Bullettime

by Nick Mamatas

  “Yes, it’s good,” Dave says, “thank you for making it.”

  “That’s love!” she says. She points at Dave’s dish. “That’s love in there. You see, anyone can make macaroni and cheese. I work hard, I want a good meal when I come home. We could go out every night, I could boil lobsters and make fantastic roasts, but I make that, for you, because I know you like it.”

  Jeremy frowns at the end of his fork. Pasta painted safety orange glistens in the light of the fixture over the table.

  Ann gapes. “What do you say about that?” She turns back to Jeremy. Dave wishes Mom would just slide her chair a bit farther back, so she could look at them both at once without having to swing her head like an annoyed snake. Maybe a smaller table would be nice—the long rectangular one the Holbrooks generally eat at reminds Dave of one of those hyperextended cartoon tables with a candelabra and a roasted turkey in the middle.

  “He doesn’t even know what to say,” Jeremy agrees. “Unbelievable. Dave, why can’t you just say ‘Thank you’ to your mother? For dinner? For everything?” His tone is even, like the static between radio stations.

  “Thanks, ma,” Dave chooses to say, knowing that there is no way to point out that he already thanked his mother without sounding petulant, and petulance is just blood in the water. It doesn’t matter. At least they’re not talking about his shirt anymore.

  “Thanks, ma,” Ann repeated. “Well it’s too late for ‘Thanks, ma’ now. These things have to come from the heart, David, the heart. My heart is full. Your father’s,” she says, indicating Jeremy with a slosh of her wine glass, “his heart is full too. Of love. For you. Don’t snicker, don’t smirk, this is serious. This is the most important thing you’ll ever hear in your entire life. I love you, David. Your father loves you. We do everything for you. This meal, this house, your father’s job, every day, every minute, every thought in our lives, David, is oriented toward you because we love you. And all we want in return—no, not even in return because our love for you is unconditional and we’ll just keep on loving you no matter what you do or say—but all that we would appreciate is a little appreciation, from the heart. Heart appreciation,” she says, that last little bit with a giggle. Her chin sinks to her chest and with a final jerk she is done.

  Jeremy sits stoically while Dave stabs repeatedly at the rest of his macaroni and cheese, piling it onto the tines of the fork to gulp it down in a single bite.

  “So,” Jeremy says. “I want an ice cream sandwich. Would you like an ice cream sandwich, Dave? Ann? Ice cream sandwich?” Nobody answers—Ann’s unable to, Dave amuses himself by pretending not to hear—and Jeremy says, “Okay, that’s three ice cream sandwiches.” He pushes his chair from the table dramatically, takes three great strides into the kitchen, collects the ice cream sandwiches from the freezer and walks back. He slides one across the width of the table to a position near Ann, but she doesn’t stir, then he forcefully hands one to Dave, who takes it willingly enough.

  Jeremy hovers over Dave, holding up the remaining ice cream sandwich and waiting.

  “Thanks, Dad,” Dave says.

  “Yes, yes. That’s right. You’re welcome, Dave, you’re very welcome.” Jeremy walks back to his seat, flattens out his crumpled dinner napkin, tears open the wrapper of his ice cream sandwich, and eats it in desperate bites, chewing loudly between them. He’s done by the time Dave has his wrapper off, but quickly moves on to Ann’s sandwich and polishes that off as well. He stands again suddenly and says good night, causing Ann to stir a bit.

  “Clear the table, dear,” she mumbles, “clear it, clear it before you go.” Then she’s back on the sudden nod. Again Jeremy hovers for a moment, then he turns to Dave and says, “You heard your mother; clear the table and start the dishwasher. Carry your weight around here for once.”

  Dave sits at the table for another two minutes, then leaves without clearing the table or helping his mother to the couch, which he sometimes does when he feels he has won dinner.

  Whenever his mother passes by Dave’s bedroom and peers inside, whether during her soporific days or agitated evenings, she declares with a sigh: “Just another average teenage boy’s room.” Dave hears this in his head and cringes as he goes up to his room, though he knows there is very little average about it. No posters of bikini babes or cars, only teenage boys and middle-aged men take seriously hang from the light blue walls, and there’s not a football or baseball to be seen. It’s actually pretty neat, except for the ankle-deep sludge of dirty shirts and jeans, the legs all twisted around one another. He heads right to the computer and turns on the monitor with a punch of his finger.

