The boys’ dorm is the repository for all the pubescent pubic hair in America, scattered about in artful piles in the corners of stalls and the tiled corners of urinals. It takes some sort of caustic lye to remove the skid marks on the toilet’s gutters.
In Admin, thank God, it’s merely a mop and a wipe down. The adults—Quincrux, Ruark, Holden, Tanzer, et al.—they manage to get their piss and pubes in the acceptable receptacles. It might be the Society of Extranaturals, but their detritus is remarkably natural.
We walk through the Admin lobby, my nuts merely howling with pain instead of screaming, under the watchful eyes of the admissions secretary—even without peeking her, I suspect she’s a bugfuck—and a metal bust of a man shoved in the corner, half-obscured by a large, bushy plant.
He’s a proud-looking man, young and angular, cast in bronze and staring wistfully out the big plate windows at the mountains. He’s got a slightly crooked nose, sensual expressive lips, pork chop sideburns, and thick, wavy hair done in a style from yesteryear. There’s something antique about the statue’s hollow gaze, but I can’t tell what it is making it seem out of place in this office. Something about the stare feels familiar to me. As if I’ve met this man, and we’ve spoken and not all of it was pleasant. While the statue is bronze, burnished, there’s black grime in the creases and craggy lines of its form—almost like the thing has been plucked from a fire.
The placard beneath the bust reads Dr. Armstead Lucius Priest, Founder of the Society for Extranaturals.
I feel like I should know that name. It has the ring of familiarity, yet I can’t place it. I look at the statue again, and Armstead and I lock gazes once more. Huh. I hightail it out of there.
THIRTY-FOUR
Morning comes early, and Jack’s kicking my bed again. Tap groans, and Hollis silently tugs on clothes.
On the field, Ruark ignores everything but assignments—Green to the upper airfield, Red Team to CE (groans), and the Orange Team to assemble on the lower airfield for transport, 0700 hours. Jack turns to look at me with raised eyebrows.
“What’s that mean?” I whisper.
“They’ve got a mission.”
The teams launch themselves into the air, but today with a lack of whoops or catcalls. I don’t even think I feel too much spit raining down.
“What’s the mission?” I ask Jack.
“How should I know?”
Clearly preoccupied, Ruark yells, “Morning: Tap, Cannon, Graves—sanitation.” She clears her throat and shifts in her faux uniform. “Afternoon: Perdie, Holden, Cannon, Princent, Klein, Tappan, Graves …” She rattles off six or seven more names. “Lower airfield.”
“What about me?” Hollis asks.
“You’re to report to Admin for further testing.” Ruark turns on her heel and saunters back to the golf cart.
There’s a collective gasp from the remaining students, and Hollis begins to shiver.
“What’s the deal?” I say out of the side of my mouth to Jack and Tap. Hollis looks terrified.
Jack shakes his head slowly. “Most kids who wash out … it starts with them going through testing again.”
Our merry trio is assigned to sanitation for the morning. It’s a messy job, gathering all the trash from the dorms and Admin and hauling it to a massive Dumpster. Messy, but relatively easy. The absence of Hollis seems to me like a missing tooth. I keep probing at it and noting its loss.
“You think he’s gonna be okay?”
Jack shrugs. “No idea. You learn real quick around here not to think you have it all figured out.”
“I got that. But he’s a good kid.” I chew my lip. “I just want to know what it means, washing out.”
After lunch, we hightail it up to the lower airfield, which is ours for the afternoon with the exception of two guards near the Quonset hut housing the Society’s jet. They pay us very little attention as Jack and Tap enter the hut to wheel out three massive reflective-silver balloons.
“So what’s all this?”
“Obstacle course.”
Each balloon is tethered to a large cement block by thick nylon rope. Each block is on a rubber-wheeled cart. I move to help Tap and Jack. The carts are heavy and slow to roll.
Once out of the hut and on the field, I spy a small gang of girls approaching. They’re all in their mid to late teens, I think, standing with a group of boys also in their teens. More non-team members, it seems.
