My chest inflates.
Images blur in front of me. A single face. The details are blurry, but Pivot’s presence is unmistakable. I feel it in my core, know its love.
I am born.
Suddenly, there is a tremendous sensation of separation. I am missing something, pulled away from a presence that I have always known. Something I have always been.
And now it is gone.
Born? Could that be my clone, my original self’s memory? Could that be what I have always felt was missing, the presence of my original self? Even at birth, I knew my essential self was somewhere else. I didn’t feel real. Because I’m not. I was just an imitation.
There is much discomfort as I grow. Hunger, ear infections, exhaustion. I learn to cope. And, often, I find comfort in the faces of my mother and father, looking down on me in the crib, in the car seat, sometimes stern, sometimes joyous, but always supportive. Always loving.
I am always with them.
I’m sitting on my father’s lap as Fourth of July fireworks light up the sky. Mother is laughing somewhere. Later, I put on his boots that rattle on my tiny feet. I am looking down a flight of steps and the world tumbles. The bottom step hits hard on the back of my head. I feel Pivot’s presence as I draw in the first long breath to bellow the alarming cry. He does not help, but he is there as my mother and father arrive, carry me back inside the house. I can feel him.
I couldn’t see Pivot, but he has always been there. He has always managed to avoid being seen, to be anywhere he wanted. To follow and watch. Did he shove me down the steps, just so I could experience life’s pain?
I am five, watching television. Mother is letting me watch television when I should be in bed, but she’s in her bedroom crying. I knock on the door, to ask if she’s all right, but she’s talking to someone. I don’t hear anyone answer, and she’s barely able to make sense, her words are garbled in sobs. I don’t know who’s with her, but I sense it’s someone familiar, but it’s not my father.
My babysitter stays with me the next day. And then Mother tells me about Father. She tells me he’s not coming home anymore. I’m confused. Why won’t he come home?
Because God took him, she says.
Why would he do that?
From then on, the emotional hole was bigger than ever. I was born with something missing, and now it was as deep as the ocean. The joy of life was gone. Mother didn’t smile. Father’s boots weren’t around. And the emptiness consumed me, until I didn’t smile, either.
“I don’t think about them, much,” Streeter says. “But I wish they were here.”
We’re seven, climbing into his treehouse to look at magazines.
“At least you got your gramma and grampa,” I say.
“Yeah, but their Christmas presents suck.”
“That’s why you want your parents back? Better presents?”
He laughs, but his attempt to avoid the emptiness in his being fails. He nervously lifts the magazine, then shows me a cool skateboard ramp for the backyard. His emptiness resonates in my stomach.
Streeter never spoke about his parents again, at least not until we were older. He didn’t know how to deal with it, except ignore it.
Chute was different.
“You like that?” I say.
Chute is in the gift shop. We’re in sixth grade, on a field trip. She’s looking at a plastic recorder instrument, something we had to play in grade school to learn music. We hated it and swore we’d never play it, again. But there she was, stroking the holes.
“I was just remembering that my mom liked it,” she says. “She used to dance with my sister when I played.”
“She danced to Hot Cross Buns?”
“It didn’t matter what I played.”
When she’s not looking, I buy it and give it to her on the bus. She doesn’t say much. Later, she plays a song and Streeter and I dance.
Chute’s emptiness was open and hurtful, but unlike Streeter, she let it be there. She let it be part of her. It felt like falling in a hole that had no bottom, but Chute let that happen because she didn’t want to forget her mother, no matter how much it hurt. I didn’t understand that, not then.
I’d known death and loss forever. Was that why we were so close?
We wait at the bus stop. It’s the first day of school. Streeter’s gramma comes out with a camera and takes the picture that Chute still has on her wall. And there, lurking in the back, the familiar presence. The presence I had known all my life. Something inseparable from my life, something I didn’t even notice. Someone was always there.
Watching.
Pivot. He was the blur in the picture. Watching, guiding, following. Building his plan, making sure I felt human. I remembered how it felt to be human. I remembered pain, I knew death and joy and love.
Always there.
“GODDAMN YOU!” My rage burst in a seismic wave, uprooting every plant within miles, tossing boulders in the air and flipping cacti headfirst into the sand. I couldn’t feel Pivot, he was no longer in the desert. I stretched my presence for miles, felt all the way back to the shipwreck. The ship was gone. I extended my influence farther, but he was gone.
Was any of it real? Did he manipulate everything so that I would be friends with the right people, have the despondent mother and the brainy friend and the girlfriend I would fall in love with so that I experienced sadness and joy and loss and fullness, so that his creation would appear human enough to trap Fetter? Is that what my life was, a fucking game?
Pain defines us. Reminds us we’re human.
Pike told me that. He knew about papa Pivot. He knew this day was coming. How could he? And what else did he know?
I stopped walking. Without my footsteps, the desert was dead silent. Destruction lay all around. The plants would soon dry out. Insects would be buried. I put things back in order, moving everything within my connected presence. The desert reassembled itself before me. It would live again, just as it had before I froze time. No one would even notice I walked through the desert. I would be invisible; the only proof would be the string of my existence on the fabric of time.
