Acceleration

by Graham McNamee

  The scream is everywhere, surrounding me and pressing in as if it has a physical presence, trying to squeeze the breath out of me. I fight my way up in a blind panic, kicking and flailing my arms. A sound tears out of me like an answer to the scream blasting through the water. A strangled sound that uses up the last of my air.

  As I break the surface, all that's left of my own scream is a choked gasp.

  The sun's back, burning an intense white from a clear blue sky. My head whips around, expecting bodies floating facedown. But everybody's laughing, splashing, and alive.

  Wayne pops up beside me.

  “Are you nuts?” he says. “You kicked me in the chest.”

  I swim over to the side and pull myself out.

  “Where you going?” Wayne asks.

  “I’m done,” I tell him, my teeth chattering in the baking heat.

  “We just got here.”

  I hurry away from the edge toward the exit, not even looking to see if Wayne's following. My right hand is clenched in a tight fist, and when I open it I see the stupid locker key. I’ve been squeezing it so hard there's a tiny cut where the metal broke the skin. A drop of blood trickles down my wrist.

  I hold my breath rushing back through the showers to the locker rooms, barely feeling the icy bite of the water. After what I saw in the pool, I’m already cold to the bone.

  EIGHT

  Back in the stacks, I’m supposed to be going through expiration dates and packing stuff for the sale. Standing by my lawn chair, I consider my options. A little handball against the back wall, some light reading, or snooping through the lost suitcases and briefcases. Jacob doesn’t care. He reads his papers, does a jumble or a crossword, and listens to the afternoon baseball games on his pocket radio.

  My eyes come to rest on that putrid diary again. What to do with it? I grab a seat and reluctantly pick it up, opening it to where I left off.

  After the hotel fire there's another clipping that says: ARSON SUSPECTED IN USED BOOKSTORE FIRE. The accompanying photo shows a low-rise engulfed in thick black smoke. A scribbled note in the margin reads: No accelerant needed with all that paper. Maybe thirty cops and firemen responding.

  The bell rings twice. I flinch like someone just cattle-prodded me. The legs of the lawn chair scrape against the cement floor as I get up and set the open book facedown on top of a box.

  Whoever said burning books was wrong never read this one.

  “Looking for a golf club,” Jacob tells me at the desk.

  “It's a putter,” says a bright-eyed guy in a suit. He stands there, his hair gelled to perfection, drumming his fingers on his briefcase lying on the counter.

  “It's got a red leather grip,” he tells me. “And on the top it says ‘ninety-nine finalist.’ “

  “Okay, I'll take a look,” I say.

  Great, now I’m going to lose my putter. I’ve been practicing with it, using a box of Ping-Pong balls someone left behind on the subway. My putting green is the cement floor. For a hole I’ve been using a Star Trek collector's glass (Mr. Sulu, in case you’re wondering). Been getting pretty good at it too, even with the floor being a little slanted and all.

  Back in the sports equipment aisle, I hold the club fondly, feeling the red leather grip. ‘99 FINALIST is engraved right there on the base. I take a couple practice swings, sinking imaginary Ping-Pong balls. I was hoping this beauty would stay safe here until its time expired, so I could give it a nice home.

  “This the one?” I ask, back at the counter.

  His bright eyes brighten another hundred watts. “That's her.”

  The whole time I’ve been handling that putter I never knew it was a she.

  “I won this in the national tournament,” he tells us, holding the club up horizontally so he can sight down its length and make sure it hasn’t been warped.

  “You play pro golf?” I ask.

  “Pro miniature golf,” he says. “I won the city championship that year, and went all the way to the national finals.”

  Jacob gives me a sidelong glance, rolls his eyes.

  “Didn’t know they had pro Putt-Putt,” I say. “Is there any money in it?”

  “Some. When you get to the nationals.”

  He frowns, holding the bottom of the club up to the light. Probably scratched from my putting with it on cement. For some reason this makes me happy. This guy goes through life with his perfect hair and shining eyes. Like life's a dream. He could use a little scratch on his perfection.