After flashing his pearly whites and gesticulating at one of the prettier girls in the gaggle, Tap pushes one of the weather balloons downrange and lets it rise. The balloon shoots two hundred feet into the air. Jack does the same with his as I struggle to get mine into position and released. Afterward, we walk over to the folks who’ve just arrived.
Introductions are made, we all shake, and a girl named Danielle says, “Someone called you the Little Devil in the girl’s dorm. Is that your handle?” She’s what they’d call ethnically ambiguous and absolutely stunning. Dark, mocha skin, long jet-black hair that makes me think she might be part Asian, possibly, but full lips and an athletic build.
“Yeah, I’ve heard they call me that.”
“Why do they?” Danielle’s voice is even. It’s not prying or aggressive, just curious.
“I can get in people’s heads.”
“That’s what I do,” a boy says. “I can infect you with a rhythm.”
“I can infect you with me. Possess you—like the devil, I guess.”
The boy whistles and extends his hand to shake. “They call me Kicks, but my name’s Bernard Perdie. Back home they called me ‘Purdy.’ They don’t call me that here.” His face falls a little, like he’s sad that part of him was left behind. “I’m paired up with that super-duper over there. Ignatius. Iggy for short.”
“Super-duper?”
“Nobody broke it down for you?”
I glance at Jack, who’s coming back from positioning the weather balloon. “No, I guess not.”
“Far as jocks go, you got your jumpers, your floaters, and your super-dupers—they’re regular old flyers who usually can’t even tie their own shoes when on the ground but are pure magic once they get in the air.” Perdie smiles, and I realize I like this guy, right off the bat. Some folks you just take to, I guess. He begins ticking off all the different flavors of extranatural on his fingers. “There’s your detonators—your boy Jack is one—your poltergeists, your firestarters, your chilly-willies. Though I’ve never seen one of them in action. You got your choke-a-bitches, your bleeders, lockpickers, spoonbenders, and your crush-ya-heads.”
“And your devils.”
“That’s what it looks like, man-child.”
Jack trots up, slightly winded from the run. “It cool if we get started, Kicks?”
“Might as well. You two up to tandem?”
Jack scowls and ignores the question. He launches himself into the air, and Tap quickly follows suit, trailed by three girls. The landbound extranaturals gather below, like parents at a soccer match.
“With us bugfucks, it’s different, you know?” Bernard says. “For every human emotion, there’s some kid who can jigger it. You got your mentalists, your psychic cowboys, the brainiacs and mesmerists—”
I watch Jack wheel and streak across the vault of sky. He’s better than he was when we were on the lam, it’s true. It’s hard to even tell that he’s making the little invisible explosions that keep him afloat.
He’s gotten better. But not much better.
Jack lances through the sky like an arrow, wheels around the first weather balloon, lightly touching it with his right hand as he banks around it, extending his other hand out to focus his energies on the microbursts directing his turns. The harder the turn, the more bursts, and Jack seems to shudder in a zigzagging pattern that’s hard for him to recover from. He manages, barely, and drops in altitude very, very slowly toward the next balloon. After executing that turn smoothly, he arcs upward in a larger blast, losing some balance, and flips head over foot thr
ee times before he can steady himself in the air, all the while rocketing past the remaining obstacle balloon. He takes the return, reverse course with the limping caution of somebody just wanting to get through the rest of his miserable day. I can see it in the cant of his shoulders.
But Bernard’s still speaking. “You’ve got your snoops. You’ve got your warm fuzzies and touchy-feelies. And then you’ve got the merchants of gloom, the emo motherfuckers that can swing your mood one way or another.” He puts his hands on his hips. “And then there’s me, Mister Shreve. Bernard Perdie, number one hitmaker, and the only rhythmatist in this whole round world.”
“Uh, can’t any DJ or drummer infect someone with a rhythm?”
“You’re new here, so I’m not gonna take offense at your dumb ass, but in a word … hell naw.”
“That’s two words,” I say.
