“Oh. . .oh, forget about it. Just forget —” I backed away from the car. The man stood his ground until I made it to the sidewalk. They peeled out furiously as I slipped into the shadows cast by the high restaurant walls. First the sound of the car disappeared, and then the sight of it, its glowing red taillights dissolving at the other end of the long, empty avenue.
Sometime after dawn I ran into a man I’d broken a window for once, back before the Voiding Initiative, and he handed me a sandwich bag. “Happy Easter,” he said, because it was April, after all, and each bright capsule contained within, when properly digested, gave me the distinct sensation of rising up out of my body and into the clouds, where I would shine like a sharp, vengeful sword, cutting a silver swath through the heavens.
Gantry’s Last
Gantry sat behind the training facility, hidden from the burning tower exercise by a broad stand of tall yellow weeds, eating the pills his mother had prepared for him, orange pills that tasted like orange drink, the ones that stopped him from doing things like cursing in other languages or petting the faces of strangers. His classmates at the Ministry of Defense Summer Day Camp were suited up in flame-retardant coveralls, strafing the tower with pink chemical gel. “Closer! Get closer!” He could hear the instructor, Colonel Roger, shouting through a heavy cardboard cone. Gantry was pardoned from the more stressful, physically intense group challenges because of his chest, which had been all wrong for as long as he could remember. He didn’t like towatch his peers at work, though. When he watched them, he thought too much about the terrible acts he’d like to perform on them in return for what they did to him on a daily basis, and when he thought about that, he was almost always overcome by dizzying, paralyzing guilt.
The camp was for children who were too smart and resourceful for their own schools, but also for slow children who were bused in from the craggy, burned-out cities in the distance. The idea was that the smart children would lead the slow ones out of the darkness of their ignorance, or at least prepare them for a brief stint in the military. Gantry was there against his will. His mother wanted him to learn to defend himself so that he might one day come home from school without a bandaged head or carrying an IV bag or being in a wheelchair.
He looked at his homework. The first question was “If I have forty acres of forest, how many search dogs will I need to find a fugitive?” He slid the sheet back into his yellow plastic portfolio and sighed deeply.
A bird approached his feet, looking at him sideways, its head a worrisome cloud of nervous activity. It was small and brown, a nutlike handful of a bird, and it was close, closer than any creature had ever come to Gantry, even when he had food in his open palm, even when he was down on all fours, panting, calling the creature by name.
“Chirk chirk?” the bird exclaimed, peering up with one empty, opalescent eye.
Gantry stared back at the bird with a startled, open expression, one that told anyone who might be looking that he was a boy prepared for nothing, a young man on whom any number of people could mount themselves, bury their heels in his soft, shapeless flanks, and thrust away at his life until all that was left was the shredded, musky rind.
“Spare a dime?” the bird asked in a voice that sounded thin and frail, born somewhere else in a flurry of spastic air.
“Beg pardon?” Gantry said.
“Got any change for a wayward sparrow?” the bird asked, retracting one of its slim, scaly legs into the downy mass of feathers covering its bright red breast.
“I don’t have any money,” said Gantry, pulling at his pockets to suggest their emptiness, “and anyway, you’re full of crap. No sparrow’s got red on it.”
The bird’s mouth opened again, wider this time. The lower beak slid back mechanically, and from the resulting hole a tiny human arm protruded, giving Gantry the finger. He looked up and saw Mr. Cushing and Mr. Felt off at the other end of the facility, past the obstacle course, holding a small remote, laughing and cursing. Mr. Cushing was the one who put a bag of fire in Gantry’s locker. Mr. Felt was the one who had called Gantry “cum shovel” and drew the picture of two sheep doing it with a tree trunk on his forehead during Sleep Deprivation Workshop, which was where all of the slow kids were put when the instructors ran out of things for them to do. Gantry had seven Sleep Deprivation sessions today and gym and lunch, which was called a class only if you were slow and had to keep saying things like “this is an apple” while you ate the apple.
