Bullettime

by Nick Mamatas

  And Dave could hide a gun in that coat. Or even a samurai sword. Or, he thinks with a barely suppressed giggle, a large baguette or oversized salami. Robotrippin’ makes a man silly sometimes.

  Then it’s off to Shop Rite for a few groceries, and in Shop Rite there is a separate liquor store. Dave always gets a kick out of it—in New Jersey, supermarkets cannot sell the hard stuff, so some genius emptied out part of the inventory storage area and put in a liquor store with its own cash registers, employees, and employee vests. Ann loads up with her usual wine and vodka, and sends Dave to buy even more orange juice for screwdrivers later.

  Later was ten minutes later, back at the house. “Sit,” she tells Dave before he can make it up to his room, to his computer.

  “I’m sorry I played hooky, Mom, it’s just that—”

  “Eh, I don’t give two hoots about that,” Ann says. She’s still sober, but her tumbler is the size of a bucket and her drink is a vat of vodka with a splash of OJ. In about five minutes, Dave figures, it’ll be all about his mother not giving two fucks. “I wouldn’t go to that school either. Not if you paid me. Look at your face!” Then, sotto voce, “My poor little boy.”

  Dave wishes he could pull a swig of his cough syrup, or make himself a screwdriver for that matter, as Ann goes on about how sad and afraid he must be all the time. Does he have a girlfriend, or are all the girls at Hamilton sluts? Dave can’t bear to mention Erin—does what he did at the Barnes & Noble in Hoboken count as slutty? By the time Ann’s glass is two-thirds empty, she starts.

  “It’s those niggers ruining everything,” she says. “They ruined this whole town. The Hispanics are okay, I guess . . .” Ann always was a lightweight; never had any tolerance for alcohol despite her regular, almost frantic consumption. She mixes herself another and takes a gulp. “Can’t leave the orange juice out for long, it’ll go sour,” she says to nobody.

  “White kids pick on me too,” Dave says.

  “But who broke your nose? Who stabbed you?”

  “Who gave me a concussion?”

  “That’s two against one,” Ann says.

  “This family is two against one,” Dave says. “Just pull me out of school. Homeschool me. Let’s move to the suburbs! Do something!”

  Ann laughs. “A teenage boy who wants to move to the suburbs.” She is really tickled—she tee-hees between breaths, and sips. “When I was your age, I was all about the city. I’d go out there and dance all night. All night,” she says.

  “Gee, Mom, isn’t the city full of niggers?” Dave says, snotty.

  Ann’s face contorts into a sneer. “Fuck you, you pathetic fucking little nerd. I’m sitting here trying to teach you something. Something about life. I don’t want you growing up to be a loser; I’m trying to protect you. If I were in school these days, I’d have all those bastards wrapped around my little finger. I used to be good-looking. I was like a short Cindy Crawford.” She finishes her second tumbler full of vodka. At least she’ll calm down now, Dave thinks.

  And she is calmer, but she still simmers. “We’ll take you out of school. You can go to a Catholic school. Saint John Pope Paul the Second, or whatever the hell that one in the Heights is.” She raises a finger. “I don’t want you believing in any of that nonsense though. We’re Protestants.”

  “Well,” Dave says. “Okay.” We were actually entirely irreligious. I never believed in anything, in any timestream save the Ylem from which I deserve all outcomes of my life, where the existence of the supernatural could not be denied. Even the Kallis Episkopos doesn’t believe. He just decided that pretending to believe was the same as believing, like pretending to hallucinate is the same as hallucinating.

  Dave Holbrook fancies himself a junior scientist of sorts. He earned good grades in his science classes, watched every sci-fi movie that came out, and knew his way around a computer. When he was a kid he read all sorts of books about young boys who tinker with electronics—Danny Dunn, The Mad Scientists Club, Tom Swift—but he lacked the resources to emulate them. No backyard, no friends, no children’s world away from the constant surveillance of adults, and no piles of radio gear and lumber left to be nonchalantly discovered and exploited by omnipotent authors. Kids aren’t free till high school, just in time for the fucking and the violence and the drug abuse to start.