Bernard laughs. “Taking it from all sides from the peanut gallery. But all I got to say to your boneheaded stuff is, go ask somebody ’bout those red shoes. I can make you dance till your heart gives out.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
“You do that.”
Tap takes the obstacle course like an airborne rhino, bullying through the turns with bursts of linear speed. What he lacks in style, he makes up for in fierce, masculine force.
One of the girls—Danielle—whips through the course like a flying snake, fluid, electric, aggressive, her body twisting and turning with each change in direction, her long hair whipping behind her like an ink stroke. When she lands next to another girl—like some gazelle ending a leap on the soft turf of the veld—she walks over to a nearby girl, hair flying around her in a wild, beautiful mess, and they immediately put their heads together and begin to exchange notes on her flight. Looking at Danielle’s companion, I realize it’s Casey, the one-armed girl from the testing. I wave and smile at her, and she waves back. With her visible arm. She smiles.
“So, we’re like flying coaches, even though we can’t fly?” I ask as Jack lands and walks over to where we stand, his arms crossed and head down. Brooding.
“That’s right. Because, at some point, our asses will be up there with them. They pair us up so that, once we’re on a team, we’ll already know how to rely on somebody else.”
Watching Jack wallow about in the sky makes me terrified of flying tandem. He’s lifted me once, but we were in dire straits. Watching him now, I know there’s no way in hell he’ll be able to pick me up.
“You gettin’ scared, aren’t you?” Bernard grins wide.
I just nod.
“Just you wait till you get to the lake and they let you fall.”
“Huh?”
“You’ll see.”
Jack looks at me, eyebrows raised. “So?”
“Yeah. Um. You’re flying better than I’ve ever seen you.”
“Screw you, Shreve,” he says. “I hate it when you do that.”
“Do what?”
“Say the opposite of what you mean.”
“Well, yeah, okay, that sucked. Pretty hard. When you were making that turn—”
“You mean screwing the pooch.”
“No, listen. You are flying better than I’ve ever seen you. But back then, you were the only kid I’d ever seen fly, right?”
He remains silent, but I can tell he’s listening to me.
“I don’t know much, but I do know that you can’t fly me around up there with you if you’re not rock solid. True?”
He nods. Grudging.
“It’s when you’ve got to make the harder turns that it throws you off-kilter, right? That’s because when you bank, you’re pushing yourself one way with pulses,” I clap my hands together, clap clap clap clap clap. “Like that. But the pulses need to be less strong, but faster, got me? Otherwise, you’ll get off-balance.”
His eyes widen, and he nods.
“Hey, Bernard, can you pick up Jack’s rhythm?”
“Who’re you talking to?” He turns to Jack. “Listen to me. Eyes right here.” He jabs two fingers at Jack’s eyes and then at his own. The universal gesture for “keep looking at me.”
“Sure,” Jacks says, grinning now. It seems Bernard has that effect on people.
Bernard starts making sounds with his mouth, rhythmic plosives, bass expulsions of air, hisses. It comes out fast. Beatboxing. Like a drummer doing a sixteenth beat on a hi-hat and snare.
Jack at first seems amused, but something in Bernard solidifies, some unquantifiable something, and Jack’s smile disappears, his pupils dilate, and his breath quickens.
“There you go, man,” Bernard says, snapping his fingers.
“You mind if he goes again?”
“Nah, Iggy’s toast for the day. But Jack’s not gonna be able to keep that up forever. He’ll need to find his own rhythm.”
“I got you. Thanks.”
“No problem. We’re all freaks here.” He winks at me. “Some of us, superfreaks.” He saunters off toward the Quonset hut.
“You ready?”
Jack, bopping his head with the internal rhythm, says, “Hell yeah.”
This time, he launches, banks smoothly around the first balloon, seems like he’s going to lose balance but doesn’t and sticks the rest of the course like a champ. When he touches down, he’s grinning. Bernard, Iggy, Danielle, and some of the others give a smattering of applause.
“I think we’re done here for the day,” I say.