  Man, Wayne was right. I do need a Happy Meal.

  Jacob makes Mr. Putt-Putt sign for the club in the register. When he's gone, Jacob looks over from his paper. “I don’t think I’ve ever been that clean.”

  I smile, shaking my head. Me neither.

  Jacob so rarely talks to me when it's not absolutely necessary that I’m always too much in shock to follow up on it.

  So I wander back to my lawn chair and pick the book up where I left off.

  The actual handwriting in the diary seems to change the deeper I get into it, becoming neater, more mature. My guess is he's been writing in it for years, the misspellings and mistakes growing more scarce. It's a thick book; two hundred pages maybe.

  As I read on, the fires get bigger and better. He goes into detail about how many fire trucks show up, the number of cop cars, how the fire advances. He must have been standing on the sidelines watching every one of his creations. His descriptions of the flames are almost pornographic. Real wet-dream stuff for the criminally insane.

  It's not the kind of diary where he'll describe his day. It reads more like a rap sheet, a journal of his crimes. There'll be page after page of clippings that span an eight-month period, but nothing about what happened in his life during that time.

  Enough of this! I skip ahead to the later parts of the diary to see how this twisted tale turns out.

  This is kids’ stuff, he writes after detailing another arson. Need something BIGGER.

  Then a few pages farther on:

  Been hunting. Riding the subway, searching the faces for the right one. All the pretty ladies sitting across from me. It's like an audition. A cattle call.

  The air stirs around me, just the slightest draft from a train passing through one of the tunnels overhead, but it sends a chill through me that raises the short hairs on my forearms.

  Hunting. He's hunting. He's moved past the animals and the fires. The “kids’ stuff.” Now he's going after bigger game. The real thing. A woman.

  NINE

  Dragging myself out of bed a little before noon on Saturday, I feel all twisted and sweaty, like I’ve just spent a few hours tossing around in a straightjacket. Passing by my parents’ room, I can hear the two big fans inside on high, blasting with the power of twin jet engines.

  Dad will still be sleeping. He started working the graveyard shift last week. That's midnight to eight in the morning. Then he comes home, showers, has a bite, and collapses into bed. Dad calls it the vampire shift—up at night, back in the coffin by nine A.M. It's the weekend, but he tries to stick to his backward schedule or he'll be all screwed up on Monday.

  He's a machinist at a factory that makes catalogues for Lands’ End and Abercrombie & Fitch. For eight hours a day, he walks the length of an assembly machine half a block long. It jams; he unjams it. It breaks; he fixes it.

  I don’t have to be real quiet. Dad uses heavy-duty earplugs to block out the sounds of the Jungle. He also wears a blackout mask over his eyes to fool his body into believing it's night. You could shoot off a cannon and fire off a flare and he wouldn’t stop snoring.

  In the kitchen, Mom's got the thick Saturday edition of the Toronto Star laid out on the table.

  “Hey, Sleeping Beauty,” she says.

  “Hmm,” I grunt. “What's for breakfast?”

  “Breakfast was three hours ago. You snooze, you lose. I had French toast.”

  She's wearing her I RAN THE 2001 TORONTO MARATHON T-shirt. She does that kind of stuff—exercises. Those
healthy genes must have skipped my generation.

  “What about your poor starving son?” I ask.

  “What do you want me to do, regurgitate something? There's sandwiches in the fridge.”

  Mom makes two kinds of meals. There's food we can eat, and then there's stuff only Dad can stomach. When he gets home, he stinks of binding glue and oil. The glue kills his sense of smell and numbs his taste buds. Everything he eats has to be spicy or it tastes like mud.

  So one sandwich has a red H written on the foil. H for hot. Dad's latest obsession is Spontaneous Combustion hot sauce—makes his eyes water when he eats.

  I grab a normal nonflammable one and a Coke. What I need is a caffeine IV drip pumping straight into my arm. Removing the sandwich from its foil, I peel back the bread and examine the contents.

  “It's meat loaf,” she tells me.