And now Gantry was hiding in the weeds, staring at the tiny, bare arm protruding from the bird’s mouth, middle finger proudly erect in the breeze. He always hid in the weeds whenever he could, because that was the only place no one would follow him. Most people at camp followed him because they knew that sooner or later he was going to get worked over, and that was something they liked to see. He could not understand why he’d been singled out. There were uglier children, and slower ones — a few could barely even walk, and yet they were spared. There was no making sense of it. The beatings had gotten worse in the past few weeks. Gantry had to wear a face mask during Biochemical Trauma Reenactment, when the others would hurl things at him, one time even a burning oil drum, the impact of which made Gantry bleed from the ass a little. He hid this from everyone but his mom’s friend Conrad. One night he shuffled into the family room with a clutch of toilet paper, in the center of which bloomed a bright red stain. Conrad, who’d lived in Gantry’s house for nearly a year, hugged him and told him he was honored that Gantry had shared this private moment with him but did not actually mention whether or not such bleeding was indicative of a deeper, hidden wound.
Today the patch of weeds, too, was despoiled.
Gantry had four toys in his portfolio: one was a yellow block that was his mom; one was a brown block that stood for Conrad; a third, big red block that could be a car or a boat; and a small stick that could be a snake or a phone or his father, depending on whether he wanted to think about his father, a person he had never seen, primarily because Gantry was made when his mother’s old girlfriend, Shelf, emptied the contents of an aluminum tub into his mother’s womb. He had seen a picture of the two of them standing on either side of the device, grinning, holding champagne glasses. A piece of colored paper was taped to the front of the machine. It said “Daddy.” The photograph was hidden behind a bit of torn fabric in his mother’s jewelry chest. Gantry had found it the other night while looking for money. He brought it into the living room, where Conrad and his mother were watching a program on elephants. “What is this?” he said, holding the picture out at arm’s length. His mother burst out crying and left the room. Conrad turned to punch one of the oversize throw pillows on the couch. He followed his mother into her bedroom.
“What is this?” he asked again. No other words were possible. “Oh, you know what that is. How could you have just — what were you doing sneaking around?”
“Is this my father? Is this where I came from?”
“Gantry, you know where you came from. You know that Shelf and I” — and here she stopped to collect a long breath — “Shelf and I wanted a child. This was the only way. How was I supposed to know what would happen afterward?”
“What did happen afterward?” Gantry asked, but his mother only fell on the bed, covering herself with the floral sheets.
Gantry went back to his room and looked at the picture. Shelf had been gone for years, without so much as a stray hair left behind. He could barely bring her name up without his mother collapsing. But he thought about Shelf often, more often than he thought about his father, who he imagined as a rail-thin man, brimming with ejaculate, vibrating solemnly in a small, dim room somewhere in a nearby city.
There were Mr. Cushing and Mr. Felt, holding the remote control at the other end of the park, cackling, and there was the bird with its mouth open, giving Gantry the finger. He thought about crushing the bird, about how easy it would be to stomp on its leering little head and grind it into the blacktop until it was just a smear of plasma and wir
es. But then he thought about what would happen to him next, how they would fill a baseball cap with dog mess and make him put it on, or stuff him up with pebbles, or mummify him with tape — all things they had done to him at one time or another. He’d liked the mummification, actually, until his mom and Conrad had to peel the tape off one piece at a time. It hurt so much that he was sure they were taking the top layer of skin right off his body. But afterward they said they were sorry and painted him with new skin and put brand-new sheets on his bed, and he felt so nice and warm again in the darkness that he forgot about the dreadful camp and Mr. Cushing and Mr. Felt altogether.
