Bullettime

by Nick Mamatas

  The boys make to head up the aisle, but Erin grabs their sleeves. “All the doors are guarded. This way.” She leads down toward the stage, and toward a trap door under it.

  “What the—”

  “Back in the old days, this school had an orchestra,” she says. “And an orchestra pit.” Dave helps her lift the door, and she slides down the four-rung ladder. Oleg squeezes into the space as best he can, and from the ladder holds the door open for Dave.

  Erin strikes a match and holds it up to her face. The flames flicker in her eyes, and she looks like an ancient thing. It’s a face not meant to be illuminated by electricity at any hour of the day or night, but one to be cut by a slice of moonlight, one to emerge out of gloom and fog. Sharp cheekbones, coal eyes, her mouth a wave.

  “Follow me if you want to live,” she says. She snorts. Erin doesn’t giggle. Dave does.

  What Erin has to show them is a whole other school. She lights matches and lets them burn to her fingertips as she leads them under the stage, into the storage areas. Manual typewriters piled high against one wall; a web of ancient iron-legged desks thrown together in one corner, complete with inkwells and penknife graffiti by teens likely dead by now; ropes from a boxing ring in another corner; a large cardboard and rat-chewed megaphone with the letter H stamped on one side.

  “This school used to be cool,” Oleg says.

  “Where are we going?” Dave asks.

  “There’s a ton of stuff down here,” Erin says. A match goes out. She lights another. Oleg crushes the old one under his heel. “We don’t have anything like this anymore.”

  “We don’t need it. We have a computer lab. And it’s not like you guys care about pep rallies and taffy pulls all of a sudden,” Dave says.

  “Taffy pull!” Oleg waggles his eyebrows. Nobody laughs. Erin walks ahead, and the boys follow. “Which way to Freddie Krueger?” Oleg asks himself, and nobody laughs a second time. Dave thinks that he and Erin could be having sex down here if not for his friend—maybe on the four-wheeled cart holding up the skeleton of a parade float, or maybe on the stack of blue wrestling mats turned grey by dust and dark and age. It would be awkward, and short, and there might be a wayward elbow to the face, but it would be something. Something like his father might have been up to at a rest stop on the turnpike last night with a stranger in a miniskirt and a mink stole. That’s what Dave always imagined hookers looking like.

  Dave nearly walks into something, and calls for the match to be brought closer. “It’s a printing press of some sort, I guess.” He finds an E among the jumble of sorts in a little wooden box on his very first try and presents it to Erin. “For you.”

  “Thanks,” she says a little awkwardly. “I’m running out of matches.”

  “Well, what did you want to show us?” Oleg says.

  “Us,” Erin says, without affect. Then she says, “All of this, I suppose. What the school could have been like. A school paper, sock hops, boy cheerleaders like upstairs in that insipid assembly. Those computers you like, Dave, are old pieces of shit—”

  “I know it,” Dave says. “And dial-up on most of them.”

  “But this stuff was high-quality educational material back in the proverbial day,” Erin says. The match goes out again, and she lights yet another. Dave sees for the first time that she has an entire box of long kitchen matches in her little purse. Likely from the diner, he supposes. “Even now,” she says over the sizzle of the burning match, “it’s like nobody can bear to throw any of this stuff away. I was down here a couple of days ago—I even saw some film cameras. Real film, not video.”

  “That’s pretty cool,” Oleg says. “We could still use those!”

  “Stop-motion animation,” Dave says. “We could get action figures and . . .” and Dave remembers that Erin is right next to him and swallows his enthusiasm.

  “Everything that’s good they take away from us. Always,” Erin says. There’s a rumble from above. “The assembly is letting out. Let’s get back upstairs before they see that we’re missing.”

  “Who’d miss us?” Oleg says.

  “Us,” Erin says again, flat as a dead man’s electrocardiogram.

  “I’m taking one of these,” Oleg says, and he holds up an ancient film camera like it was a pistol. “Long coat, big pockets.” He slips it under his leather duster. Dave had left his coat in his seat.

  “I wonder if they even make film for that anymore,” Dave says.

  “They probably don’t,” Erin says.

  Oleg hangs around for lunch too, a fifth wheel who thinks he’s the first. He either doesn’t get that Erin’s clipped responses mean that she’s simmering with rage, or doesn’t care. Dave can’t eat, though the cafeteria is quiet for once. No fights, no shouting, no sudden spray of milk, or cruel laughter and hooting.