  Dave’s email client, the web browser, the chat program, the MP3 player, and a couple of the bullshit programs he can’t quite be bothered to adjust the preferences on, all compete for resources as they struggle to be the first to start. Dave’s scarcely more patient than the computer itself, though it occurs to him that he doesn’t actually have anything to do, and isn’t waiting on some important email or message. He tries to conceive of what an important email would even be in his case, but can’t think of anything. It doesn’t matter though; important messages suggest things like deadlines, deadlines imply commerce, commerce means want, and want means the world of the flesh. Not anything Dave is very interested in.

  To Dave, the Web was the everywhere he kept everything in. He didn’t even feel his fingers hitting the keyboard or manipulating the mouse anymore, but rather felt his self flowing through the monitor, into the net. He laughs, remembering the time his mother dragged herself to the doorway, made her usual comment, and then pointed to the computer to ask if there was any way to get some tax form or another from “in there.”

  “Not ‘In there’,” Dave had said. “Out there.”

  Dave was out there, in the place of all places where music always played, where women splayed their cunts and turned to look over their shoulder, where everyone knew everything about the President and free market and Star Wars and “real magic“ (with a k!), and where everyone was his friend except for assholes he could blink out of existence with the click of his mouse. Sometimes it took two clicks.

  Click. Click.

  CHAPTER 5

  There were a number of leaflets, photocopies of handwritten material, and print-outs from webpages, blogs, Twitter feeds, Facebook threads, and Bboards in the dossier. One of them read as follows:

  This is our symbol, this is our hope. All you need to know and all you need to do can be found within its mysteries. Those jagged lines, what are they but a slash and a backslash and a slash and yet another backslash. What is our life, our cause, but an attack followed by our counterattacks, which begets yet another attack, and thus again we counterattack. But the battle ends with us, with our victory!

  And what is that symbol but that of a resistor as depicted in a schematic? What do resistors do but sap the power of a circuit, to slow it down and bend it toward new ends? That too is our path and that too is our goal. The power of the system must flow through YOU—prepare yourself (and your Self) and choose your career, your location, your lifestyle. Maximize your impact (the pact between the “I” that is you and the “me” that is all).

  And what is the symbol but a set of fangs displayed in a grimace? You must learn to bare your fangs before the system, to intimidate, to threaten, and ultimately to take a bite! Tap into your animal nature, live in the flow of a natural world where freedom is neither means nor ends, but simply the water in which we swim, like a shark in the ocean amidst minnows. We tear through the nets others are trapped in.

  To find out more—you know where to look. With-IN.

  I put the flyer back down on the table after I finished reading it. My cuffs jingled. My shrink, who sat across from me, asked, “Would you like to talk about what you were trying to say with this, uh, leaflet?”

  I laughed. “I wasn’t trying to say anything. It’s said. It’s a completed action, a moment in
time.”

  She nodded, pretending to get me.

  “And besides, I didn’t write it.”

  “Oh no?”

  “I simply inspired it.”

  “It’s signed by you at the bottom, isn’t it?”

  I laughed—she was such a stupid cunt. “Psychologists are wealthy, aren’t they?”

  She pursed her lips and played with the eyeglasses that hung from the long necklace of plastic pearls around her neck. She couldn’t figure out a way to move the discussion away from where I had decided to lead it, as she knew I’d just “act out” as she liked to call it.

  “Some are, some aren’t. I’m not, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

  “Not very wealthy, but wealthy enough, right? Wealthy enough to get some letter from the President or a Senator, someone who wants your vote and some money, right?”

  “Yes, of course. Junk mail.”

  “Are these letters from the President signed?”

  She nodded. What I liked about my shrink, why I didn’t just have her taken, to be found three days later in a Wal-Mart parking lot down the shore, the hands of her charred corpse melted to what would be left of her steering wheel. “No, of course not,” she said. “A machine signs them, and it’s probably some publicist or expert who drafts the letter. They’re designed to persuade, even down to the realistic-looking signature.”

