by Julian Folk
7:50
Light foot traffic in the humanities building.
Raring to teach, Connor bursts into Lecture Center 102.
Lavish lights and streamlined seats. A chilly hall. And the new professor’s the first one here!
He proceeds to graffiti the white board in his lecture’s key points. Writing while lecturing sometimes causes him to lose his train of thought. Taking care of it beforehand allows him to deliver a more fluid lecture. The day’s subject: the birth of bully culture in Plymouth Colony.
7:55
The board is properly graffitied. Connor spins around and looks out at the seats.
They’re empty.
He checks the time on his phone.
8:00
Official start of lecture. Nobody’s here. The kids’ lateness will force him to say unpleasant things, start the year on a sour note. He hates being mean.
8:05
Are they sleeping in? These kids are too young to be partying so hard.
8:10
He’ll play Bow Man on his phone, make it look like he couldn’t care less when they walk in.
8:15
To be confronted by a bloodsoaked mob bearing torches and pitchforks would beat this.
8:30
The hackers must’ve struck again. He’ll call Robert. Connor’s calling him right now— Ugh, voicemail.
8:50
Robert’s not looking into this fast enough! He’ll text him!
9:15
One lecture under Connor’s belt. Zero students. Fuck them! Assholes! Entitled Junior College brats! The fucking government pays their damn tuition and they can’t be bothered to attend class!
Connor erases the board. On a hunch, he checks Twitter. No surprise. It’s been hacked. HACKTIVATE published three dozen hate-tweets this morning in his name. Each expression of bile is bigoted in a unique way. The kindest one reads:
“Community College Students—too fucking poor to show up for class?”
Two more lectures. Zero students. 115 hostile tweets.
Connor stews in the classroom and falls to pieces. His pieces crumble. Whatever’s left disintegrates.
By the end of the third class, at 3:15, Connor hyperventilates, hunched in a cocoon on his desk, envisioning suicide.
What a dark and tight cocoon. His fists bash the back of his skull. Mutely, he screams apologies to his family because he didn’t live up to his promise, wasting eight years on a sociology PhD that led to a DOA memoir and a squib of a teaching career.
Compare him to Robert.
Big bro’s thirty-six-years-old, an FBI point man on counterterrorism, devoted husband to an ex-stripper MILF, doting father to three boys.
I’m falling into a pit…
A hand touches Connor’s shoulder. Big, strong and warm—a man’s hand. Connor, in his despair, couldn’t care if this was the hand of a resurrected Eric Rice, Ayelet’s loverboy Marcello, or a terrorist beheader. Any touch counts.
The man talks to Connor, whose arms block his ears and impair his hearing.
“Connor, man,” Xavier says. “It’s alright.
Xavier eases the new professor out of his depressive cocoon.
“Our system was hacked,” he says. “HACKTIVATE sent a mass email to your students. Said your lectures were canceled and you were suspended. IT corrected the mistake and included a note about your Twitter being hacked. Don’t worry, man.”
Connor hugs Xavier. He grows stronger in his boss’s embrace. His tears and sweat stain Xavier’s collar.
The Chairman granted him a reprieve; Connor needs to up his game.
He sulks home, and Ayelet ravishes him. All digital devices and appliances in the house have become unusable. Frank’s face graces their TV, laptops and phones. They order Thai on the landline, drink tea and commiserate about the day’s torments.
The obliteration of Connor’s ego frees him. He feels older, wiser and above the fray. He plans to appreciate what he has until he no longer has it—and that might be soon.
They share a slice of defrosted cheesecake.
“I had a dream Eric was back,” Connor says, “even though this harassment isn’t Eric’s style. That guy used to get in my grill. You know, verbal abuse, shoving, slapping. When his frustrations mounted, he became really violent, beatdowns, you know, culminating in…”
“Taking a scalpel to your balls.”
“I must get better,” Connor says. “Better at everything.”
“Babe, don’t get caught in your bully’s self-improvement trap,” Ayelet says. “You’re perfect the way you are.”
“Thanks, but perfect doesn’t cut it anymore,” he says, “even if I have a PhD, tenure track job, nice house, smoking hot celebrity author wife and a munchkin in the oven.”
“Robert will hunt these people like the terrorists they are,” she says.