But it was hard to forget about Mr. Cushing and Mr. Felt for long. They had a way of always coming back at him; they had a sense for where he would be at any given time, and they would be there first, prepared with tools. Once, Gantry decided to play in a massive leaf pile Conrad had blown to the curb with a blower thing, and they had been, like, hiding inside the leaf pile all afternoon, just waiting to strap Gantry into a rubber nude suit, a white one even though Gantry was mixed. They made him walk up and down the street in the stifling suit, past Katrina Boda’s house, twice, while they shouted things at him from behind through a megaphone. That episode had even made it into the local paper, with a large photo in which Gantry’s privates were blocked out by one of the radar sticks the police used to calm down Mr. Cushing and Mr. Felt. Colonel Roger was wicked pissed and made all three of them work the hygiene stand for the rest of the week.
The bird drew the small arm back into its mouth. It cocked its head and looked at Gantry with its other eye. He kicked out his foot gingerly to test the bird’s reaction. It dodged the foot, hopping backward, looking him up and down as it did so, taking a brief, humiliating survey of his body, as if to underscore that even it was capable of taking him down. In the distance Mr. Cushing gestured wildly with his elbows as he maneuvered the bird out of Gantry’s path, while Mr. Felt jumped up and down, cupping his mouth with awkward, oversize hands.
The bird, now several feet away from Gantry, bent down to the ground until its beak nearly touched the pavement, and spread its wings. Two slender tubes emerged from underneath, and Gantry knew he was about to be strafed with behavior medicine — Mr. Felt had copied the keys to the camp’s biochemical pantry, and daily he pilfered tiny vials of whatever he could get his hands on. Gantry drew his limbs in close to his body, hugging his long, spindly legs, both hands clasped over his mouth and nose in preparation. One thing he excelled in at the camp was the assumption of self-defense positions — no one could touch his Stop, Drop, and Roll, his Henderson Shroud, his Top Jimmy. He started to breathe slowly and deeply. Behavior medicine was supposed to sting a little. But there was a swooshing sound instead, a great rustling of leaves, and when he opened his eyes all Gantry saw was the swiftly retreating form of a colossal truancy robot, in whose chest cage Mr. Cushing and Mr. Felt sat cross-legged, fuming.
It was time to see the nurse. Or rather, it was time for the nurse to see Gantry, because it was she, after all, who came to him and did all the looking. Gantry just squatted over the machines and grimaced as warm jets of air were fired high into him, so high he swore they were massaging his heart.
“Nurse,” Gantry said between clenched teeth, “what is it called when someone puts something on you so that you can’t go near them anymore?”
“Like a preemptive hood?”
“No, not a garment or a magnet or anything. I mean like a document. Something that says that a person has to stay a certain distance away.”
“Restraining order,” the nurse said coolly, unfastening the nozzle from Gantry’s chest catheter.
“Exactly. So, what, like, conditions would someone have to be under for a person to have one of those put on him?”
“Abuse of some kind, I imagine,” she said. She had a deep, untraceable accent, and her black hair smelled like rich soil.
“Like if she had a partner who was beating the shit out of her?” Gantry asked.
“Who?”
“What?”
“Who?”
“Yeah, who what?”
“You said ‘she.’ ‘She had a partner who was . . .’ you know . . .” “Oh,” said Gantry, his face flushing bright red. He did not want the nurse to know that the person he had in mind was Shelf, that his mother had put a restraining order on Shelf when he was four. The term was incomprehensible to him at the time — it hovered over him, bearing down at all hours. “No, I just meant someone, anyone, who was being beat up in some way. That’s the reason people get restraining orders, right? They would need a restraining order to keep other people away from them?”
The nurse held a clear tube filled with Gantry’s vital juices up to the light and tapped it gently with her forefinger. There was something wrong with Gantry, but no one had yet figured out the specifics of the condition or the cause. “Seems to me,” she said, “there’s no way to keep a person away who feels it their right to stick around. It’s like keeping a wasp in a jar. Either they’ll find a way out, or they die.”
He did not understand the example. He felt as if he were the wasp in the jar, crashing against the aluminum lid, choking on the sweet, dead air.
