Neanderthal Opens the Door to the Universe

by Preston Norton

  “Maybe Kyle doesn’t need a status update on every little detail of my life.”

  Aaron stopped. The car stopped. I almost stopped—then I remembered that I was trying to get the hell out of here. I did glance back, however, as I kept walking.

  Lacey looked speechless. Which, to the extent of my knowledge, was a new look for her.

  “Just…let me talk to Cliff, okay? I’ll explain everything later.”

  That was as much as I heard. I rounded the corner of Gosling onto Gleason, swallowed in the shadow of the Monolith. The moment I was safely out of view…

  I ran.

  I was already daydreaming about Brown Sugar Cinnamon Pop-Tarts and reading Orson Scott Card until I passed out due to sci-fi pseudo-philosophy overexposure when I finally reached Arcadia Park.

  Aaron Zimmerman was sitting on the front steps of our trailer home.

  I stopped. Although “stopped” was putting it generously. I probably looked more like one of those Star Wars AT-ST chicken walkers tripping over Ewoks and shit.

  Aaron stood up. “Hey. You’re fast.”

  I looked at Aaron. I looked behind me—where he should have been—a mile away. And then I looked back at him.

  “How’d you beat me here?” I said.

  “Lacey gave me a ride. We actually drove right past you, but you seemed like you were pretty in the zone. I would’ve offered you a lift, but…”

  I started marching directly at him—mostly at the door behind him—which sort of threw his conversational skills off-balance.

  “Whoa, hey!” said Aaron. He frantically backed up the steps. “Chill, man, chill!”

  I stepped up the first step, second step, until he was pinned on the third step between me and the door. Though he was a step higher, our eyes were level.

  “Get lost,” I said.

  “No,” said Aaron.

  “Do you want to die?”

  “Actually, I almost did. But I’m not dead. That’s why I’m here, genius.”

  “Stop!” I screamed. “Stop it with this God bullshit, okay? Do you realize how insane you sound?”

  “Well, my family’s atheist,” said Aaron. “So yeah, I’m sure I sound bonkers.”

  “Then why are you doing this?”

  “Because it’s the truth.”

  “No.”

  “Dude. I saw God.”

  “Shut—”

  “He gave me a list of things to do.”

  “—the—”

  “And he wants me…”

  “—hell—”

  “…to recruit you.”

  “—up.”

  “You’re important, Cliff.”

  That last line. Oh boy. The last strand of my sanity snapped. I laughed. I laughed hard. I couldn’t stop laughing. It erupted from my gut and fried the nerves in my face. I was the Joker, this hysterically laughing psychopath, and there was no Batman to beat the hysterics out of me.

  “Um…Cliff?”

  I pushed Aaron off the stairs, opened the front door, and walked inside. He fell like a delicate autumn leaf—tied to a bowling ball. Fortunately for him, he landed in the brown-patchy bullshit pretending to be grass.

  “Son of a bitch,” said Aaron, crawling on the grass. “I’m not going anywhere, Cliff. Not until you agree to help me.”

  “Then I hope you like being a lawn ornament,” I said, and I slammed the door.

  The next day, my morning started the way mornings always should. My alarm clock was set to the radio, which was set to the Blaze, which blasted the Beastie Boys screaming, “So, so, so, so listen up ’cause you can’t say nothin’/You’ll shut me down with a push of your button,” and I hit my Snooze button, and I proceeded to hit it another six times until Rage Against the Machine played “Wake Up,” and, like, who the hell am I to argue with Rage Against the Machine? So I got up, showered, fell asleep in the shower, woke up again when the water started getting cold, scrubbed all seventeen square acres of my body, dried off, and got dressed.

  I stared scrutinizingly at my “lucky” hoodie.

  “Ah, what the hell,” I said, and I pulled it on.

  I slinked my ratty backpack over my shoulders and ventured into the kitchen, charting a direct course to the Pop-Tarts. As soon as I stepped around the corner, there was my mom, filling her thermos to the brim with coffee, black as the new moon. Our eyes made contact. The tension was more than palpable; it was a whirlpool. It was swept underwater, the oxygen sucked out of my lungs. I felt an apology in the back of my throat. In that same moment, I noticed my mom’s lips hover apart, searching for words.