  I take a small bite. “Try again?” I say.

  Mom sighs. “Okay, it's tofu loaf. We’ve got a cholesterol problem in this place. One good pastrami sandwich will move your father into heart-attack country. You don’t like it—”

  “Hey, hey, I just like to know what I’m eating.”

  “Well then, eat up and shut up. Sweetie,” she adds, to soften the blow.

  I read the comics as I eat. You can’t trust tofu. I mean, you never see it out in the wild, like a cow or a banana or a zucchini. Tofu—even the word sounds weird, like someone sneezing in another language.

  She turns a page. “You were making noises in your sleep again last night,” she says quietly.

  I stop chewing. “What kind of noises?”

  “Oh, you know, kind of…whimpering.”

  I swallow. “Wasn’t loud, was it?”

  She shakes her head. “I only noticed because I don’t sleep all that well alone, with your father on graveyard.”

  She hands me a paper towel a second before I realize I need one. “You’ve got mustard all over your face,” Mom tells me. She sets her paper down and grabs some o.j. from the fridge. “I was watching this nature special last night— penguins down at the South Pole. After the mating season there are thousands and thousands of little baby penguins that all look exactly alike. And they’re all crying out for food. Not unlike yourself.” She reaches across the table and gives me a little shove. “So the mothers go diving for fish. And when they come back up, there are all these babies crying out for lunch. And how is the mother supposed to find her screaming baby in a mob of identical screaming babies? But every time she knows exactly which crying penguin is her crying penguin. It's a mother's hearing, tuned to that one specific frequency.”

  “Which means?” I ask.

  “Means I only have ears for you, baby.” She smiles as I groan. “So you want to talk about it?”

  I shrug. “Nothing to talk about. Dreams,” I say, shaking my head, like they have no power over me.

  Mom worries too much—those ears permanently tuned in to me. Late last year she made me go see a psychiatrist a couple of times, back when I wasn’t sleeping at all. He gave me some pills. They put me out—no dreams, no thoughts, no brain, no pain. But they left me groggy and a little dizzy, so I stopped taking them. Sometimes pain is better than nothing.

  “I’m here,” she tells me when I don’t say any more. “Always here.”

  “I know.” I give her a sleepy smile.

  She turns to the travel section of the newspaper.

  “You ever think of giving Kim a call?” she asks.

  “No. That's been over for forever.”

  “I know. But she was good for you.”

  “Yeah. Guess I just wasn’t good for her.”

  I take a long drink.

  “You know, that Coke is going to burn a hole in your stomach,” Mom tells me.

  “I just hope it kills the tofu first.”

  I read somewhere—or maybe I saw it in a movie—how people who lose a leg or an arm can still feel the missing limb sometimes. They'll get this impossible itch on a foot that isn’t there anymore, or they'll feel an ache where there's nothing left to ache. They call it a phantom limb, because of the ghost pains it still sends back to the brain.

  That's what Kim is like for me now—my phantom girlfriend. Gone, but still aching.

  And whenever I feel like waking up the ghost, I pull out the old photos.

  The thing is, these shots flatten her into two dimensions and freeze her in time. And that's definitely not Kim. She's always in motion. I’ve got pictures of her last summer over on Center Island, where they’ve got an amusement park and a working farm you can walk through. The way I remember it she was just exploding, really alive. Trying to swallow everything in a day, like she only had hours to live.

  But I’m looking at those photos now and all I see is someone who fits her general description. Whatever makes Kim Kim got lost in translation. The only shot that says anything about what she's like is one where she moved when I was clicking. She's a blond blur, rushing out of the frame.

  Kim plays center for Milton High's girls’ basketball team. They call her Big Bird, because she's almost six feet tall and has wild, feathery blond hair. I liked the fairness of her, the long-ness of her; I felt like an explorer, going over her body. There was this vanilla-scented oil she always wore, made me think of ice cream, made me think of licking her behind her ears.

  We were together about a year. Where it went wrong, where I screwed it all up, was after Kayuga Beach.