  Back in his room, Dave finishes off his cough syrup. His limbs are heavy; he wants to puke it all up and paint his keyboard purple. He Googles for guns again. There are books, blueprints, suggestions. He could build a gun—if he had a lathe. If he even knew what a shaft collar was. A generation ago, he could have been a tinkerer, like the boys in the books he used to read. He really just wanted something to wave around, something to scare people off with.

  CHAPTER 17

  Two weeks ago a teenage girl in Youngstown, Ohio scarred her stomach with a razor, then walked out in front of a truck. She was a chub and thus largely intact even after the collision, which was useful for the police because they could more easily identify the design of the cuts on her flesh. Even so, at first the cops thought she had tried to carve herself into a jack-o’-lantern thanks to the jagged-tooth pattern. It was mid-October and Halloween was coming up. Finally, they figured it out that it was the sign of The Resistance, and I got my television interview just in time for November sweeps.

  I’m so dangerous it was done via Twitter. I got to tweet, with a hack breathing down my neck behind me, presumably in case I attempted to upload myself to the Internet. Jersey’s corrupt enough to let the media do whatever they like with us lifers, but with the cameras flashing the state doesn’t want to look unprepared or anything.

  What do you miss most about life outside?

  Eris, the goddess of discord, who walks among you till this very day!

  How do you feel when you hear of some naive teenager listening to your garbage and killing herself in such a shocking and public way?

  Ladies and gentlemen, that question was from my publicist. Answer: how does the Prez feel when body bags come home?

  Do you regret the Hamilton shootings?

  Does the Prez regret her war record in Syria?

  Do you get it up the ass in prison a lot, you punk bitchfag?

  Does the Prez . . . never mind. I’m a giver, not a taker.

  Do you realize that you are going to burn in Hell for all eternity, but that the choice remains yours?

  False: Typhon, the hundred-headed father of monsters, will consume the universe first.

  Also, can people stop asking questions with “do you” in it? Try. Think different, like the billboards used to say.

  If you were President, what would be your first act?

  Martial law. I always wanted to be popular with the masses instead of my stupid cult following.

  Respond to this plz: I hate who steals my solitude, without really offer me in exchange company.

  When I declare martial law, I will make it impossible to Google the phrase “Nietzsche quotes.”

  Look out behind you!

  It was a joke so old I had to play it. The hack laid in to me hard. He couldn’t help but tweet that tweet, then drop his phone to the floor with a clatter, and try to take my head off with his baton. It took an extraction team to get him off of me. Luckily, there was such a team already stationed outside the door, albeit one whose primary job it was to protect the Fox News laptop and webcam I’d been issued for the interview. So now I am in the infirmary and can make my escape. The hack was a cousin of the fat Ohio girl, so the warden thought he’d be eager to cave my head in. Of course, just like the girl, he was one of mine, just another loser kid from Clifton who busted his ass to get a CO job just to get close to me, to see me go about my day, to make sure none of the other inmates fucked with me too hard.

  Vicodin doesn’t normally generate hallucinations, but past entertainments have done a number on my kidneys, and it’s easy enough to get extra pills, so I can ha
ve visions while under the influence. I saw glimpses of my life that one night, what will be and what could have been, but the details were often vague. I know that I’ll be free, but not how to be free. If there’s a sci-fi paradox in looking into the future to figure out the present, I embrace it, as I embrace all contradictions, all things that sunder logic and reason. Tweet that! So I take my pills, breathe deeply, still my limbs and wait for the latest revelation. I am going to be the man on the glacial throne. I just need to know how I get from here to there.

  And here it is: what the Kallis Episkopos doesn’t know is how his life ends. The drugs don’t help him catch a glimpse of me, or any of the other I’s, as he would put it, this time. Instead he just sleeps and dreams of high school again, like any other arrested adolescent who peaked at sixteen. His confederates continue with their planning—they steal uniforms, bribe orderlies, arrange for a safehouse in the Pine Barrens, and from there an airplane to Florida and a boat to Dominica. Somehow, he—I—would get to Marrakech, as Morocco has no extradition treaty with the US. That was the plan. But no, there was no timeline where any Dave Holbrook made it out alive.

