Real

by Merrell Michael

  Lena never had sex with Jesse again.

  and added

  She did not remember having intercourse with him in the first place, or kissing him, or anything romantic in nature.

  Finally he wrote

  She did not feel anything romantic for Jesse at all, or in the first place. Only for Sam.

  When he thought about it, Sam decided to delete the first lines about Lena telling the truth about everything. That could prove potentially embarrassing in certain situations. Besides, he could trust her well enough, as long as he knew exactly what he was going to do. With excitement he went into the bedroom, and saw Lena lying still under the covers.

  "Honey." He asked. "Do you remember Jesse coming over today?"

  "Yeah."

  "What did he want?"

  "Just to talk to you about something. I don’t know. At one point I thought he was coming on to me, or whatever." She laughed. "It was awkward. I can tell that guy doesn’t get any. Plus he's got gross breath, have you noticed?"

  "Yeah, I guess so." Sam said. "I mean, he smokes."

  "Ugh." Lena said. "I could never get with a smoker."

  "So he's not your type, then?"

  "I know he's your friend." Lena said. "But I just don’t see it. He's a really intense guy, plus he drinks all the time. His hair is cut like he did it himself. I just, its not there, for me. No thanks." She pinched Sam's cheeks. "Were you getting jealous? That's cute."

  "No! Don’t be silly." Sam said. "I can trust you guys." And he knew that was true, from now on.

  The next day Sam made an extra effort to be there, with Lena, and to involve her in what was going on. The writing for Black Terror only took up a fraction of his time, after all, and he worked from home. At one point Jesse stopped by. He looked a little awkward, and said he had to leave soon for a VA meeting. "Anger Management." He muttered. Sam could tell something was wrong, and he knew what it was, but it was over now. It was up to Jesse to take the next step, whatever that was.

  If Sam was going to be honest, he was a little sick of Jesse sometimes. The man clearly had issues. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or whatever, and that was fine and Sam wasn’t questioning that. But Sam was getting a little sick of it all. What he had done with Lena crossed a line. Sam wasn’t going to push the issue, or even confront it; he had taken care of the matter by simply writing a few lines on the laptop. But it still existed.

  They spent the rest of the day at the pier. It was fun, after all, and close. Sam had thought about driving to Magic Mountain about an hour away in one direction, or even Disney about two or three hours away in another, but the pier was close enough to count. It wasn’t as if they hadn’t been there before, but Lena seemed to be enjoying herself maybe a little more than usual. Sam's mind was wandering, as it had before, and often did.

  It wasn’t as if there weren’t theme parks in Ohio, or roller coasters. Certainly no pacific ocean, and much harder winters. His parents had written him recently. His mom had, rather, sent him a message on Facebook (which she had recently discovered) just a quick hi how or you type of thing, with maybe a little more subtext, in which she asked if he had been getting her letters. Sam had, of course, but simply not bothered to respond back to any of them. It wasn’t that he didn’t get along with his parents, it was something different. A fear of return. Every once in a while, for the past few months, Sam had a reoccurring dream in which he was simply back in Ohio, living in his parents’ house, as if nothing significant had ever passed. As if the book had never been published, the golden ticket had never been punched, whatever you wanted to call it. Looking around at the pier he saw the problem was obvious, at least with Ohio, it was simply anywhere. Sam reasoned that it would have been possible to take everything he experienced in his childhood, all the suburban streets, all the friends or bullies or crushes from his time in public education, and simply change the word Ohio to Pennsylvania or Michigan or Connecticut, and nothing would be changed at all, or even halfway noticeable. The problem with Ohio was that it was anywhere, and the thing about California to a transplant was that it was nowhere but there.

  "What are you thinking about?" Lena asked.

  "My parents." Sam replied.

  "Are they out here?"

  "Back in Ohio. Why?"

  "I'd like to meet them."

  "Like right now?"

  Lena rolled her eyes. "I mean, sometime." She said. "In the near to immediate future. It doesn’t have to be right now."

  The music on the pier was loud and bright, but Sam had managed the trick of leaning far enough on the edge of the railing so that it dissipated a little, and was framed by the far more soothing noise of the ocean below. "I don’t know where I'm at." He said. "With my parents."

  "How sad."

  Sam shrugged. "They divorced when I was little. My dad ran off, and I was mostly raised by my gran-gran."

  "Your gran-gran?"

  "My grandmother. And my grandfather. When I was a teenager, my father came back from wherever he went, and my mother actually went ahead and married him. Which I never understood."

  Lena said nothing. The wind was catching off the water’s edge and sending little sprinklets of salt upwards, into her hair. "I've always thought." She said. "That if you had parents, they would be someone you would love."

  "Yeah. Well, not always the case." Sam backtracked, "I mean, Christ, I'm not saying that I don’t love them, or whatever. They're my parents, you know?"