Gantry stood in the wide foyer of the restaurant, waiting for Conrad and his mom to get out of the bathroom. The walls and ceiling of the restaurant were padded with light quilted material, so that children who were floaters would not be hurt. At least Gantry was not a floater. His generation had been the last to receive the inoculations, before it was determined that the inoculations tended to flatten out the forehead, putting pressure on the frontal lobe of the brain. Gantry’s forehead was broad, firm — it made him look angry even when he wasn’t, which was most of the time. But people thought he was angry, and that was all the excuse they needed to avoid him at any cost.
He pressed his fist into the fluffy wall. It sank into the fabric, right down to the elbow. In the corner there was a candy machine, half full of bright, multicolored lozenges. Gantry ran his finger over the smudged glass surface, taking careful inventory of each candy, naked and pulverized, fused into grotesque clumps from disuse.
“Them candies have been in there a year,” the hostess called out from behind a massive register. Gantry turned around, terribly embarrassed.
“Pardon?”
“Them candies. I think they put them candies in there, like, a year ago? Them same ones have been in there since I started working.” The girl was not pretty, even through the most generous, high-minded lens, but the sight of her made something heavy move inside him. In her plain, quilted one-piece uniform she seemed to zero out the whole history of beauty, render it irrelevant.
“I’m still hungry, though,” said Gantry. He could feel gobs of blood racing up through his neck to form in awkward splotches across his face.
“Have this,” the girl said, coming toward him, her left palm outstretched. Resting there was a tiny brown cake.
“Boy, it’s a small cake,” Gantry said. “Yes,” said the girl. “It’s a private cake.”
“How much would a cake like that cost me?”
“Normally it costs a lot, but I am giving it to you for free on account of I just stole it from the display counter.”
He looked. There was a single missing spot in the fanciful array of tiny cakes under the glass of the display case. “Won’t you get in trouble for that?”
“I don’t know. Usually we don’t get in trouble, we just get yelled at. Or put in the cold room.”
“Okay.” Gantry took the cake from the girl, lightly and inadvertently brushing the surface of her palm with his fingertips as he did so. Her hand was white and chalky, ridged as if she’d been immersed in bathwater. He put the cake into his mouth. Its texture was rich, meaty — it made the saliva glands at the back of his mouth tingle and spark.
“This is a robust cake,” he said.
“Yes.”
“I go to camp during the day. To fight terrorists.”
“If
you come to the back room, I could take off your pants and do things to you,” she said, but as she said this Conrad and Gantry’s mother emerged from their respective rest rooms with alarming symmetry, and the girl disappeared.
The next day the instructors wore black masks and attacked the campers, throwing nets over them while shouting in a foreign language. They bound them with nylon cord to stout posts in the basement of the facility and hung a plastic medallion containing a sugar marble around their necks. If they got into a situation they could no longer control, the instructors advised them in halting English, they were to eat the sugar marble. This meant suicide, and for the rest of the day the students who ate their sugar marbles had to sit in the guidance counselor’s office.
Gantry ate his marble as soon as it was issued to him.
“So, can you find things out about people with that computer?” he asked the guidance counselor, Admiral Sedge, who was navigating his way through a database in order to pull up Gantry’s record.
The admiral only huffed, moving his hand over the smeared, hazy touch screen. He was nothing but a grainy, oversize pencil of a man, slumped at the other end of the long desk.
“I need to find some stuff out,” Gantry said to the admiral. “Huh.”
“I need to find out where my mom is.”
“Your mother is at home, son.” The admiral bit his lip, tapping repeatedly at the screen.
“No, this is my other mom. She went away a long time ago.” The admiral stopped tapping. He looked at Gantry. “The hell do you want me to do about it?”
“Where is she?”
“Gantry. You know I can’t give you that information.”
“So that means you do have the information. Good, now what would it take —”
“Gantry.”
“I just want to get this straight. You have an address or something over there?”
“I have nothing, Gantry. I don’t even have my own address here.”
“You couldn’t, like, give me a hint? A street name?” “Please don’t do this.” The admiral bent over, possibly adjusting a shoe.
Super Flat Times Page 14