Space and time are inseparable.
And if I can manipulate time, I can manipulate space.
I closed my eyes, spreading out to the far reaches of the desert, to the foot of the mountains many miles away. Every molecule, each atom, resonated with my being. I was a body, but was inseparable from the essence of life. And if I wished, if I willed it to be so, I could transfer my body through the atoms of space to the outer reaches of my influence, transferring my physical existence like a sound wave passes through air, like a wave rolls across the ocean.
My body seemed less solid, the barrier of my skin becoming gray and fuzzy as it dissolved into the atoms. Thinner I became until my awareness blew in the atmosphere like a dust cloud. I floated with the cloud of my body, all the way to the foot of the mountain range where the dust cloud of my atoms reassembled and condensed. My organs solidified and my skin tightened.
I opened my eyes.
The shadow of the mountain fell over me. I’d traversed several miles within seconds.
I expanded outward, again, pushing through the solid mountains, connecting with the inner core of sand and miniscule algae and delicate lichens, past the reaches of the desert into the town on the other side where I merged with houses and cars and people, absorbing their memories and desires and worries.
I can go anywhere. Be anything.
Pike was calling me, I could feel it.
I closed my eyes, felt the dissolution of my body. Somehow I knew I would find him in South Carolina.
* * * * *
Your entire life may prepare you for one moment,
a single second in time that means everything.
When that moment arrives, will you be there?
Pivot
Let go over a cliff, die completely, and then come back to life.
After that you cannot be deceived.
Buddhist prover
b
I have seen the beginning and end of the universe.
Do you want the answer?
Pick up a cup and drink from it.
Do so purely, without thought.
That is the face of God.
Socket
* * * * *
Hearts that Hum
South Carolina was a thousand miles away.
I crossed the land, one enormous leap at a time. Cars that were once speeding along were frozen to the concrete like a wax museum. The passengers appeared to be singing or facially numb with boredom.
I crossed through Kentucky and Tennessee, stopping often to admire the countryside and the horses in their gated land, lips to the turf. I floated over the top of the Smokey Mountains, walking along the curving Interstate, towing the dashed line between massive trucks and tiny cars. I stepped off the Blue Ridge Mountains and dissolved before hitting the trees, merging with the green foliage and crumbled bedrock.
I walked through Columbia. My heart was barely thumping anymore. By the time I reached Charleston, it started to hum.
I needed to find Pike.
My physical expansion spread out over the Lowcountry of South Carolina, reaching into the outer limits of Charleston, merging with the wetlands and egrets and brackish water. I focused, feeling everything in existence between my body and my destination and, with a thought, relaxed into the ether and felt my body dissolve one more time.
I came together in front of the high school. The front doors were open, students were frozen in mid-stride. School was out.
I solidified inside the grassy circle of the turnabout where buses were lined up. Three flagpoles were behind me. The flags were swept in a non-existent breeze, as if molded from bronze.
The sun was partially obscured by broken clouds. There was no way to measure the amount of time I spent in the timeslice, but I had grown accustomed to the sound of my breath and footsteps, absent was the sounds of daily living. Did I even need to breathe?
Slowly, the fragrance of grass and the sounds of people intensified as I returned to normal time and molecules began to drift. The flags snapped overhead and the first bus in line began to creep ahead. Shouts and playful screaming started slow and came to full speed as my body synchronized with Earth’s regular time and those that lived in it.
Hundreds of students fled for freedom, racing into the parking lots, their thoughts a random collage of desires and fears, locked into their identities of geeks or jocks or queens or studs, gearheads, burners, gamers or flamers. I felt their lungs expand and vocal chords vibrate. I absorbed their concerns about parties and clubs, who was doing what and who was dating who. I was a distant shadow that tasted their experiences and absorbed the essence that was their life.
The natural tendency to steal their essence was suddenly repulsive. I may not be human, but I wouldn’t become Fetter. I had to stop.
In the mix of it all, a pair of girls came out to the flagpoles and began winding down the flags. Shannon Quigley and Stacy Parker, they’d been best friends since second grade, spending the night with each other almost every weekend. Right now, Stacy wanted Charlie Nelson to ask her to prom and Shannon was secretly jealous, hoping he wouldn’t but telling Stacy something supportive because that’s what best friends do. But if she got a date—
I snapped back. I was already siphoning their essence again, along with their thoughts and memories.
They lowered the flags, not a foot away from me. They didn’t notice me or my shadow next to theirs. They were folding the flags and on the topic of homework when I felt Chute. She was on the second floor, coming down the steps with two friends, holding her books to her chest. She slowed down as she approached the bottleneck at the front doors, past the security guards.
There she is.
She lit up the yard like another sun, her essence beaming brightly, sinking warmly into my chest. My fading heartbeat quickened, as if remembering what it once was.