  In the days to come afterwards, and even the weeks, months, and years, Sam would remember that night as a turning point, a totally unscripted event that changed the course of everything that happened before, and everything that would happen after. Looking back on it, it was possible to put all the pieces together, and rationalize it to the point that it all made sense. But the fact that Sam couldn’t get over was that it simply was not true. There were no warning signs, really, no danger marks. On the internet he would discover such events listed as Black Swans. The justification being for the longest time in the western world, all swans were considered to be white, thusly, all swans were white, until a black one was discovered. The moral being, just because something had never happened, did not mean that it could never happen. We each contain a multitude inside ourselves, and among that multitude is every possible occurrence. There was the pier, and then there was Jesse standing with a gun in his hand.

  The news would later give an exact description of the weapon. It was a nine-millimeter automatic from a major manufacturer. It had not been modified in any way from its stock origin, and could be legally purchased in most of the fifty states, and legally possessed in all but a few American cities. It was not an assault rifle, whatever those really were, as was originally reported by the media, and indeed, believed by the police officers who arrived first on the scene. It was a gun simple enough in appearance to fit a child’s idea of such an object, and it did its purpose.

  Sam did not see Jesse standing there, on the pier, as he was with the gun in his hand. A security camera would later capture the scene, and frame the first shots fired. Jesse raising the hand and a flash of light. A woman, falling to the ground. Then a child. Later a man. Jesse simply fired and walked from person to person, or as he was seeing them, target to target.

  The way Sam perceived it was a little different. There was a loud pop, and several other loud pops. Not one after another in the manner of firecrackers, but spaced apart evenly. A dawning feeling of horror bloomed inside Sam's gut, which was vocalized by the man next to him, who simply went "Oh shit." People started to scream, and a few people started to run. It was one of the runners that Jesse killed next, when the girl simply ran directly at him, and all he had to do was squeeze the trigger. She flopped down to the side, as if her strings had been cut. And that was when Sam saw him friend up close and realized what was happening.

  A moment passed between the two. Jesse had the gun pointed out, in the manner of a gangster such as those found in a Humphrey Bogart film, with his elbow
cocked up so that he could shoot from the hip. Sam looked at Jesse and saw his face now, expecting some form of emotion. A sneer akin to a supervillian, maybe, about to kill James Bond in a moment of triumph. Or perhaps tears streaming down both sides of his face, snot bubbling out his nostrils, the anger of a petulant child denied a prize toy. But instead Jesse's face was a blank mask, and his eyes appeared flat and dead. There was an invisible hand pressed over Sam's mouth rendering him unable to speak. He felt the bullets before he heard them.

  Or rather, he heard the impact, then heard the gunshots. Lena was first, with the round that took her in the head rendered with a wet smack, jerking her one way, and the one taking her in the gut jerking her another. Sam felt the sting in his side where the bullet tore through, and panic setting in. A voice started to scream hysterically inside his head. His t-shirt was wet and at first he thought it might be sea water until he saw the red and sat down. It did not hurt as bad as he would have imagined. As for Lena she was slumped to the side having fallen in a peaceful position that might have been mistook for sleep in other circumstances. Sam mouthed words at Jesse, that he hoped would help his friend at the time but the other man was looking at the gun which had run dry and ejected the magazine. Finally he fumbled in his pocket and found the last bullet left and loaded it from the top, through the ejection port. Sam knew what was going to happen and thought he wouldn’t be surprised, but he was instead, how Jesse fell down after the shot. Not unlike a puppet that had had its strings irrevocably cut. The shot went through the side near the temple and Sam wondered why Jesse had not done it through the mouth as it would have been known to result more often in death. Then he heard the sirens, and did not think of anything for a while, waiting for what was to happen next.

  Things calmed down somewhat on the ambulance ride. The paramedic in the back dressed his wound, said something to the effect of "It doesn’t look that bad." And gave him something for the pain. The medic was amiable and overweight, and made comments about how, in Iraq, he had packed such wounds with tampons. Sam tried not to hear it. There seemed to be too much of a connection to the medic and Jesse, and he could still see the events in his mind’s eye. Sam was feeling numb and a little high by the time he got to the hospital.

  It had been a long time since Sam had been inside a hospital. Once, during his childhood for a broken leg, and once for his brother with a dislocated shoulder. He had managed to experience most of his twenties without any further injury, all the way up to the point where Jesse chose to shoot him at the pier. From what he remembered both trips had been framed by a lengthy wait in the Emergency Room. He noticed that by arriving in an ambulance, on a stretcher there was no such disposition. Instead there were a series of test, x-rays, and even an MRI. The doctor worked quickly on the wound, before pronouncing Sam acceptable. "Basically, the bullet just passed right through." He said. "A lucky shot, considering your kidneys are right there. We should be able to release you tonight."

  An old black man with a crispy white moustache cleared his throat. He was wearing a security guard uniform that looked cheap and wrinkled. "Sorry doc." He said. "We can’t release this young fella yet. Them police want to have a talk with him."

  "Oh." The doctor waved distractedly. "Fine, fine." And walked out impatiently. The security guard stood where he was in the doorway, with both hands on his belt as in the manner of an old west gunfighter, although Sam could see no visible weapon. He stayed where he was until the police walked in, and Sam realized he had a choice. Either tell the truth, or a variation of it, leave tonight, or stay and probably answer a lot more questions. The officer got out a yellow legal pad, and just as Sam had made up his mind to lie for the time being, he remembered Lena. He needed to find out about Lena.

