Motive ; One Last Day ; Going Viral

by Dustin Stevens

  “That sucks,” Quasi says, seated sideways in my desk chair.

  His ribs are pressed against the back of it with one arm looped over the side. Using the toe of his foot, he is swiveling back and forth, moving no more than a few inches in either direction.

  “Yup,” I agree, finishing my shoes and standing.

  Crossing over to the dresser I take up the orange and yellow Bob’s polo from the top of it and press it to my nose, sniffing deeply.

  Sweat, grease, and French fries. I’ve definitely smelled it worse.

  Tugging it on over my white undershirt, I wrestle it into position and ask, “So, what did you come over to show me?”

  “Oh, man,” he replies, his face instantly displaying the same glee he’d had at The Deuce a few nights before. “You are going to love this.”

  I wait until he has turned back to the computer before rolling my eyes, pushing out a breath of air as I shove the tail of my shirt into my khakis.

  “What is it this time?" I ask, shuffling across the room and glancing at the clock beside the bed. “Eight minutes.”

  “I know, I know,” Quasi says, pulling up an internet browser and going straight to YouTube.

  For two days now, ever since the video went live, I have been making a point of avoiding the site. Just knowing it’s out there was been a constant thought in the back of my mind, though the idea of staring at it every hour for hope of some external validation seems too much to fathom.

  Instead, I have done everything I can to pretend it doesn’t exist.

  “Have you seen this?” Quasi asks, finding the new video and clicking on it.

  The sound of our voices on the lead-in begins in the background as he scrolls down, his body bouncing up and down in the chair in front of me.

  “Three days,” he says, his voice rising to just shy of a shout, “and already six thousand hits!”

  The words find my ears, taking a full moment to compute before the rest of me reacts. My mouth drops open and my heart begins to pound, my wallet slipping from my hand and falling to the floor beside me.

  “How many?”

  “Six thousand,” he says, wheeling around to look at me.

  His face is folded into such a large smile his cheeks look like golf balls are stuffed in them, his glasses just barely able to stay on his face.

  “Four hundred likes!”

  I know he has no reason to fabricate the numbers, but I have to see them for myself. My wallet skitters across the floor as I kick it, moving straight for the desk. My hip pushes Quasi to the side as I scroll down.

  Just as he said, over six thousand people have seen the video. One in every fifteen of them liked it. Only thirty-two didn’t.

  “When did you post this?” I ask, my throat growing dry.

  “Wednesday morning,” he replies, repositioning himself to look past me at the screen.

  “That’s not all,” he adds, moving me to the side as he rolls forward, extending his arms towards the screen.

  In a flurry of typing, the webpage changes from YouTube to Twitter, his beefy digit extended towards the screen.

  “Two hundred and eighty-five people are now following you,” he says, his voice so full of giddy energy it practically crackles.

  For a solid week now, I have been pulled along in this craziness, though I never actually expected anything to come from it. I tried smoking because Weinberg suggested as much. I hated every second of it and was convinced to leave it behind forever.

  Clearly, I didn’t have the requisite chops for being a writer. I could find some other way to do right by my father, ensure the same fate didn’t befall me.

  The first video had been a complete fluke. Quasi wasn’t supposed to be recording anything and just happened to throw it up online, using a fickle and bored populace to garner a few viewings.

  This was on an entirely different level.

  People I had never met before were now tuning in to see what I did. They were watching my various exploits and actually deriving pleasure from them.

  “How did this happen?” I whisper, staring at the numbers on the screen, the thumbnail image of myself coughing amidst a cloud of cigarillo smoke.

  “I told you,” Quasi replies, his own voice lowered. “That’s how this stuff works now. Social media gives an avenue for anybody to do anything.”

  My gaze shifts to the clock in the corner of the screen. We were supposed to have left three minutes earlier, though I no longer care.

  “What’s next on the list?”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Saturday, March 17th, 2012

  1:39 pm

  “Come on, this is stupid,” I say, raising my hands by my side. I let them flop back down hard against the tail of my leather jacket, the impact giving off a heavy slapping sound.

  “Isn’t you recording me doing this stuff enough? Do I really need to stand out here and do this too?”

  This is Quasi’s latest idea, a new wrinkle he has presented for the video series. I do not like it in the slightest, for a variety of reasons.

  In the previous two, I was only an actor. In the first, I didn’t even know the camera was there. In the second, I knew but ignored it for the first fifteen minutes. After that, I don’t recall being cognizant of much at all.

  This is different, though. This is me staring the audience directly in the face and addressing them. We are shattering the fabled fourth wall, which just feels all kinds of wrong.

  James Buchanan would never do something like this. He isn’t a man that ever acts for the sake of fanfare.

  Chaz D shouldn’t be either.

  “Come on,” Quasi says, relaxing his pointed cameraman stance and rising to full height.

  He lets the phone in his hand fall to his side as he looks at me, the same stupid vest he’s been wearing for weeks now in place.

  “We’ve been hyping the newest adventure of Chaz D for two weeks. Eight hundred people on Twitter are dying to see this. Do you want to let them down?”

  A heavy breath passes through me as I roll my eyes, doing it so dramatically it rocks my head backwards and to the side.

