Bullettime

by Nick Mamatas

  “Get arrested, go to jail . . .”

  “Oh Davey,” Erin says. “Everyone knows that white kids don’t end up in prison for shit like that, unless they actually shoot someone.”

  “What do you know about guns, anyway? They don’t sell them with a side of fries, you know.”

  Erin squints and licks her lips. “You don’t know much.”

  “It’s about that guy, isn’t it? ‘Uncle Bill’—is he some criminal you know? Is he going to get me an Uzi?”

  “He’s not a criminal.”

  “He stabbed me with a pen.”

  “It wasn’t him.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know everything,” Erin says.

  “You’re just picking another fight with me,” Dave says. “This is stupid.” He reaches for his coat.

  “Wait,” Erin says. She takes his hand. Her own hand is very warm. “I need your help. I’m really not feeling well. Will you go to the bathroom—it’s down the hall and to the left—and bring me the cough syrup? It’s on the sink, where I left it, I think. No need to look through the medicine cabinet, understand?”

  “Okay, sure,” Dave says. And he goes, and the cough syrup isn’t on the sink, so naturally he looks in the medicine cabinet for it. It’s there, sans label and in a glass bottle rather than a plastic one. And he sees an assortment of pill bottles. He takes a look, but the prescription information is all in Greek. He tries to figure out whether the name “Erin” appears anywhere—E is the same, isn’t it, and doesn’t the Greek r look like an English p? But maybe Erin wasn’t even her real name. Her real Greek name.

  “What’s taking so long!?” Erin calls out to him from the living room. Dave takes a swig of the cough syrup—it tastes odd, like something old and licorice-y—and brings it into the living room. He’d half-hoped that she would have her pants off or something similar, but no. She held out her arms and wiggled her fingers like a baby. “Thank you, thank you!” she says as she takes the bottle and drinks from the cap. “Thanks again.”

  Dave sits back down. Erin passes him the bottle. He swigs right from it, without bothering to use the cap. They pass the medicine back and forth for a while, not saying anything, but enjoying the touching of their knees, the brushing of finger against palm.

  “Why do you think people pick on you?” Erin finally says.

  “I dunno,” Dave says. “They can, I guess. They pick on Tigger too, but not as much.”

  “Because he’s a little crazy-looking.”

  “And there are a few Armenians in the school. Some big guys—they’re like trucks who wear sweaters. They’re all tight.”

  “And you got nobody, eh?” Erin says.

  Dave giggles. “I got you, babe . . .” he says, voice a sing-song.

  “And I got myself a gun,” she says, another melody.

  “Why all this gun talk?” Whatever Dave’s been drinking, it’s not over-the-counter. His blinks are longer than his looks.

  “You think you’re the only one being attacked?” Erin says, that edge back in her voice. Or maybe the cough syrup doesn’t coat her throat quite as well as it could. “Why do you think I enrolled in that shitty school? Why we’re living out here in Joisey instead of Astoria in this dump above some third-cousin’s luncheonette?”

  Dave doesn’t have anything to say to that. Is it another wind-up to a joke only Erin will ever get?

  “Whatever . . . it was a rhetorical question,” Erin says, finally upset about something. Angry rather than mocking. Defeated instead of enthusiastic. Petulant and not scintillating. From the Ylem I scream It’s a trap! and Dave does get a sense of foreboding, but he doesn’t listen.

  “Why don’t you get a gun, then?”

  “I have two already,” she says. She struggles to get off the couch and again walks to the kitchen and then through a small door Dave hadn’t noticed before. A few moments later, she returns with a pair of very real-looking guns. Uzis, just as he had said. “Minis. Easy to hide in a coat like that.”

  “Machine guns?”

  “Of course not. These are sub-machine guns. They use pistol ammo.”

  “Where did you get them?”

  “When you have family in the restaurant business in New York, you just get to know people, you know?” Erin says.

  “Are those legal?”

  Erin stares at Dave as though he, in the space of a breath, had developed Down’s Syndrome. “No. Nor is taking them to school and waving them around. This is a Bonnie and Clyde gig.”

