack of bullets flying and hitting concrete and glass. Spitz was flinching with each shot, gripping my arm so hard it hurt.
“Let’s hide,” he whispered.
We quickly gathered the blankets and packs, and huddled together with our backs to the side of a dumpster, hugging our stuff. I looked over at the woman. She was breathing but was as unbothered as a corpse. If she were more alert, I’d have worried about her waking up and stabbing us for taking her cardboard.
“I hope it’s over,” Spitz said. “One block over? It was quick. No cops will show up.”
“Yeah, maybe it wasn’t a big deal, but we should have kept going. This place sucks.”
We sat in silence for a while, waiting to see if anything else would happen, and eventually our heads hit our packs, and we slumped down onto the pallet again. The sky was turning gray instead of the deep black it was at night. The crack of the bullets was still echoing around in my head. Fielders don’t pay much attention to the violence and other things going on in town because only the dance matters. Our time walking around in the human world is just a temporary situation that we get to escape every night, sometimes for years at a time, sometimes as other creatures, depending on how good the batch is. It wasn’t usually a gang thing, since Dread Red didn’t have rivals in town. That was all I knew about gang stuff. It was probably just people robbing each other. I closed my eyes and sang songs in my mind, mouthing the words. It’s a good way to keep lyrics memorized.