  “Do you think the assembly worked?” Dave says.

  “Doubt it!” Oleg says. “People are just happy to be out of that assembly. That was some mind-numbing shit, even compared to class. Right?” he says. “Right?” he says again, looking at Erin. There’s breading from fish sticks all over his lips. “So, are you two a couple?” he says.

  “Uhm . . .”

  “No,” Erin says. “He just fingered me once.”

  Oleg laughs, half-shocked, half-thrilled. He waves his arms just like a cartoon tiger, and the first half-pint of milk of the afternoon flies.

  Dave finds a note in his coat pocket after lunch. It’s from Erin—even her handwriting is sharp and pointed, not full of swirls and curly-cues like that of most girls her age—and it reads Meet me later. You know where.

  She doesn’t come. She’s not coming, Mr. Holbrook, Dave thinks, alone in the dark, and though he is sad and worried, he chuckles over his mental pun. The old wrestling mats in the basement of Hamilton High School aren’t nearly as soft as he imagined them. Good thing he imagined Erin on the bottom, and him on top, pumping like a jackrabbit. Dave has clearly gone insane; the lingering sulfur scent of Erin’s kitchen matches remind him of her, and how much he wants her. He’s a colour wheel of emotion from here in the Ylem—every creek and thud is her, and so he is exultant for a half-second at a time. Then miserable. Was this another joke? Another lie? Then suddenly worried—Erin must have tried to load the Uzis and shot herself in the face! Hair and bone embedded into the white walls of her living room, the top of her head missing like someone had taken a bite out of it. He had no cough syrup with him, but he managed to calm himself, anyway.

  After a while, Dave gets antsy, and I try my best to keep him down in the basement. Fuck this, I need to go home. I’ll call her at home, he thinks and I whisper in his ear, Five more minutes; she’ll be pissed if you’re gone when she comes. He needs to pee, and I tell him to be a man and hold it. Dave grows bored, and I tell him to find something to steal, like Tigger did. Something even cooler, like an old Radio Shack computer, or maybe some student records from the 1940s, if he could find them. I just need to give Erin some time, maybe a half hour at best, but it doesn’t work. Dave heads back up the ladder into the auditorium, and finds his way out to the loading dock. The door near the dock entrance is locked, but not from the inside.

  Dave hears it before he sees it, but it sounds so strange that he can’t help but walk up the little three-step stoop, put the key in the front door, open it, walk into the vestibule, and then open the door to the living room. And there she is, live as porn. Erin, naked, straddling Jeremy, but facing away from him in a reverse cowgirl position. Her breasts are plump and pointed, nipples huge, her eyes wide open and staring, bush black and trim, her mouth like an O. Behind her, Dave’s father sits naked and fleshy, his hands on her tiny waist, his pants pooled around his ankles.

  “Don’t fucking stop!” Erin says, her voice feral. She reaches back and slaps Jeremy as best she can with her chicken-winged arm. “Keep fucking me!” Dave just opens his mouth and vomits.

  Jeremy throws
the girl off of him and steams forward awkwardly as he pulls up his pants. “David! You get the hell out of here!” he bellows. Dave pedals backwards into the vestibule, and his father slips right on the puddle of vomit and falls atop him. Erin’s stomping around, picking up clothes, cursing in two languages. “Where’s mom! Where’s mom!” Dave demands. He’s sure Erin’s killed her, or maybe Jeremy did. “How do you two even know each other!” He can’t stop staring at the condom on his father’s penis. It looks like a grocery bag that had been left in the gutter.

  Erin hops over Jeremy, who is in tears now, beating his vomit-stained fists against his own thighs, and shoulders Dave out of the way. She mutters, “Excuse me,” as she does, and Dave can’t help but flash back to James. His nose hurts all over again. Everything does. He has nowhere to go, so he runs to his room.

  Dave slams the door shut behind him and pulls on the corner of his cheap four-drawer bureau till it falls across the door. That’ll keep his father out—he’s expecting bellowing and fists against the door, but nothing is forthcoming. He dumps the contents of his book bag on the floor and starts grabbing clothes and stuffing them in it. Ann isn’t around, but he’s sure she will be soon, to come and pick him up. Maybe not one hundred percent sure, but it seems like a reasonable expectation. If not, he can stay with Oleg for a few days.