  So the Kallis Episkopos awakens, the escape plan already mid-execution. He’s in a laundry cart being pushed into the yard when he wakes up, but he succumbs to sleep again after a few moments. When he wakes again, the ambulance he’s in is roaring down the highway, sirens blaring so intensely that at first he doesn’t realize he’s hearing the sirens from police cruisers in hot pursuit. Light floods the cabin in bursts—the spotlight from a helicopter, though whether it belongs to the police or the media is beyond him. The Kallis Episkopos gets to his feet just as the ambulance pitches hard to one side and skis on a pair of wheels. Then the police start shooting. He hits the deck and holds on as best he can. He’s not sure why the ambulance stops, and it seems a long time before anything happens. A door slams, some muffled orders are barked. Then he hears something at the door to the cabin.

  It swings open. He knows the man standing there. It’s the detective from years ago, from his high school days. Giovanni—greyer and fatter, but his face as placid as ever. For a moment only. I can smell it on the Kallis Episkopos; he’s excited. It must be kismet. The kind detective.

  Then Giovanni’s eyes widen and he pantomimes a shiver, and shouts, “Gun! He’s got a gun!” and reaches for his own sidearm. He plants a bullet in the head of the Kallis Episkopos. Maybe it’s the same thick Holbrook skull that saw young Dave through a number of high school beatings, but he—I—hangs on for a few moments, just for a few nanoseconds. Giovanni pulls a second pistol from his belt. I feel it pressed into my stiffening hand before the light in this universe goes out entirely.

  CHAPTER 18

  Dave Holbrook realizes that he needs to take the initiative. That’s why Erin has him going so crazy, why he’s such an easy target for every racialized faction at school. That’s what the gun is, after all—a totem of potency. His mojo, still underdeveloped thanks to a slow-ticking puberty. Dave was born toward the end of the year; most of the bullies and jocks and geniuses toward the beginning. Eleven months to catch up on. If only he were still in ninth grade and not tenth.

  That’s loser talk, Mr. Holbrook, he thinks. Dave is so enamored with his executive functioning, with the mind behind his mind, that he stops for a second, sensing something. Sensing me, in the Ylem, watching him, living him. He shakes it off and without thinking anything else at all, stands up, slips his jacket on and walks downstairs, right past his mother and out onto the streets. To Erin’s house. This time, he thinks, he’ll be the unpredictable one. He’ll be the trickster. And there was the matter of “Uncle Bill” as well. It’s only about ten blocks to Vroom Street, and the sidewalks seem to roll Dave toward the building. He even has something to say in case he encounters Erin’s father again. I brought her homework—we’re in every class together. Only at the door to the apartment building, with his finger on the buzzer, does he realize that his line would only work if Erin actually stayed home today. If she cut school entirely and was out wandering around, demanding fingerfucks from other boys or bailing kids out of hospitals, he’d be doomed. He buzzes anyway. Be the trickster, be the wild one.

  There’s no ritual salutation from the intercom, just a louder return buzz and the clunk of a bolt opening up. Something about the immediacy of the buzz says Erin to Dave, so he takes the steps two at a time. He knocks on the apartment door and she opens it a crack, peering at him with one eye.

  “What do you want?” she says, like he’s a stranger.

  “We’re in a secret society together, remember? Just you and me. What’s yours is mine and what’s mine is yours, that’s what I guess that means.” He sees the flesh of her shoulder, creamy save for a pimple or two, and one long hair. Erin doesn’t open the door, so Dave says, “Let me in.”

  “Okay,” she says. Erin’s wearing pajama bottoms and a blue T-shirt for a restaurant called GYRO PALACE. She turns her back to him to lead him into the apartment, which is cluttered, the walls covered in photos, vaguely Greek statuary and vases on the coffee table and on otherwise barren bookshelves, and he reads the legend on the other side of her shirt: I HAD A GIANT PITA!