  “Who?”

  “Sid and Nancy?”

  “Still nuffin’, sorry,” Dave says. His tongue is beginning to feel leaden.

  “Mickey and Mallory?” Erin says.

  “Oh, okay,” Dave says. “But no killing, right?”

  Erin sits down next to Dave again, the guns heavy in her little hands. “I don’t think either of us have that in us.”

  And in a way, Erin’s right. She’s never done her own dirty work. Not in the beforetimes when the world was young and Zeus faced down Typhon with the victory goddess Nike at his side and Eris on the side of the great hundred-headed dragon, not in Greece where she chucked an apple into a party to which she was not invited, and not now either.

  And she’s right about Dave Holbrook, in most cases. I couldn’t have done it. I still wonder if that’s why, with a flick of the wrist and a blanket, she exiled me here. The one who did it hardcore, he was able to spread discord after a fashion with his “movement” of malcontents, but in the great scheme of things, all those high school goons didn’t add up to much more than a handful of suicides, one copycat stabbing spree by a kid in Massachusetts who couldn’t get his hands on a gun, and a pop culture footnote of less import than Charles Manson. Someone somewhere made enough money on those resistance symbol stickers to buy a small house in Berkeley, California’s worst neighbourhood, but that’s about it.

  Erin never does show up that day, though. Dave does. He decides that he’s going to, right now. He won’t brandish the gun, he says to himself, unless someone starts something with him. Then he realizes that someone starts something with him nearly every damn day. So he won’t take it out unless someone pulls a weapon, or if he ends up on the floor of a hallway, books scattered everywhere. But what if the gun goes off from the impact? There’s a safety on it, sure, but . . .

  “We should go someplace and practise shooting these.”

  “You want to practise shooting machine guns?” Erin asks.

  “Yeah, we can do it in the swampy area by the Liberty Science Center. Shoot over the river or something. It’s not like the bullets will make it to Manhattan.”

  “Yeah,” Erin says, suddenly bright. “And if they do, it’ll just blend in with the criminal weather over there.”

  “Yeah, who’d even notice?”

  They kiss. For quite a while. But they keep their hands on their guns.

  CHAPTER 19

  There’s only one world where Dave and Erin go out to practise. What Dave didn’t know, as he didn’t read the papers much, is that the “swampy area” he recommended was to become Liberty National Golf Course. It was still three years from opening when he and Erin took their Uzis out to practise, but there was some construction going on. Security was present. Calls were made. Sirens blared. A police boat roared into view right off shore. Dave froze. Erin vanished. On a flat plane, tens of yards from any building or hole in the ground, she just disappeared, leaving her Uzi in the muddy ground to annihilate any fingerprints. Dave ran for it, ditched the gun, and actually managed to get away. The gun he had left behind somehow ended up in his locker, and a janitor popped the lock when a trail of mud leaked out from the bottom of the locker and onto the floor. Dave’s solution was elegant—he burst into hysterics in the principal’s office, snatched a letter opener off the desk right in front of Doctor Furgeson and plunged it into his own neck.

&nb
sp; But Mr. Holbrook isn’t in that world. In this world, there’s no practice session. Dave doesn’t take a gun home with him. He leaves Erin’s after some making out so as to avoid meeting her father on the steps again. He doesn’t take one of the Uzis with him because that would be insane. Only after walking halfway home does he realize that he never got an answer about the mysterious “Uncle Bill,” and that his virginity is still intact. Why did she kiss him if she had her period? Why not at least offer to jerk him off?

  “Wouldn’t that be the polite thing to do?” he mutters to himself. To me. I don’t answer, but perversely I want to whisper something about fairness in his ear.

  The difference between the world where Dave and Erin march out across knee-high grass to shoot guns at Manhattan and all the others is that tonight Jeremy doesn’t come home. He often stays late at work—why wouldn’t he?—but never has he just gone missing. Ann is beside herself. She fills up his work voicemail and his cell phone, wonders aloud if she should call the police.

  “I think it takes forty-eight hours before one can file a missing person report,” Dave says.

  “How do you know?” Ann says, her voice a whip.