  Kim started volunteering at Gatherup, a drop-in center for street kids downtown. It's run by a guy named Father Darcy out of the Osgood community center. He's a priest, but he's okay. He doesn’t throw Bibles at you or anything.

  I told her spending time there was a bad idea.

  “Can’t you volunteer somewhere else?” I said to her. “That place is a real hole.”

  We were shooting free throws in back of the Jungle, where somebody had screwed a hoop into the bricks about ten feet up. You couldn’t really dribble with all the cracks and bumps in the asphalt, so we played twenty-one. She spotted me ten. I was still losing.

  “They don’t need me somewhere else,” Kim said. “They need me there.”

  I took my shot and bounced it off the bricks.

  “You’re not following through,” she told me. She showed me how, making the motion without the ball, bending her wrists.

  I passed her the ball. “Yeah, yeah. Just take your shot, Birdy.”

  She did, sinking the ball without it even touching the rim.

  “I mean, that drop-in place,” I said. “It's like right beside a needle exchange.”

  “The exchange is three blocks over.”

  I took my time, lining up my shot. “So what do you do down there?”

  “Give out information. You know, about places to stay, free meals, drug treatment.”

  “Don’t they have social workers for that?”

  “Yeah, but a lot of kids are scared to talk to them. Scared they'll get turned in and sent home against their will. Or worse, to foster care. I’ve heard some real horror stories.”

  My shot bounced off the rim.

  “Maybe I should spot you twenty next time,” Kim said, chasing down the rebound. She caught up with it and started dribbling the ball on the broken asphalt, between and around her legs, making it look easy.

  “I don’t like you being down there,” I said. “I mean, these are street kids. You can’t trust them. They’d probably knife you for the change in your pockets.”

  She stopped dribbling, giving me a look I was getting a lot from her. The stranger look, like she wasn’t sure who I was anymore. She kept saying I was turning into this mass of negative energy.

  “Most of the kids there are lost and scared,” she said. “What I do is listen to them, pass out cookies and coffee. And besides, they have security in the center. I’m not an idiot. I can read a situation and know when to back off.”

  “Tell me when you’re getting off and I'll pick you up.”

  Kim was frowning. �
�I already told you, I don’t need you to pick me up. The security guys will walk with me to the subway if I need them. It's only half a block.”

  I looked up at the brick wall, waiting for her to take another shot. The last few weeks, her team had been running practices after school, so I’d been meeting up with her to walk her home. It was late October and getting dark earlier.

  “Just tell me when—”

  “No,” she said. “This has to stop. You’re my boyfriend, not my bodyguard.”

  I shake my head, telling her, “You just don’t know…what's out there.”

  She sighed. “The world's out there, Duncan. The good, the bad, and the plain old ugly. I can’t go around being afraid all the time.”

  “I don’t want you to.”

  “Yes, you do.” Her voice broke, and she had to take a deep breath to steady herself. “You’ve locked yourself up in some dark little prison cell. And you want me to join you. But I can’t live like that.”

  Her eyes were tearing up. That seemed to happen a lot back then when we talked.

  I whispered, “No.” No to her crying, to what she was saying, to everything. She wrapped her long arms around me, dropping the ball to hug me.

  I didn’t know it then, but that was the beginning of the end. It took a while; things got messy. I don’t know if there was an exact time of death for our relationship; one day I woke up and it just wasn’t there anymore.

  I still see her sometimes, passing in the halls at Milton. We say hi and everything, but it's nothing like before.

  It's a phantom.

  TEN

  Traffic noise and the distant but relentless beat of dance music drift in through my open window. But not even a hint of a breeze. It's past midnight. I’m sitting at my desk in my underwear, with a fan aimed at my head. In front of me is the diary.

  At the top of the page it says: 3 CONTESTANTS. Under that heading are three names: Cherry, Bones, and Clown. Details are listed for each woman: their clothing, hair and makeup, approximate height and weight.

  Cherry is a redhead. Bones is anorexically thin. Clown wears heavy makeup.