“My brother didn’t get back to me today,” Connor says. “You know what? I’ll jog to the police station. Update them on this insanity.”
He rises, kisses his wife on the lips and says, “I love you.”
“OH GOD I LOVE YOU.”
He hears Ayelet’s voice. But her lips are pursed. Her mouth is closed.
“I FUCKING LOVE YOU. I FUCKING NEED YOU. I NEED YOUR NASTY DICK INSIDE ME.”
Same thing—sealed lips. These are Ayelet’s words, though, recorded earlier. Husband and wife hear the words in the dining room, at a high decibel level, with terrible clarity. Ayelet’s mouth finally opens. It gapes. Still, her tongue doesn’t move.
Connor points to the corners where the ceiling intersects the walls.
The speakers.
“FUCK FUCK FUCK ME OH MY FUCKING GOD YOU’RE MY GOD—MARCELLO.”
Her words degrade to moans.
Connor splits to the living room. Video of Ayelet’s afternoon encounter plays on TV. The roughness of the sex waylays him. Our brand new leather sofa, the spot where I slept last night. He traces the angle of the picture on TV to the Xbox Connect. They jacked my Xbox! He scopes Marcello’s body, visible from the neck down, and cringes at the orange tan and bodybuilder brawn and not-so-huge…
At least her lover had the class to wear a condom.
The dirty talk ratchets up. Real-life Ayelet slams the TV power button. No dice. Onscreen, she mocks Connor’s erectile functioning and sexual prowess, calls him gay, a boy, a women. Frank’s mug appears superimposed on Marcello’s: “Leave your husband, baby, and I leave you alone.”
Frank gives Connor the finger.
Ayelet tackles her husband to apologize, but he breaks free.
Main Street quiets down by 10:00 p.m. Underage students party in the bars and townhouses. Sidewalks empty. Connor jogs at a six-minute-mile pace, listening to Gorilla Biscuits’ Start Today record on his ageless iPod Shuffle.
At the police station, he files a full report of the day’s madness, including the torment Ayelet suffered, and the indignity of the sex tape broadcast, with Isoldi, the petite lady cop who sat outside their house last night.
He jogs away feeling accomplished. The cops are up-to-date on the day’s developments. And Ayelet’s treason gives him the upper hand at home.
He accelerates to a light sprint, daydreaming of his future courtroom testimony against the captured hackers, when the first bullet hits under his right shoulder. He twists to the right, in the direction the bullet came, when another strikes the inside meat of his left calf.
Holy shit! IS THIS IT? Is Connor Yard done?
The sudden twist of his torso, clockwise, pulls his rear deltoid muscle. The pain of the muscle strain exceeds the pain of the shot. For each bullet that connects to a limb, two connect to his torso. The bullets rupture on impact, or his flesh does.
Gotta find cover, duck in a bar, call an ambulance.
But the need to know who what and why compels Connor to face the Shooter:
Young white man, college-aged. White baseball cap. Passenger in a white Escalade. Pumping the gun, pumping frenziedly, not fi
fty feet east of Connor’s position. Desperate to squeeze out every last shot.
Connor hears the bullets whiz past his head and click the sidewalk and buildings. He notes the Shooter’s relish, the Orgasm Face the Shooter makes as he pumps his gun. And SPLAT. A bullet connects with Connor’s forehead. The Escalade rockets away.
I had a good run. Thank you Mom, Dad, Robert. Thank you Ayelet and Baby. Anyone would be blessed to live this life…
He anticipates losing his senses shortly. But he doesn’t. He sees blue.
Fucking paintballs.
Adrenalin toxifies his blood. Connor becomes someone else, a primal being, an ancestral version of himself that lived ten thousand years ago. He wants to run back to the police station but the barking muscle in his shoulder hurts too much. So he walks. Fast.
He crosses the street. Glimpses the station in the distance. The Escalade pulls up to his side. The Shooter photographs his prey.
Connor charges the vehicle, kicks the door, and the Shooter loves it. Connor balls his fist. The Shooter asks, “Are you gonna break the glass? Huh? Are you gonna? Fuckin’ bully!”
Connor bangs the window.
It won’t break.