  And then the moment passed.

  I didn’t even know who let it pass—her or me. It was most likely a joint effort. My mom screwed the cap on her thermos, and I grabbed a silver-wrapped rectangle out of the Pop-Tart box. We parted like well-acquainted strangers—her, to the bedroom to collect her purse and things. Meanwhile, I determined to make a quick exit.

  In an effort to defuse the tension, I immediately unwrapped my Pop-Tarts, stuffed one of those diabetes-filled bastards in my mouth, inserted my right thumb in the hole of my hoodie pocket, and walked out the door.

  Aaron Zimmerman was sitting cross-legged on my lawn. The Pop-Tart fell out of my mouth.

  Damn you, lucky hoodie!

  “You’re awake, finally!” said Aaron. “Have a nice hibernation, Papa Bear? We gotta hurry, or we’re going to be late to school.”

  “What the—? Why are—? How did—? Did you sleep on my lawn?”

  That already didn’t make sense because he was wearing different clothes.

  Aaron laughed. “I’m not that crazy. I just woke up early and walked over. I live on the other side of HVHS. I timed it, and it’s a little over forty minutes from here to school. That should be plenty of time for me to tell you everything. Whaddaya say?”

  I walked back inside and locked the door.

  “Cliff!” Aaron shouted.

  I couldn’t do this for one more second. My brain was short-circuiting. I shuffled to my bedroom and dropped my backpack on the floor. No school today.

  “Dammit, Cliff. Just listen to me!”

  I spun and flopped on my bunk bed like Shamu the Whale doing his showstopper.

  “Life isn’t just existing,” said Aaron. “It’s a door.”

  What the hell?

  I rose from my sinking mattress like a shark.

  “Don’t you want to know what’s on the other side?”

  WHAT THE HELL?

  I exploded out of my bed, across my entire forty-foot home, out the door, and down the stairs. Aaron’s hands flew up in his defense, but I already had him by the throat. I slammed him into the nearest tree.

  “Who told you that?” I said.

  “Gahh…ack…urp…gluck,” said Aaron.

  I released his windpipe, but only slightly. “Who the hell told you to say that?”

  “Told me to say what?”

  “‘Life is a door,’ you bastard! Who the HELL told you to say that?”

  Aaron was blinking, irises quivering, as he absorbed the fury and saliva flinging out of my mouth. “Um. God?”

  “DAMN YOU!” I screamed.

  I threw Aaron aside, and I punched the tree, and I punched it again, and bark was flying, and my fist was screaming, and I could see blood on the tree, and I knew it was from my knuckle, but I pretended it was the tree bleeding, because right here, right now, this fucking tree needed to die.

  And then I collapsed—a broken heap on the brown-patchy trailer-trash grass. I was crying. I was crying for the whole world to see—particularly for that asshole Aaron Zimmerman to see—but I didn’t care, because when you want to die, it doesn’t matter who sees anything.

  And then the storm subsided.

  The calm enveloped me.

  I stared up at the canopy of the sympathetic tree I attempted to murder. The tree leaned over me and seemed to understand. It glowed with compassion against the teal-painted sky, and for a moment—just a mo
ment—that tree reminded me of Shane.

  Everything was eclipsed by Aaron’s head as he hovered over me. “Are you okay?”

  I raised the thing that used to be my hand but was now just a bloody, pulpy mess with fingers. “I don’t think anything’s broken.”

  “Oh. Good.”

  I sat upright. I breathed in a nice, clean breath of oxygen, and let it out nice and slow. I could breathe, and it felt good.

  “I’m going to go grab my backpack,” I said. “You have a little over forty minutes to tell me about your bullshit near-death experience.”

  Aaron’s mouth twitched, creeping into a grin. “Brace yourself.”

  “So this boat hits my head,” said Aaron, “and the next thing I know, I’m on this tropical beach, and Morgan Freeman is standing over me.”

  My speechlessness was a placid crystal lake without ripples. I was drowning in my own inability to form words.

  “Only it wasn’t Morgan Freeman,” said Aaron. “It was God. I only knew this because he says to me, ‘Hi, Aaron. I’m God.’ Only he sounded exactly like Morgan Freeman, too. So yeah, it was weird.”