  Dave realizes that he’s never been to Oleg’s house. He’s not even sure where in Jersey City Oleg lives, though it has to be fairly close to the school, and JC simply isn’t that big of a town. He drops the bag to the floor. Oleg isn’t a good friend, Dave finally figures out. He’s a lunchroom buddy and a hanger-on—a sidekick. Or maybe Dave is the sidekick. Oleg comes and goes as he pleases, and basically shows up whenever he needs an audience. He’s not picked on as severely as Dave, and even threw down during the altercation outside the school, for all the good it did.

  But it’s not as though Oleg ended up spending a night in the hospital. It’s not as though Oleg’s breath always smells cherry-sweet from all the Robitussin. Though the boy could use some mouthwash, Mr. Holbrook, Dave thinks. Maybe Oleg couldn’t—or wouldn’t—take him in because of his fussy Old World parents.

  Dave’s next thought is for Erin, but all he can see now is her tits hanging off her slim torso, her pubes, how her face looked with his father’s bagged dick inside her. He gets on the computer and starts frantically Googling for anything. Youth hostels are for eighteen and up; turning himself in to the foster care system would be insane and certainly wouldn’t be any safer than Hamilton. Hitting the streets just sounds dangerous—maybe the Hare Krishnas in the East Village would take him in, but Dave can’t stand the idea of vegetarianism, or brainwashing. He’s not coming out of his room without a plan, but he already failed to make one. He has no food up here. Not even a candy bar in his book bag. He could call for pizza, but doesn’t have much cash on him, and there’s no way he could convince the delivery guy to hop the fence, come around to the backyard, and then clamber up on the shed and stretch really hard to hand over the mozzarella sticks.

  Maybe Dad will leave too, and I’ll be alone. Dave couldn’t pay the mortgage, or the power bills, but he has ninety days before they’re turned off. Unless Ann was already late in paying the bills, which she frequently was. That’s a dumb fantasy. Then there is Hamilton’s storage area, but the dust and mould would probably give Dave asthma, and besides, Erin knows all about it. That’s the first place she’d look, if she wants to rub his face in all that she has done. She spread her legs and that hairy twat for his own father.

  Dave can’t think anymore. He can almost feel his brain shutting down. I can feel it too; I feel it every time I revisit this moment, and I revisit it frequently. There’s a great, if momentary, gap where David Holbrook’s consciousness used to be. His body incapable of anything else, he collapses onto his bed. And he hits something hard under the comforter.

  Erin had left the guns for him to find. Dave starts thinking again.

  CHAPTER 20

  In the Ylem I can live an infinity of my own lives. I’ve been the baby howling in the light, covered in blood and goop, feeling my own limbs for the first time. I’ve been myself finally realizing that there was a person behind the pair of boobs I sucked on four times a day. I can relive my first cookie, my first erection, the first time I was by myself in a car, driving down the turnpike without either parents or passengers to keep me from singing along with the radio—all of it is mine to live and live again. What prison food tastes like. How someone’s face just stops moving the moment after the body dies. The smell of Erin’s hair that first time. The smell of her fucking that last time.

  But there are many things I’m not a party to. I’ve grown up here in the space between spaces, in the moments between seconds, and I’ve learned a lot about myself, from myself. We are more than just our thoughts and feelings. There are deeper impulses we can never access, and they come from somewhere else. Maybe it’s epigenetics—one Dave eats lots of Pop-Tarts and the chemicals influence his brain chemistry sufficiently that he becomes a happy mass murderer. Or maybe Ann snuck a few drinks during her third trimester and that ruined some of me.

  One time, when I was eight years old, an old shopkeeper threatened to cut my dick off for stealing when he saw me trying to pocket a Mounds Bar; in another timeline he didn’t and I got away with it. The first Dave was awkward and shy and ran crying from Erin that evening in Hoboken. He ended up killed in a fire in a shitty Union City apartment at the age of twenty-two. The second was the one who just discovered two loaded Uzis in his bedroom. I can’t see all the dots, and those I can see I cannot always connect with confidence. So many Daves, knees weak and stomach empty, threw themselves back-first onto his bed, but only three took up the challenge of the gun.