  Dave shrugs. “TV.”

  “Pfft.” Ann is agitated, pacing across the living room. Everything smells like booze and perfume. “I don’t want a missing person report. Your father didn’t run off!”

  “He didn’t?”

  Ann ignores that. “He’s probably been in a car accident, or is stuck on the turnpike somewhere. I want the police to call the state troopers and run his plates.” She has a wine bottle in one hand, the phone in the other. “Is this a 911 call?” she asks herself. “Dave, get the phone book. Find the precinct number.”

  Ann can’t bring herself to make the calls. She pours a glass to steady her nerves, then another. She debates with herself—should she call the JCPD or the New Jersey State Police? What was the damned license plate number, anyway? How come Dave, who is so smart and has such a great recall, didn’t memorize it either?

  She finally decides to call the state troopers and is caught in their endless phone tree. “What if this were an emergency?” she sputters into the phone. Then she laughs at herself. “I guess I’d call 911 if it were, eh?” She winks at Dave. “Can you get on the other line, the one you use for the computer, and order us some pizzas? I think that’ll be our dinner tonight, okay? Will that make you feel better?”

  It will not. Dave makes the call, then gets on the computer. There’s little to do but check the news and look at pictures of bodies mangled in wrecks. A complete jaw topped by a pile of what looks like smashed watermelon. A pair of legs on the street. He thinks to call Erin. She knows criminals. She has guns in her kitchen. And he wants to talk to her. But when he calls, the phone just rings and rings—no pick-up, no answering machine.

  Dinner is in the living room, sullen and quiet. The pizza tastes like ketchup’d cardboard, and every pair of headlights that shine through the curtains must be Jeremy’s car. And when there are no cars, Ann still parts the curtains to frown at the empty street. There’s no news of a car accident or a pile-up on the turnpike on the 9 o’clock news, nor the 10 o’clock news, nor on 1010 WINS, which Ann makes Dave tune into via the old battery-operated transistor radio he got in advance of a promised camping trip that never happened. Ann declares that she’ll sleep on the living room couch tonight, and will smack Jeremy with her slipper when he finally walks through that goddamn door, and Dave has nothing to do but go to bed.

  For a long time, Dave does not sleep. He doesn’t even worry about school the next morning, or fantasize about sneaking Uzis past the metal detectors, or think overmuch about Erin. His father’s absence is troubling, much more so than he ever thought it would be. Ann will have a meltdown if the morning brings another cop to the door, this one with bad news. She can’t work. They’d lose the house. Maybe Dave would have to go all the way down to North Carolina and live with Grandma, in her double-wide trailer home. Without Dad, maybe he would end up a real street kid, and finally toughen up. He’d have to wear an itchy suit to the funeral. There would be hugs, and tears, and they’d be a million times worse than the ones rolling down his cheeks right now.

  Finally, he sleeps. One interesting thing about Ylem is this: as I am conscious of every moment of every possibility of my life, I have unfettered access to my own dreams. We don’t really remember our dreams so much as piece them together in the moments after waking. Dreams aren’t much more than flashes, montages from a dozen different films. And sometimes—and this might just be because Dave Holbrook is here in the Ylem forever—those flashes come true.

  Dave dreams of a woman, white and skeletal, dragging herself out of the black earth. Where she goes, war follows.

  Dave dreams of a life in the alleyways, a cold spike of fear embedded in his spine. Eating garbage to live.

  Dave dreams of Erin, his fingers in her sex, her eyes shut and mouth open.

  Dave dreams of a kid in school, his hands up and screaming, tears everywhere.

  Dave dreams of the man who stabbed him, of the man who signed him out of Saint Mary’s with Erin and then left without a word. He had seen him a third time too—the first time, actually—in the Washington Place Diner and Restaurant. The short order cook! His eyelids fly open for a moment, and he sees his father, Jeremy, looming over him, a shadow.

  No, not Jeremy, someone else. Me.