  I kept staring at Aaron like he was the Easter Bunny or Adolf Hitler or Barney the Dinosaur. My inner skeptic/conspiracy theorist was almost convinced that Aaron had somehow extracted every precious detail of my relationship with Shane, and he was now using it to manipulate me into his twisted little scheme. But how would he know about our obsession with Bruce Almighty? There was no way.

  “And I had to believe him,” said Aaron, “because, like, what’s weirder? Waking up on some obscure island and randomly discovering God or Morgan Freeman? Anyway, it doesn’t matter what he looked like. It only matters what he told me.”

  “What did he tell you?”

  “Basically he said that Happy Valley High School sucks.”

  Wow. Maybe Aaron did talk to God.

  “He told me that things need to change,” said Aaron. “And that I was the messenger who would set these changes into motio— Son-of-a-bitch-don’t-talk-I’m-not-done!” He said this with a raised, silencing finger as I opened my mouth, wearing the most cynical look since Scully met Mulder. I closed my mouth. “And he said that I needed your help. You, Clifford Hubbard. He put a lot of emphasis on you actually, and how we needed to do this together. And then he gave me the List.”

  “List? Like, he actually wrote a list out for you? Like a shopping list?”

  “Yes. Like a shopping list. Because he wants us to go grocery shopping for him. No, not like a shopping list! It was weird. He touched my forehead, and I saw the list. I can still see it. It’s like it’s ingrained in my brain. I wrote it out, though, so you could see it yourself.”

  Aaron reached into his pocket and pulled out a folded, slightly crumpled piece of paper that looked vastly unspectacular. He handed it to me and I unfolded it to Aaron’s deplorable handwriting:

  1. Put an end to Niko’s bullying.

  2. Call the JTs to repentance.

  3. Remind Mr. Spinelli why he chose to teach.

  4. Show Frankie’s gang a better way.

  5. Find and stop HAL.

  I folded up the sheet of paper and handed it back to Aaron.

  “Well?” he said. “What do you think?”

  “I think that is the stupidest thing I have ever read in my entire life.”

  “Which part is stupid?”

  “The part where these letters come together to form words.”

  Aaron paused to mull this over for a moment. “So…you don’t like the List.”

  “I feel like the stupidity of the whole thing is burning a hole in my cerebral cortex. I’m trying to figure out which part is the dumbest, but the levels of stupidity for each point are so astronomical, I wonder if two of these ideas bumped together, the universe might implode in a reverse Big Bang, and life as we know it would vacuum into a supermassive black hole and disappear from existence.”

  “Do you write a script every morning of all the weird shit you’re gonna say?” said Aaron.

  “One,” I said, ignoring him. “Niko is the Antichrist. You can’t put an end to his bullying unless you cast him down to hell where he belongs, which probably involves incapacitating him with a crossbow, holy water–dipped arrows, and an ancient exorcism that must be recited in Latin.”

  “I’ll take that as a yes.”

  “Two,” I continued, “the JTs will call us to repentance. And then they will crucify us. And then they will set the crosses on fire. And then they will scatter our ashes in Esther’s breakfast cereal, which she will enjoy eating.”

  “Ah.”

  “Three: Mr. Spinelli became a teacher to ruin teenage lives. Four: If you try to ‘show Frankie’s gang a better way,’ which I assume involves not pushing drugs, they’ll probably laugh at you. And then Frankie will disembowel you with his bare hands.”

  Aaron’s mouth became a very thin, straight line.

  “FIVE!” I exclaimed. “HAL IS FREAKING AWESOME.”

  Heretofore, I have not explained the greatness that is HAL, so here’s the skinny. Nobody knew who the hell he (or she) was, but one thing was certain: HAL could hack anything. Like when he hacked into the report card files and gave the entire student body failing grades. Or when he erased the faculty from computer records and gave their jobs to the most unqualified students. (I am proud to announce that for three and a half hours, I had replaced Ms. Lipton as the instructor for Dance.) And then there was the yearbook. Right before it went to print, HAL Photoshop-replaced everyone’s face with that of Nicolas Cage. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my entire life. HAL was a hero.

  “I refuse to believe in a God who doesn’t find HAL absolutely hilarious,” I said.