She laughed at something Suzy Keller on her left said, then looked at Jonie White on her right. Chute’s ponytail whipped from one shoulder to the next. They stopped at the curb and looked both directions. The buses were loaded and gone. Cars honked and Denny Stillbee hung out the window of his car. Chute and the girls laughed. I felt her joy inside me. And as the yard cleared, I watched her walk with her friends to the parking lot. Suzy was going to take her home. Cars passed between us. She was almost out of sight. I was going to let her go. But then she stopped.
My chest thumped.
She tipped her head, unsure of what she saw. It was what she felt that made her turn around and look. She shaded her eyes, searching. I don’t remember becoming visible, but somehow she saw me. She called over her shoulder to Suzy to hang on a second, she’d be right back. When she crossed the roundabout road, she ran.
She jumped into my arms. I tightened, afraid she would see me for what I was. But her essence was so intoxicating; I forgot for an instant that my world had imploded.
“Are you picking me up?” she asked.
I put her down and she grabbed my hand. I backed up but she pulled my hand to her. It must’ve been the look on my face that changed the energetic colors around her. Her essence suddenly contracted and soured.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
I lightly jerked my hand from her grip, hiding the new fingers behind my back like it was all the evidence she needed. The slashing weapon. Fingers falling.
LIAR.
I backed up a step.
“Why are you acting so weird?” she asked. “Did I do something?”
“No.” I took her with my other hand. “You didn’t do… everything’s all right. I’m just a little tired, that’s all.”
“Well, what’re you doing here?”
“I just wanted to see you. And talk to Streeter.”
“He’s in the virtualmode lab, as usual.” She pointed at the front doors. “You’ll have to call him, security won’t let you back in the school.”
Amanda Flenner shouted at Chute, said something about leading the student cabinet meeting next week. Chute hollered back. Her complexion was so fair, the freckles highlighted on her smooth cheeks. The skin crinkled between her eyes when she laughed.
She reached out without turning while talking to Amanda and hooked her finger with mine. I stared at our hands, recalling the vision of when we were older. Not all visions come true.
“So, are you taking me to the Garrison?” she said, swinging our hands back and forth.
“What?”
“I’m going to play tagghet with the kids today, remember? Spindle was going to pick me up at my house, he didn’t think you’d be back yet.” She shrugged, girlishly. “I’m so happy you’re back.”
“I, uh, no I forgot. I’m sorry, I just went through a lot today, there’s a lot on my mind.”
“Did your meeting go bad?”
“It wasn’t good.”
“I’m sorry. Maybe we can go out and cheer you up. I was talking to Janette and she wants the four of us to go out. We could do it tomorrow!”
Suzy pulled through the roundabout and honked, looked at Chute strangely and said, “What’re you doing, talking to flagpoles?”
“Oh, that’s not nice,” Chute said, not getting it.
“I got to go, I don’t want to be late,” she said. “Will you be at the Garrison later? I want to play with the grimmets and they’re always more fun when you’re around.”
“Maybe,” I said.
She kissed me on the corner of my mouth and frowned. “Are you sure you’re all right? You’re so cold.”
I nodded and kissed her back.
Then watched her go.
It hurt when she left. The beating faded in my chest. The hum grew louder.
No Mask
“I just need to go to the office, man.” It was Jake Studard, starting left tackle for the football team. He was trying to shoulder his way past the security guard. “Just call the coach, he’ll explain.”
&
nbsp; “You call the coach.” The security guard played the same position ten years earlier, now he had three kids and a wife and a bit of a drinking problem. He wasn’t budging. “It ain’t my problem. Once you’re out of the building, you stay out.”
The security guard hooked his thumb in his belt. I slipped past him just as he stopped Meg Chansey with the crazy idea she could get back inside because she was class president.
The hallways were mostly empty. A few students hanging out at their lockers and a small group of teachers were outside the office. The essence of their experiences drifted into me, charging the hum in my chest. The three of them looked around like a ghost just passed.
I turned the corner and tread up the wide steps to the second floor. No one was within a hundred feet, except at the end of the hall, behind the vault door of the virtualmode lab. Four people were in there. My insatiable essence-hunger fled into the walls and lockers and classrooms, feeding on the memories of past students, their fears and apprehension, the joy of being asked to homecoming by the right guy or the panic of getting one’s ass kicked after school. They saturated the wood like blood; buzzed inside me.
The door slid open and Mr. Buxbee walked into the hall, looking over his big round belly at the shiny floor as he semi-waddled toward me. His lower lip plumped out and he hummed a quiet tune, something he always did when few people were around. My favorite virtualmode instructor passed me without looking.
I stopped outside the door and stared at the scanlock where a key could be waved. Not many keys were given out to that room. The gear inside was worth more than the entire school. I could feel the circuits inside the lock and followed them with my mind. I didn’t need a key. I simply asked the door to open. And it did.
The room was half the size of a regular classroom and twice as cold to keep the gear from overheating. Workbenches lined the walls. A large silver table was centered in the middle. Streeter and Janette stood on each side of it, staring at the half-spherical black object, their hands pressed flat on the table, mumbling to each other a checklist before they tested the locator again. They didn’t look up, consumed with the project at hand, assuming I was Buxbee returning for something he forgot.
Socket 3 - The Legend of Socket Greeny Page 12