Jack shakes his head. “I should go a couple more times. Muscle memory.”
“Sure.” I look around to see if there’s anything else I can do. In the jet’s shadow, near the guards, stands a darker shadow. Negata watches me, silent and motionless.
I give the airfield another, closer examination. At least four cameras are trained on us.
Negata makes a small and curious inclination of his head, his gaze never wavering. If I didn’t know better, I’d think he was saying hello.
Jack leaps into the air again, rocketing through the course, faltering only with his descent.
When he lands, I say, “Hey, nice one. But you’re stumbling on the third balloon.”
“Can’t you give me one second of feeling good about myself?”
“Not really. Don’t be a titty-baby about it.”
“Screw you, man.” He’s thrumming, bobbing his head a little. Patting his thigh. Bernard’s magic holding sway.
“No, this is good. You nailed the banking, right?”
“Yeah.”
“So that let me see what else you’re screwing up.”
“Ass.”
“So, when you’re descending, what are you doing?”
“Falling. I’m always falling.”
“Yeah, but when you have to lose altitude, you do what?”
“Allow myself to fall.”
“Right. You’re just letting gravity take over. And it’s not doing it fast enough. You’ve still got some forward momentum.”
He nods.
“So to drop fast enough to make the lower balloon, you’re going to have to give a pulse upward. Push yourself toward the ground.”
He doesn’t like the sound of that. I can tell from his expression.
“I know it goes against probably every instinct of self-preservation you have, but hell, man, if you listened to your self-preservation instincts, would you be flying to begin with?”
We laugh. “Okay, I’ll try it. That doesn’t mean you’re not a jackass.”
“That I am, broseph. That I am.”
He nails it this time. Perfectly.
I don’t tell him so, though. I complain some more, just to aggravate him.
“Better, man. You have the grace of a whale caught in a fishing net.”
He punches me in the shoulder. It’s quite a blow. He meant some of it.
Good. I can still get under his skin. All of Shreve hasn’t been burned away in the dark.
We watch the others finish their maneuvers until the sun passes beyond the mountain rim and casts the
valley into blue-gray shadow. Strange expressions pass over the features of our group, girls and boys alike, as they come out of the golden rays of sun to land, back on Earth once more, in the shadow of mountains. They look haggard, wan. Even jovial Bernard, in this half-light, looks sallow, with deep bags under his eyes. His smile has disappeared, and I have one of those moments of clarity in which everything comes into focus and everything around me seems to go still and be revealed for what it truly is—beautiful or horrific, base or sublime.
These kids are scared.
“Something wrong?” I ask Danielle.
“No,” she says, her face a mask. “It’s just …”
“Night, Mr. Shreve. Hope they turn on that buzzer for a long time.”
“That buzzer?”
“Yeah. What keeps the insomnia out.”
“The Helmholz.”
“That’s right. The buzzer.”
“So you can’t sleep without the Helmholtz?”
“Ain’t you listening, man?”
Danielle puts her hand on Bernard’s arm to quiet him and says, “It’s bad now, Shreve. At first, it was just on the radio. We’d hear about it in passing. We’d see it on the television in recreation. The news. But it’s here now. And we can’t sleep without the Helmholtz.”
I don’t know of any way to say it but just to say it. “I can help you.”
“What you talking about, man? You can’t help none—”
But I’m out, beyond my body in the nonspace between souls. Between stars.
I perceive each one of them, each one of them like an ember, slumbering, unrealized. Waiting to burst into flame. The match heads of their minds.
I burn through them, every one, and where I pass, their minds burn bright.
“What the fu—” Bernard looks stunned. “What did you just do, boss?”
Danielle sinks to the ground, legs crossing under her. She puts her hand to her mouth. “Oh my god.”
Casey tugs at her bottom lip with the trembling fingers of her only hand. Bernard just stares at me silently, listening to the drumbeat of his heart. The dusk settles around us like a cloud, and there are desperate and uneasy echoes of what I’ve done in the ether. Something has changed.
The Shibboleth Page 24