  Dave dreams of me, just as the Kallis Episkopos wanted to. He sees me, but he does not know me. I see him, and I know him, but can’t reach out and touch him, or speak to him, or tell him not to be stupid. Live the boring life of a state employee. Go ahead and spend two decades jerking off to Internet porn and end it all by accident one night with a cheap plastic belt. A belt that was supposed to snap and didn’t. Be glad it didn’t.

  Dave dreams of other things. The dog he wanted as a kid. The one he created in his imagination after his parents woke him up one morning at five in the morning and pushed him outside into the freezing rain. “You’ll have to wake up this early every morning and walk the dog if we got you one,” Ann had said. She was in her robe. Jeremy was already dressed for work. He said nothing, but stood behind his wife and nodded like a stranger agreeing with an overheard conversation. He dreams of a comic shop where all the covers are exciting and blindingly colourful, but when he opens up the pages he can’t read the dialogue in the balloons. He dreams of the smell of frying bacon, of a long-nailed hand against his bedroom window, of five white lines being scratched into the glass, of his mother howling when she finds them.

  At three in the morning, Dave hears something and falls out of REM sleep. Jeremy passes by the bedroom door on his way to his own bedroom. Downstairs, on the couch, Ann snores loudly.

  If there’s a discussion regarding Jeremy’s whereabouts, Dave isn’t a party to it, and he’s not allowed to ask where his father had been all night. Ann hisses like a snake when he tries. Jeremy isn’t sporting a black eye, and all his teeth seem to be in place—though Dave is still happy to consider a criminal underground of midnight dentists, somewhere out there in the world of diabolical adults—and indeed Jeremy even seems content. He whistles as he butters his English muffin. Ann’s nursing a headache with a mimosa and a wet washcloth at the kitchen table. Finally, Dave realizes that his father has probably been to see a whore. He’s both upset and strangely aroused. It would be some news to share with Erin anyway, something to talk about other than Uzis.

  After homeroom, there’s a surprise assembly. Seniors are excluded “because the damage has already been done,” according to Oleg, who squeezes into the tight auditorium seat next to Dave, who had scored himself an aisle. “It’s anti-bullying stuff. Haha!” he says. Dave spots the black puff of Erin’s hair somewhere a few rows down and decides that he will stare at her until she turns around, thanks to his awesome mental powers.

  “How do you know?”

  “I have my
ways.”

  “And they are?”

  “I saw some guys bringing in the projection screen and some film canisters by the loading dock. There’s also some old lady dressed like a cheerleader or something.”

  “I didn’t even know this school had a loading dock.”

  “Sure,” Oleg says. “How do you think they get desks and equipment and bullshit in—through the front-door metal detector?”

  Dave’s mind spins. At that moment, Erin turns around to look at him—her eyes are the opposite of headlights, two dark pools under the bright lights of the auditorium. The lights dim.

  It’s an hour of footage from CNN’s Columbine reportage, of clips from popular films about young kids standing up for themselves against unarmed bullies. Backpacks and clean, undented lockers are everywhere. The kids have late-model cars and lean up against them casually as they insult a gallery of hapless nerds. “A lot of white-on-white crime in Hollywood,” Oleg whispers into Dave’s ear. “Everywhere on TV is the suburbs,” Dave says, “except in music videos.”

  Then the cheerleader comes out, with two big guys in sweater vests and button-down shirts. “It’s like we’ve fallen into a timewarp,” Dave says. “Greetings, time travellers from 1953!”

  Dave didn’t pay too much attention to the skits, but he did enjoy the round of echoing boos that filled the auditorium when the two sweater guys dared to start rapping. Mostly he just daydreamed about someone else strolling in from backstage, machine guns blazing, and shooting the first ten rows into meat sauce. The survivors trample one another on the way out, only to find that the doors have been chained shut. Then the smoke starts to pour in from the vents. No wonder they didn’t announce the assembly in advance, he thinks.

  In the dark, he can’t see Erin anymore. She taps him on the shoulder and he practically jumps out of his seat. “C’mon,” she says, crooking a finger. Oleg follows without an invitation, and if Erin has any magic in her glare, he’s proof against it. “You know I’m coming with you!” he says. “Don’t even think about leaving me alone in this place, without entertainment.”