  “Sick today?” Dave says.

  “Yeah, I got a cold.” She leaves him standing in the middle of the room and plops herself down on the overstuffed couch. It’s the sort of furniture only old people have, and with plastic coverings. Erin puts her feet on the coffee table and flexes her toes. The nails are painted purple. “Did you bring me any homework?”

  “I didn’t stay in school either today. I’m sick too. We didn’t get homework in math for once.”

  “So you came here to make me sicker?” There’s a glass of ice water on the coffee table; she takes it and drinks it down.

  “I played hooky and went to the mall. I ran into my mom there, but she was all cool about it because I’ve been having a hard time lately.” He gestures toward his face. “Then we got home, she got soused and started laying in to me.”

  “Did she buy you that coat?” Erin asks. “It looks cute. Doesn’t your friend Trigger have something like it? Why is he named after a TV horse, anyway?”

  “Tigger—and there was a horse named Trigger?”

  “You know, Roy Rogers.”

  Dave laughs and sits without invitation next to Erin. “Roy Rogers! How old are you anyway, grandma?”

  Erin says, “I have an old soul. All Greeks do.”

  “Have you ever seen that movie, My Big Fat Greek—”

  “Yes,” she says flatly. “Why are you here, anyway?” She tugs on the hem of his coat.

  In a rush, he just says it. “I want you to suck my cock, then I want to fuck you.” Before Erin can say anything, the words tumble out of his mouth. “I’m tired of waiting. I’m tired of being teased. You’re supposed to like me. That’s why we hang out, isn’t it? That’s why we did what we did in the bookstore, isn’t it? Well, if you can pop in and out of my life, I can do the same to you. That’s fair. That’s fairness.” Then he adds, his eyes locked on Erin’s, “And I like you. A lot.”

  “I have my period,” Erin says. Her voice sounds raw, like she really is sick. She takes her glass and gets up without another word, walks into the open kitchen which is packed with shelves—themselves packed with restaurant-sized canned foods—opens the refrigerator, and refills her glass with water from a pitcher. Dave knows he’s doomed, but tries to act like a real guy, keeping his eyes on her ass the whole time, though her pajama bottoms are baggy and are a kind of plaid suggestive of an item from the boys’ section of a discount clothing store.

  Erin comes back to the couch and says, “And fair . . .” She hoists her glass, proposing a toast. “To the fairest!” She clears her throat with a grumbling noise, then gulps down about half her water, letting some of it dribble from the corner of her lips. “You have a lot to learn about women. We’re really not so mysterious, but even the most strai
ghtforward of girls wouldn’t fall for a line like ‘That’s fairness’ when it comes to spreading their legs for a guy.”

  “I . . . I don’t apologize,” Dave says. “You’re a cocktease, you know that?”

  Erin smiles—a thin little line on her face. “Are we breaking up?” she asks.

  Dave’s face explodes with heat. “We . . . we were together?”

  “Were?”

  “You’re just fucking with me again,” he says. “I should slap you across the fucking face.”

  “Dave, I don’t feel well . . .” Erin’s voice is light and dreamy now. She stares off at the corner of the room, as though the cobwebs were suddenly intriguing. Dave can’t help but be reminded of his mother in that mellow stage between three drinks and five. He really wants to apologize—truly, he should. There’s a world in which he does, and it makes him feel better, and he gets a few more weeks of relative peace before picking up a gun and taking it to Hamilton.

  “Take your coat off if you’re going to stay,” Erin says. “Just looking at you makes me feel hot. Feverish, I mean.”

  Dave shrugs it off his shoulders, but doesn’t hang it up. He has nothing to say.

  “Are you a member of the Trench Coat Mafia now?” Erin asks.

  “Maybe,” Dave says.

  She leans in close, and whispers in his ear. “Do you have a gun? Do you want one?”

  “What would I do with a gun?” Dave says slowly, carefully.

  Erin shrugs. “Wave it around. Scare people. Maybe get punched in the face a little less often.”