  “So you’re not going to help me?” said Aaron.

  “No, I will.”

  “What? You will?”

  My sudden agreement surprised even me. But I played it cool and shrugged. “I don’t have anything better to do.”

  “Oh,” said Aaron. “Okay.”

  “So where do we start?”

  “Um. I dunno. I wasn’t expecting you to be so agreeable all of a sudden. Where do you think we should start?”

  “We could start with the easy one,” I suggested.

  Fun fact: the pseudo-evil sentient computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey is named HAL 9000. Shane and I were in agreement—if that title alone didn’t make this hacker a complete badass, nothing did.

  Okay, so I didn’t really know who HAL was. In the same sense that the judicial system didn’t really know that O.J. killed his wife.

  However, there was a preponderance of incriminating evidence.

  Mr. Gibson’s computer lab was closed before school. Unless you were one of his two student tech-support lab monkeys: Jack Halbert (the most recent victim of Niko’s 3DS theft) and Julian Jeffries. Julian was the Ron Weasley to Jack’s Harry Potter. Not just because they were best friends or because Julian was so ginger that the existence of his soul was questionable, but because, even for a genius computer nerd, he was bafflingly stupid. But this wasn’t about Julian.

  No, we were here for Jack HAAAAALbert.

  See what I did there?

  “You’re sure it’s him?” said Aaron.

  “I’m sure,” I said. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

  “Psh! Please. I’m God’s Messenger, bro. Am I sure that my left testicle hangs lower than my right?”

  “Well. That’s…hmm. Okay.”

  Aaron waltzed into the computer lab like he owned the place. I followed a little more reluctantly behind him. Jack and Julian were seated at Mr. Gibson’s desk when they noticed us. They jolted up from their seats.

  “Hey, guys,” said Aaron.

  “What are you two doing?” said Julian. “You’re not supposed to be here.”

  Aaron raised his arms in the air. “We’re on a mission from God, bitches. Ain’t that right, Cliff?”

  “Uh…” I said. “I don’t think…”<
br />
  “So here’s the thing,” said Aaron. He crashed his weight down on the computer table with two heavy hands. The impact caused them both to jump, and Julian yelped. His gaze narrowed on Jack. “We know you’re HAL.”

  “What?” said Jack. “I’m not HAL.”

  “Sure you are. You’re a computer genius.”

  “Well, that’s flattering, Aaron, but I’m not HAL. Besides, Julian knows just as much as I do about computers.”

  “Unless we’re talking about shitty, overpriced Macs,” said Julian.

  “You can shut your oral cavity, Julian,” said Jack. “The ghost of Steve Jobs will Paranormal Activity your ass.”

  “Sorry, I don’t think his ghost-iPhone has an app for that.”

  Aaron slammed the table with his fist. This brought the oh shit back to their eyes.

  “Your last name is Halbert,” he said to Jack. “HAAAAALbert.”

  “Yeah, and Cliff’s last name is Hubbard,” said Jack. “That doesn’t mean his dad wrote Battlefield Earth and created Scientology.”

  Aaron’s cool composure was in a rapid state of disintegration. He turned to me. “He’s HAL.”

  “I’m not HAL,” said Jack to me, because apparently I was now the Supreme Court Justice in this hearing.

  “Uh…” I said.

  Aaron grabbed a pencil out of a pencil holder on Mr. Gibson’s desk. He snapped it in half with one hand. Tossed the severed halves across the room.

  Jack and Julian both swallowed, their Adam’s apples bobbing in sync.

  “Aaron?” I said.

  Aaron grabbed another pencil. Again, he snapped it with one hand. Tossed the pieces.

  Ohhhhhh boy.

  “Okay, Aaron,” I said. “I think we need to—”

  Grabbed another pencil. Snapped. Tossed.

  “—talk this over?”

  “Look,” said Jack. “You can’t just use scare tactics to make me confess to being someone I’m not.”

  Grab. Snap. Toss. A graveyard of dismembered pencil corpses was accumulating on the other side of the room.

  “AARON!” I said.

  Aaron looked at me, eyes wide, the left one slightly twitching. Clearly, the pressures of his Divine Calling were weighing heavily on his sanity.