He can kill someone. Maybe he actually will. Adrenalin makes it possible.
Chapter 6
Ayelet opens the front door, dead laptop in her canvas bag.
Yikes.
She shrinks from Glady’s starved-ostrich face and locks the storm door. The tip of Gladys’s nose smushes against the glass. A change has overtaken this neighbor. Teary-red eyes, bags under them, a frown.
Penitence.
Gladys’s protest is over.
Ayelet unlocks the storm door. Gladys takes Ayelet’s bag and hugs her. “I confessed to the brick attack,” she says, “and spent the night in jail. I’m sorry I believed the dumb hackers.”
She accompanies Ayelet to the car.
“Buzzfeed investigated the I-Stand-with-Frank movement,” Gladys says. “They dug up the real Frank Profeta. A guy from Chesapeake, Virginia. Had no idea who Connor was. Frank’s a family man, welder’s union. I’m so sorry, Ayelet. I screwed up. I’m ashamed. Let me make it up to you.”
Ayelet beats back tears. She fantasizes about smacking Gladys, knocking her neighbor to the sidewalk, planting her fat pregnant ass on Gladys’s face and suffocating the bitch. But alienating a neighbor now, even a violent protestor like Gladys, would be unwise.
“Vouch for me at Bean-to-Martha’s,” Ayelet says. “Buy me coffee. Tag along to the computer store.”
Martha promises not to shun Ayelet or judge pregnant coffee drinkers. Gladys pays for Ayelet’s coffee and black-and-white cookie. She asks to drive but Ayelet insists.
Her baby, her risk.
The stories the neighbor tells about her family soften Ayelet’s vengeance-seeking heart. Gladys and her husband Carl lost a daughter to heroin and a son to…they’re not quite sure. Gladys offended her daughter-in-law on a family vacation to Cape Code. The argument was about free trade. Their son hasn’t spoken to them in five years. Gladys hasn’t met her grandkids. This spring, Carl, a sixty-eight-year-old Professor of Music at NBCC, left Gladys for a thirty-eight-year-old heiress.
“I try to do the right thing,” Gladys says. “Maybe I try too hard. I certainly get punished enough.”
Sort of like Connor.
Ayelet dishes on Connor’s paintball attack.
“My husband looked like a blue M & M.”
The computer shop is one-town east, in Eaton. There’s metered parking. And a Lexus-sized space between a Chevy pickup and a VW.
“Look at that,” Gladys says. “Your luck has changed.”
“I’m the Queen of Parallel Parking,” Ayelet says.
Connor bumps anything inside five feet of the car. He breaks off side view mirrors like it’s his job. Ayelet hasn’t so much as nudged another vehicle in her thirteen years of city driving.
She pulls up next to the pickup truck, shifts into reverse, presses the pedal gently, eases the car back…and then it jumps backward. “What the…” Gladys grabs the inside door handle and braces herself on the dashboard. Ayelet slams the break and shifts into drive.
“Sorry Gladys.”
Ayelet gives it a little gas, but the car charges forward and stops just short of hitting the pickup. Now the pickup’s owner, a bearded man in a lumberjack shirt, his upper body encumbered by a nineties-era CPU, exits the shop irate.
He thinks I’m an incompetent driver. But the gas and brake malfunctioned. What if Lexus recalled this car and nobody told me?
She shifts into reverse again, raises her hand to apologize to the man, presses the gas pedal lightly, but the car refuses to budge.
She applies more pressure. Nothing happens. She lifts her foot off the gas pedal, and it jumps backward again. The Lexus backsmashes the Jetta.
Her baby shakes.
“WHAT THE FUCK, LADY?” the pickup owner screams.
The man squats down and places his CPU on the ground.
“Oh no,” Gladys says.
Ayelet shifts into drive. “We’ll park in the municipal lot.” Her foot rests on the brake. She catches her breath. On its own, the car jerks out of the space and speeds to an intersection. Her foot remains fixed on the brake. She’s too scared to curse.
Gladys flips.
Ayelet points to her foot.
Gladys cranes her neck to verify. The car sails under a red light and gains speed. The engine groans on account of the exertion.