  “No, eight hundred people are waiting to see me make an ass of myself again,” I correct. “That can be achieved without me actually having to do all this.”

  I can hear him muttering as he turns on a heel and walks a few paces, running a hand back over his hair. This is another tic he has picked up in recent weeks. My guess is it is something he saw Steven Spielberg or Martin Scorsese once do.

  Just envisioning that raises my annoyance another level.

  “Alright,” he says, turning back to face me and moving into position, “let’s make a deal.”

  Already I can tell by his words and his tone that he is trying to placate me. I feel my hands curl into fists beside me, though I say nothing.

  “We’ll do this once,” he says, “and if it doesn’t work, we’ll go back to the cold opening from now on.”

  My eyes narrow as I stare across at him. With each passing day, it is becoming more apparent that he actually fancies himself a director, someone that is putting together blockbuster pictures instead of cheesy videos to be uploaded to the internet.

  Even more annoying than his acting this way is the fact that I can’t lash out or cut him loose just yet. Our list has a half-dozen more things on it to accomplish and our online following is just beginning to grow.

  “One day,” I say, still glaring at him. “We’ll leave the video up for one day. If it doesn’t get as many hits as the last one did in the same amount of time, we cut the intro out.”

  “Deal,” he says, seizing on the offer with a little too much vigor.

  One hand he raises to his chest as if swearing his allegiance, the other he raises like he’s taking an oath.

  “We’ll edit everything else so it can be snipped off if we need to.”

  I don’t like the arrangement or the fact that I just had to cut a deal to even get that. Swiveling at the waist, I glanc
e back over my shoulder, taking in the derelict building behind me. Standing a single story tall, the entire thing is painted tan, though large chunks of paint have long since flaked away. The roof is made of dented green corrugated metal and the windows are covered in advertisements so faded the products they are hawking can no longer be discerned.

  Under one of them is a wooden sign using the same green-on-tan motif.

  DUCK RIVER SHOOTING RANGE.

  After smoking and drinking, guns were the next thing we felt James Buchanan needed to be proficient with. Never in my life have I even held a gun, let alone fired one. That level of inexperience will never do.

  After three solid days of research, even calling in sick once from work in the process, we decided on the Duck River because it was the only place we found that had weapons on hand that could be fired. Most other ranges in the area were simply that, a bunch of targets stuck in the sand at various distances. People brought their own stash of firearms, paid a nominal fee, and were free to shoot until their trigger finger fell off.

  The website for this place claimed that they had a veritable arsenal, including weaponry from every American military engagement in the last hundred years. Quasi’s experience with guns rivaled my own, meaning our options for this bit were to either buy a whole cache for ourselves or rely on someplace like Duck River.

  Once the subject matter and the location were nailed down, Quasi really went to work.

  On our Facebook page, he posted updates each day that a new video would be out on Monday. Every six hours on Twitter he tweeted something cryptic and foreboding, trying to build suspense.

  After the comparative success of the last video, I wanted to rush straight into the next one. He had cautioned against it though, saying our time frame was much longer than the list of things we had to take video of. The key was to build suspense and keep people interested, not to feed them everything they wanted right up front.

  “Alright, you ready?” Quasi asks, going back into his crouch, the camera extended. The pose makes his hunch look even more pronounced, resembling a manatee in a fishing vest.

  I nod, pushing my hands into my pockets. Already I can feel my heart rate rising and sweat starting to form on my lip, though I maintain the stance as Quasi counts backwards from three and points at me.

  “Hey everybody, this is Chaz D,” I begin, my voice sounding much more confident than I feel. “Today I’m standing in front of the Duck River Shooting Range where in just a few minutes I will try my hand in the world of automatic weapons.”

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  For the briefest of moments, I feel like a God, like a stone cold badass dressed in black.

  I am James Buchanan.

  Not just writing him, not just being able to convey the details of his life the way I want to.

  I am him.

  Lying belly-down in the dirt on the edge of the firing range, I slide the end of the Winchester 30.06 against my shoulder. I can smell the oil on the wood stock, feel the cool metal of the barrel against my skin.

  In the dirt fifty yards ahead of me stands the silhouette of a miniature person. A head rises up from a pair of rounded shoulders, the rest of the figure extended straight down on either side. In the center of it is a bulls-eye ring painted in white, chips and dents visible as I stare the length of the gun. Tilted backwards on the top of it is a straw cap, an inverted cone like people in China wear when working in rice patties.

  In my peripheral vision I can see a thick brown blur, my mind only vaguely computing that it is Quasi and his camera. For the time being, I can’t even seem to muster the requisite ire for his presence, lost in the task at hand.

  Step one in steeling the legend of James Buchanan.

  Sliding my finger up from the edge of the gun, I curl it around the trigger. I lay my face against the stock and peer down through the pair of metal clips along the top of the barrel, using them to hone in on my target.

  Sweat drips from the tip of my nose as I hold my breath and wait for the notch between them to settle on the metal figure before me. Counting backwards from three, I exhale and pull the trigger.