  “Do you consider my signature realistic-looking?” The resistance sigil was repeated at the bottom, in a scraggy, bloody font.

  “It is important to you, Mr. Holbrook—”

  “Call me I!” Snapping gets her attention. I wondered if her father ever hit her. Lots of my girls respond well to snapping because of that. Lots of shrinks enter the field because they want to fix themselves.

  “Is it important to you, I, that I think your signature is realistic-looking?” she asked, toneless.

  “I do think my signature is realistic-looking,” I said, and I chuckled.

  “By I, I meant me, you know.”

  “Yes, exactly.”

  CHAPTER 6

  The next time Dave sees Erin, he is leaning against a billboard on the platform of the cavernous Journal Square PATH station. It really was a cavern cut into the side of a hill—Dave wasn’t above thinking of it as “The Batcave,” which, to be fair, was what nearly everyone thought the first time they saw it. Dave is daydreaming about that old show from the 1960s (the flame from the Batmobile’s rocket engine being used as a weapon somehow, the front wheels smoking and screeching as the car struggled to stay in place while the fire engulfed the side of a criminal hideout) when Erin walks up to the billboard, leans against it next to Dave, winces as her hair is caught between her shoulders and the loud red ad for Hot 97, then steps away to move her long curls over her shoulders, and leans back again. She’s wearing a tank top, white, with the words I MOCK YOUR VALUE SYSTEM in black block letters, and denim shorts held up by a brownish belt. Her ass looks a little too big in the shorts, Dave thinks.

  “So,” Erin asks. “Where are you going?” She hasn’t noticed him staring, or, Dave thinks somehow excited by the thought, She doesn’t care if I stare.

  Dave is so smooth. “M-me?”

  Erin nods.

  He jerks his head away to look down at the platform. It’s a newer kind of cement with glittery somethingorothers embedded into the mix. Keeps the cave bright. “The city.”

  “Yeah, what’s in the city?”

  He shrugs. “I dunno, everything.” Dave glances away.

  “But what are you going to do there,” she says, her voice developing an edge as she growls the r in “there”, as she reaches for his hair.

  “Ow!”

  Erin’s eyes flash and she shows her teeth with a wild, jagged smile. Her teeth aren’t fixed. “You look at me when I’m talking to you! What the hell is wrong with you?” Dave has never seen such an angry smile.

  “Nothing, I’m just going to go—you know, hang out.”

  “Where?”

  “I dunno,” Dave says with a shrug. “Around.” Her smile is getting even wider—is she cheering up or getting angrier?

  “Do you know what stop you’re getting off at?” A train was coming. Dave prided himself on knowing on which track a train would arrive from the merest initial vibrations. It was his train this time.

  “Uhm . . . Ninth Street. I’m gonna hang out in the Village. You know, look around.” Behind Dave, the train rounds the bend to turn into the station from the yard, giving him a chance to shut up. The train slides to a halt in front of them, but the doors don’t open.

  Dave looks at Erin.

  “Look around, eh?” she asks.

  “Yeah.”

  “Exciting stuff! Do you look often?” Dave does look, at the train car nearest them, attempting to open the double doors by force of will. No go.

  “So Erin, what brings you to the city?” Erin says to herself aloud.

  “Oh, yeah. Uhm, what you going to do in the city?”

  “Fuck some strangers,” she deadpans. “Not for money or anything. I’m just mad for the cock.”

  Dave blushes furiously. Erin smiles and slowly raises her hand then points to her shirt. “You’re one of those uptight kids, aren’t you? I can tell because you’re wearing a belt instead of just letting your pants fall past your hips.” But she’s wearing one too, he thinks.

  Finally, the doors open. Dave wonders if—and hopes that—Erin will sit next to him, and also that she’ll stop being so oddly antagonist. Instead, she sits across from him, across the narrow aisle of the train car. The train moves from the tunnel, and Erin whoops as they hit the sun-drenched elevated tracks. Dave grins as the reddish highlights in her dark mop of hair surface in the light.

  “Hey, are you Irish?”