“Dear God, Dear Jesus, Oh Christ,” Gladys says. “My words denied you many a time, Lord, but my heart—No, not once…”
“The Almighty can’t help us, Gladys,” Ayelet says. “Assholes hacked the car’s computer! Call 911!”
As if priming itself for interstellar travel, the vehicle accelerates, a 2.5 ton spacecraft racing under red lights, the horn honking at random.
Gladys’s fingers go to jelly. She dials 912, 811, 617, 941. The car finds a free lane and accelerates to 140 mph. It feels like liftoff is imminent. Gladys successfully dials 911 and presses SPEAKER:
“911, what is your emergency?”
The operator speaks in a nasally voice, a nerd’s tone, but glib, too. It conjures a picture of a bored, skinny white woman wearing thick-rimmed glasses. Not an ordinary 911 operator.
“We’re in a car, a Lexus,” Gladys says.
“2015 Lexus RX 350 Luxury Crossover Vehicle,” Ayelet shouts.
“Cool ride,” the 911 operator says. “Be thankful, man.”
A touch of smug.
“The car was hacked!” Gladys shrieks.
The hackers brake. The car comes to a complete stop. The 911 operator stays silent. Ayelet and Gladys breathe loud, long and deep.
“Okay,” Gladys says. “The car stopped. It was hacked in front of the computer store. A pregnant woman is driving—”
“Awwwww I love babies,” the 911 operator says, “until they’re born… Then it’s wah-wah change my diaper.”
Ayelet cringes. She hits the unlock button but the door stays locked. The car sits lifeless in the middle of the road. She is clueless about their location. The rearview shows a fleet of cop cars playing catch-up.
“Will you PLEASE inform the police?” Gladys asks.
“Um, I won’t be spoken to in that tone,” the 911 operator says.
Ayelet looks at Gladys’s phone as if it’s diseased.
“The police are coming, Gladys,” Ayelet whispers. “Just hang up.”
“Police are, like, mad dangerous,” the 911 operator says. “Y’all aren’t safe here. I’ll take you back to Martha’s. Her coffee’s good.”
To the blue sky above them, Ayelet mouths the words, “What… the… fuck?”
The car bolts.
It does zero-to-sixty in eight seconds, as advertised, but—
Backwards.
The lady hacker drives Ayelet’s Lexus in reverse. She switches to the westbound lane and races to the parkway entrance, driv
ing with the flow of traffic and gradually exceeding it. Gladys and Ayelet hold hands. They watch the pall of mortification descend on other drivers’ eyes as the Lexus speeds past them. Passengers whip out their phones to capture images of this psycho car.
Gladys pulls a Banshee act.
Ayelet surrenders to the moment, remains calm, keeps a hand on her belly.
The hacking, the joyride-in-reverse, the 911 operator…until someone gets hurt, Ayelet kinda likes it.
What’s wrong with me?
The car takes the exit ramp to North Berkshire. The hacker drives too fast. “Slow the fuck down!” Ayelet bleats.
The hacker talks back using the car’s stereo:
“I’m doing the best I can! You guys’re, like, so demanding…”
The left side tires come off the ground. Why would a woman do this to us? The tires touch down again. The Lexus blasts forward. Through an intersection. That’s where the accident happens. Between the North Berkshire Post Office and Tony’s Auto Repair.
A Lincoln heading southwest stops short to avoid hitting the Lexus as it speeds in reverse through the light. The GMC truck behind it rams the Lincoln. The Lincoln spins and swipes a Jeep heading northeast. More rams, spinouts and swipes. Gladys squeezes her eyes shut. In the rear view, Ayelet watches a man’s body soar above, out of, the intersection.
The Lexus races in reverse on Main Street and cars scatter. Must be hitting triple digit speeds. Ayelet senses a hard left approaching.
The campus.
This hacker intends to run Connor down.
No.
The hacker drives the Lexus on the grass. Just having fun. Plowing scores of objects. Ayelet can’t see what. She shuts her eyes anyway. She fears her car has plowed, is plowing, the bodies of students. Finally, she opens her eyes onto a campus green now ravaged by feathers, blood, guts, bones and divebombing geese.
The hacker turns at acute angles to crush the poor geese and bash them as they take flight. The car slips and slides. Ayelet recalls stepping on goose shit on Boston Common. It leaves the grass extra slick.