  Dave wisely didn’t try anything the next morning. He wakes up to a home empty except for a twenty-dollar bill on the kitchen table, with a Post-It note reading FOR FOOD!! attached to it. No messages on the machine from his mother either. Dave takes a look around the house to see if he can find any other money, and manages to score another fifty-seven bucks from his mother’s dresser, plus a handful of quarters and gold dollars. He tries wearing the Uzi too, but reconsiders it for two reasons—his new wool coat actually doesn’t obscure it well enough, plus everyone is likely on edge due to yesterday’s assembly.

  Mr. Holbrook, he thinks as he fills a shot glass with cough syrup for breakfast, was yesterday’s assembly about you? Or are lots of kids being beaten up in the halls? Maybe someone else would bring a gun to school, or a pipe bomb, or even hijack a plane with a soda can in a thick sock and try to slam it into the place. Hamilton was just big enough to get lost in, but not so big that Dave could avoid his tormenters. Maybe those other nerds from the racist cafeteria line-up had holes in their sides from pen-wounds too. Or maybe they just had richer, more together parents with school board members on speed dial.

  No Erin in school. Dave isn’t surprised. What is surprising is another assembly, right after homeroom.

  “There’s gonna be a week of this shit,” Lee tells Dave. It was an awkward rush to the auditorium today, so Dave just squeezed in anywhere, and Lee surprised him by plopping down next to him. “No homo,” Lee says.

  Dave’s so used to it, he ignores the insult and carries on with the conversation. “How do you know?”

  “My auntie’s on the district school board,” he says. “I’m gonna have to fly right. That’s why I’m sitting here with you, instead of my crew. If Hamilton don’t straighten up, they gonna bring in a bunch of crazy Vietnam vets to be the teachers and make us wear uniforms like Catholic schools do.”

  “Is that even legal?” Dave asks, but the lights dim and Lee decides to concentrate on the stage rather than answer.

  This time the assembly is by the JCPD. Detective Giovanni stalks the stage like a TV preacher, bellowing into a microphone, promising swift vengeance and hinting at a decade of daily prison rape should anyo
ne engage in gang activities or bullying. “It’s assault!” he shouts. “Assault and battery!” There are no Hollywood movie clips or dance numbers, but there is a brief scare film about a young girl whose brother was shot and killed, and how much she misses him. Some grainy photos of the boy are flashed on the screen—he’s an obvious acolyte of the Cult of the Shell Necklace. The black and Latino kids chuckle and hiss, and even Dave smirks.

  “That guy looks like a total asshole,” he whispers to Lee, but Lee ignores him. Instead, Lee says, “I don’t know why I’m here. Black people don’t shoot up schools. They could have put us all in the cafeteria again and shown your white ass this movie.”

  Dave realizes that if he does bring the gun to school, he might have to shoot Lee first. And Malik. That George guy as well. Just because he foolishly asked them if they knew where to get guns.

  The assembly is short enough, but afterward Vice Principal Fusco takes to the stage and announces that there will be assemblies every day for the rest of the week. Tomorrow, Wednesday, will be on sexual harassment. Fusco bellows the word sexual as though daring the students to hoot or giggle. Thursday will be on the new dress code. “Not uniforms, but a dress code. Proper, professional dress. No more baggy pants or midriff-bearing blouses or gang colours . . . like blue or red.” That summons up some murmurs of protest. It’s pretty hard to avoid blue. Then there’s Friday’s assembly, which will involve the mayor, and a “famous rap star”—more buzzing, now positive—and “lots of media and security.”

  Friday will be too intense. Thursday it will be. He cuts class after the assembly in the usual manner of leaving school for lunch and then just continues to walk. Nobody’s home, but now the answering machine is full of messages. The first is from Ann, obviously inebriated and a little giggly, insisting that Jeremy take a leave of absence from his job to “care for poor Davey.” The next is from Jeremy, demanding that Ann call him at work to demonstrate that she is “ready to be a mother, if not a wife.” Neither of Dave’s parents are clever enough to actually check their messages from afar, even though Dave has drilled them on how to do it a million times. Ann left three messages in a row after Jeremy’s—the first two are increasingly angry, and in the third she’s calm again, as if having been reset. Jeremy’s last two messages are short. The last is just him saying, “Call me! Now!” as best he can through clenched teeth.