  “What?” Erin asks. “What? What the hell is wrong with you!”

  Dave slides down in his chair, submissive. “I was just asking.”

  “I’m Greek. You know, Greek? Ever been to a diner? It’s a pleasure to serve you? Tacky murals of the Acropolis? Zorba? Opa? Can’t play cards? Big fat weddings?”

  “Well your name is Erin—”

  “My name’s not Erin. That’s for you white people. My name is Irini,” she says, rolling her r and elongating her e’s to an almost ridiculous extent, at least to Dave’s ear.

  “Wait, you’re white—”

  Erin ignores that. “Irini means ‘peace’; it’s a very common name, actually. After the Greek goddess.”

  “I never heard of any Greek goddess named Irini.” Dave says it “Eye-reenee.”

  Erin kicks up a sneakered foot, then slams it back down to the floor, coming nowhere near Dave’s face, but he flinches anyway. “She’s not the sort of goddess you’d find the stats for in your copy of Deities and Demigods, but she’s real. Oh yes, very real.”

  Dave leans in, suddenly excited again. “Oh wow, do you RP?” I’m in, he thinks.

  Erin lifts her hands, “Oh God, forget I mentioned it.”

  “Well how do you know RPG manuals? Did you have a boyfriend that used to play or something?”

  “Oh yeah, I like to fuck strangers who are in college and get good grades—lots of nerds at NYU and Columbia.”

  “Is that where you’re headed now?”

  Erin points out the window behind Dave’s head. “Ah, is this your stop?”

  “Thanks!” Dave says as he hops out of his seat, grabs onto the pole and performs what he hopes is a cool-looking spin toward the opening set of doors, only to be greeted by the sight of a PATH station pillar with a large white letter C on blue tile. Christopher Street. Manhattan’s fancy little gay neighborhood, where rainbow flags decorate storefront windows as frequently as stickers for Zagat Guides or the New York Times, which is sold everywhere, of course. Flushed, he pivots on his heel and sits back down, while Erin does a little laughing jig in her seat and mout
hs the word “Fag-got” at him.

  His stop, 9th Street, was only twenty seconds away, but they were a long and sullen twenty seconds. Erin stands up with him and loudly calls out, “Bye, David Holbrook of Jersey City who is going to the Village to look around!” as he darts, shoulders lowered and head first, out of the car, through the turnstile, and up the steps and the three-jointed winding tunnel that lets him out on the corner of West 9th and 6th Avenue.

  And Dave does look around. He likes the Jefferson Library; its spire and old clock, he decides, look European. It’s closed now, though, and sitting on the steps to people-watch is no fun without company. He doesn’t like it when the little yappy dogs turn their heads to stare and bark at him while their owners, always imperious and oblivious at once, march down the street without a word of apology. There is a great barrier between Jersey City and Manhattan, despite the PATH train, despite the fact that the Hudson is easily traversable. People from there just don’t come here. That’s why Dave likes it so much.

  Dave decides to walk down to Washington Square Park. He loves the few blocks he traverses; autumn leaves have a smell subtle but pervasive enough to scrub the exhaust out of the air. Brownstones with huge bay windows line the streets, and Dave loves the glimpses of walls painted in tasteful reds, the endless shelves of books, and occasionally on stoops or walking past the windows, the people who can actually, through seniority or million-dollar incomes, afford to live here.

  The city, Dave decides, is much different than the picture painted by his mother’s hissing and spitting: “Scum, trash, and spics. The city is a cesspool, a pit. I hate that your father even has to work there,” she told him this morning, agitated as she was before her morning tea and palmful of medicine. “Were it up to me, I’d blow up the Holland Tunnel and the PATH train, just to keep the city people from seeping over the river. I don’t even know why you want to go there. Just be careful—don’t look any black people in the eye. That’s how they challenge people on the streets; they’ll kill you if you stand up for yourself.” He laughed at that, but she was serious, almost frantic, and explained that she had read it in the newspaper once, or maybe it was the TV news, plus she had grown up in Gramercy Park back when New York was at least “half-sane,” so she knows what she’s talking about. “And don’t buy any food from a cart!”