  So instead, he told the truth. It wasn’t hard at all. The cop asked him to describe what had happened, in a pretty straightforward fashion, and when the time came Sam let slip that he knew the shooter. "You had a relationship with him?" The cop asked, to which Sam replied, "He was my friend," reasoning that the officer would assume that friendship was a sort of relationship, a way of knowing someone intimately. The cop then stopped what he was writing and said some words into his radio in garbled cop speak, and then waved his hand for same to continue. After that the cop confirmed what Sam already had figured out, he was not free to leave. There were other, further questions to be had, from other people.

  "Do they know what happened to my girlfriend?" Sam asked.

  "Was she injured in any way?" The cop asked.

  "She was shot." Sam said, and when he said the words it seemed to him that they came true.

  The cop nodded in a knowing manner, as if there were more he could tell but he was prohibited from saying. "I can try to find out." He said. "Hold tight." And Sam was left alone. This time the security guard waited on the outside of the door, and Sam found himself being consumed with anxiety.

  What if Lena was dead? And they weren’t telling him? What would it be like if she died? Would she simply fade away and disappear, back to unreality, like some sort of Jedi Knight, or would she sit in a meat locker starting to stink, like any other carbon based life form? A thought came to Sam, until she had been shot, he had not known that there was blood pumping through her veins. Was the rest of her anatomy correct? Could the doctors even operate on her at all? He felt hopeless and responsible at the same time. He wanted to talk to someone about it, and he realized that of the two people he would talk to in these situations, one of them was possibly dead, and the other most certainly was. A man with in a cheap sort of business casual walked in, with a gun and a silver badge at his hip, and slammed the door behind him. He was white and grey haired, a different sort of cop than the other who had been young and Hispanic.

  "Your Sam Harshbarger." He barked, more statement than question.

  "Yes."

  "You knew Jesse Allen."

  "Yes."

  "How did you know him?"

  "He was my friend."

  "Friend like what?"

  "He was my friend. We did things together. I knew him from Ohio."

  "When was the last time you spoke with him?"

  "This morning."

  "What was it about."

  "I don’t know."

  "You don’t know or you can’t remember?"

  "I mean, I can’t remember." The cop stared him down. Finally Sam came out with, "I don’t think it was anything important. I would remember if it was."

  "Nothing like, 'hey, I'm going to kill a bunch of guys today?' did he ever say stuff like that?"

  "No."

  "Even as a joke?"

  "No."

  The cop took out a small notebook, and scribbled things down. "Did you know he had a gun?"

  "I thought he might have."

  "You thought or you knew?"

  "I thought. I mean, he was in the military. He knew how to shoot. But he never talked about having one, or anything."

  The cop rubbed his eyes, as if his head hurt behind them. "Here's my problem." He said. "I've got four dead people. One of thems a kid. Two people that are in pretty bad shape. I've got reporters out there and my boss, and his boss, all wanting to know what happened. I've got you, the one guy at the scene who knew the shooter. And you’re really not telling me a fucking thing."

  "He wasn’t like that." Sam said. "I mean, Jesse."

  "Yes." The cop said. "Look, yes. I get that he was your friend, but you’re going to have to realize that he was like that. He did this. He shot a lot of people, and you. And if there is anything you can tell us about it, anything at all, you really need to do that."

  "I talked to him this morning." Sam said. "I thought we were good."

  The detective grilled him a little more, until finally he gave him a card and told him to come in the next day for more questions. It was only when he was done that Sam realized what he had been hiding from the cop, the fact that Jesse had slept with Lena. It dawned on him that that might have been the motive for everything t
hat happened, which scared Sam a little, and made him feel like some sort of accomplice. But after the cop left the security guard was done as well, and a nurse came up to him with discharge paperwork and a pill bottle filled with medication.

  "I checked on that girl you were asking about." The nurse said. "Your gurlfrehn?"

  "Yes ma'am."

  "She's in ICU." The nurse said. "Only thing is, they had her in there as a Jane Doe. Didn’t have any driver’s license on her or nothin'. That's why it took so long, darlin'. Does she have some family you can call?"

  "No." Sam said. "I mean, I'm her boyfriend."

  "No parents, or anything?"

  "I don’t think so."

  The nurse clucked. "Aint that a shame." She said. "Only thing is, its only family members visiting in the ICU. I could take you up there, if'n the momma or the daddy said it was okay. But without anyone to give me the say-so, I can’t do nothin'."

  So she's alive, Sam thought, feeling relieved and scared, both at once. "Thank you." He said.

  "Go home, darlin'." The nurse said. "Come back up here tomorrow and speak with the people. Maybe they can get you in."

  Getting home proved to be more of a challenge than Sam thought. The ambulance was quite a ways from the beach and his condo, and besides the hospital insisted on wheeling him out in a chair. This proved troublesome given the fact that he did not have a ride, eventually the receptionist in the front desk called a taxi in somewhat of a huff. For a while he was left to himself, in the wheelchair wearing a green hospital gown on account of his shirt and pants having been cut off during the procedures to attend his bullet wound. A few of the people waiting in the ER gawked at him, one with an open mouth.