  A tuft of dust erupts six yards short of the target as the gun slams backward, the butt of it smashing into my shoulder. Agony courses through my body as it hits so hard it rolls me up onto my side, pain searing my arm.

  To the side of me, I can see Quasi jump up and take a few steps forward, his camera poised. He appears to be yelling at me, but I can only vaguely make out the words, a loud ringing having settled into my right ear.

  Tears pool in my eyes as I roll to my back and lay in the dust, the gun on the ground beside me. I cradle my right arm in my left and bite down on the inside of my cheeks, fighting to keep from screaming out in pain.

  I have no idea how long I lay there before a dark shadow crosses over me. My eyes open, twin streams of moisture dripping to either side, to see Bud Ripley peering down. The owner and operator of the range, he is a massive man in his sixties, with white hair and a bushy mustache to prove it. Straddling my legs, he bends forward at the waist, his aging face lined with concern.

  “You alright, boy?”

  The question sounds muffled and distorted, the ringing in my ear receding to a dull hum. Without waiting for a response, he reaches down and picks up the gun, running a hand along the barrel of it to wipe away the dust.

  “Mhmm,” I mutter, waiting for him to step back before sitting up.

  I attempt to roll my shoulder once to ensure everything is still working, but get only halfway before a blazing ache shoots down the length of my arm.

  I can barely feel my hand as I look down at my fingers, flexing them each in turn.

  “Shouldn’t have started you off with the Winchester,” Ripley says, shaking his head as he extracts an oil cloth from his rear pocket.

  Bracing the butt of the gun against his thigh, he runs the rag along the length of it, wiping it clean.

  “Why’s that?” I ask through gritted teeth, a groan following as I extend my arm from the elbow.

  “Too much recoil,” he says without looking over at me. “Should have known a newbie like you wouldn’t have it cradled right.”

  I glance to my right to see Quasi still filming, bristling at Ripley calling me a newbie for all to see.

  “I think it was just that I was lying down,” I fabricate. “Made it tough to get a good hold on it.”

  It is obvious from the look on his face that he isn’t buying it, but he nods just the same.

  “Yeah, maybe.”

  Once more, I flick my gaze over to the camera, hopeful that the concession sounded more authentic on film than it did in person.

  Raising a hand to my ear, I press the palm down flat, the hum becoming a little less pronounced before returning to its previous level. I try it twice more to the same effect, the buzz never completely dying out.

  “We’ll get you some muffs for the next one,” Ripley says, finishing with the Winchester and placing it back in its vinyl carrying case.

  He zips it up and moves it off to the side of the splintered wood table it rests on, three more just like it lined up, ready to go.

  The thought of going through this even once more is enough to bring palpitations to my chest, but I fight off any outward reaction. The combined effects of having a camera rolling and having already given the man a hundred dollars for the opportunity to shoot won’t let me quit just yet.

  “How about you try your hand at this one?” Ripley asks, pulling a smaller case close to him and unzipping it.

  From it, he extracts a weapon with significantly less muscle than the one I was just using, the implement resembling a stick in his hands.

  “This here is a .22 Ruger,” he says, running the same oil cloth over it once before extending it to me. “A good starter piece. Grew up with one of these myself, used it for shooting squirrels around the house.”

  The comment sticks in the back of my mind as I look at the gun extended towards me. The combined
effects of the fire in my arm and the ringing in my ear already has my acrimony level raised, but being handed a child’s weapon threatens to push me over the edge.

  “You got anything a little bigger?” I ask, letting him hear the disdain in my voice as I look from the gun to him.

  James Buchanan would never bother with something that was used for shooting rats from trees. He would want something with heft, something that could take a man off his feet at a hundred yards. When he stood on the rooftops and surveyed the city, he needed something that cut a mighty silhouette against the setting sun.

  He didn’t need a damn popgun.

  “You sure?” Ripley asks, looking at the Ruger and up at me. “Might be something good for you to take a few on, get your shooter’s legs under you.”

  Aware that Quasi is looping around beside us to get the entire exchange on camera, I nod. The first shot already made me look like a buffoon to untold hundreds. I have to redeem myself, and fast.

  “Biggest thing you’ve got,” I say, again nodding for emphasis.

  In direct order, hostility, followed by disgust, and finally amusement, flashes across Ripley’s face. He holds the look and the gun a moment before nodding, a simple, “Alright,” his only response.

  Every part of me wants to turn to the camera and address anybody watching, reassert my dominance over the situation. Instead, I stand acutely aware that it is watching me, my entire body twitching with anticipation as Ripley puts away the Ruger and slides the largest case over in front of himself.

  “This here is a .358 Norma Magnum,” Ripley says, turning to speak over his shoulder as he works.

  A moment later, he hefts the weapon up and turns towards me, the barrel pointed up in the air.

  “But I just call her Norma.”

  My eyes go wide as a weight crashes in the bottom of my stomach. A quiver passes through me as I stare at the monstrosity gripped in his hand, the weapon much larger than either of the other two.

  “Solid wood stock, bolt-action chamber built for one of the biggest rounds made,” Ripley says, looking at the weapon with an expression that borders on affection. “Had the fiber optic scope installed a while back just to give her a little more reliability.”