The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015

by Joe Hill

  “A speech impediment.”

  I nodded. “But a weird one. Where the words don’t come out right. Or don’t come out at all. Or come out as the wrong word. Clouding makes it worse.”

  “I like it,” he said, looking at me now instead of Mega Man. “It’s part of what makes you unique.”

  We played without talking, tinny music echoing in the little room.

  “I don’t want to go back to my room. I might get jacked in the hallway.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Can I stay here? I’ll sleep on the floor.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re the best, Sauro.” And there were his hands again, rubbing the top of my head. He took off his shirt and began to make a bed on my floor. Fine black hair covers almost all of me, but Case’s body was mostly bare. My throat hurt with how bad I wanted to put my hands on him. I got into bed with my boxers on, embarrassed by what was happening down there.

  “Sauro,” he whispered, suddenly beside me in the bed.

  I grunted; stumbled coming from dreams to reality.

  His body was spooned in front of mine. “Is this okay?”

  “Yes. Yes, it is.” I tightened my arms around him. His warmth and smell stiffened me. And then his head had turned, his mouth was moving down my belly, his body pinning me to the bed, which was good, because God had turned off gravity and the slightest breeze would have had me floating right out the window and into space.

  “You ever do this before? With a guy?”

  “Not out loud—I mean, not in real life.”

  “You’ve thought about it.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’ve thought about it a lot.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why didn’t you ever do it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You were afraid of what people might think?”

  “No.”

  “Then what were you afraid of?”

  Losing control was what I wanted to say, or giving someone power over me, or making a mess.

  Or: The boys that make me feel like you make me feel turn me into something stupid, brutish, clumsy, worthless.

  Or: I knew a gay kid once, in a group home upstairs from a McDonald’s, watched twelve guys hold him down in a locked room until the morning guy came at eight, saw him when they wheeled him toward the ambulance.

  I shrugged. The motion of my shoulders shook his little body.

  I fought sleep as hard and long as I could. I didn’t want to not be there. And when I knew I couldn’t fight it anymore I let myself sink into data—easy as blinking this time—felt myself ebb out of my cloud port, but instead of following the random data beamed into me by the nearest router, I reached—felt my way across the endless black gulf of six inches that separated his cloud port from mine, and found him there, a jagged wobbly galaxy of data, ugly and incongruous, but beautiful, because it was him, and because, even if it was only for a moment, he was mine.

  Case, I said.

  He twitched in his sleep. Said his own name.

  I love you, I said.

  Asleep, Case said it, too.

  Kentucky Fried Chicken. Thursday morning. For the first time, I didn’t feel like life was a fight about to break out, or like everyone wanted to mess with me. Everywhere I went, someone wanted to throw me out—but now the only person who even noticed me was a crazy lady rooting through a McDonald’s soda cup of change.

  Case asked, “Anyone ever tell you you’re a sexy beast?” On my baldness his hands no longer seemed so tiny. My big thick skull was an eggshell.

  “Also? Dude? You’re huge.” He nudged my crotch with his knee. “You know that? Like off the charts.”

  “Yeah?”

  I laughed. His glee was contagious and his hands were moving down my arm and we were sitting in public talking about gay sex and he didn’t care and neither did I.

  “When I first came to the city, I did some porn,” Case said. “I got like five hundred dollars for it.”

  I chewed slow. Stared at the bones and tendons of the drumstick in my hand. Didn’t look up. I thought about what I had done, while clouddiving. How I said his name, and he echoed me. I dreamed of taking him up to the roof at night, snapping my fingers and making the whole Bronx go dark except for Case’s name, spelled out in blazing tenement window lights. It would be easy. I could do anything. Because: Case.

  “Would you be interested in doing something like that?”

  “No.”

  “Not even for like a million dollars?”

  “Maybe a million. But probably not.”

  “You’re funny. You know that? How you follow the rules. All they ever do is get you hurt.”

  “Getting in trouble means something different for you than it does for me.”

  Here’s what I realized: It wasn’t hate that made it easy to talk to my mom. It was love. Love let the words out.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Because. What you are.”

  “Because I’m a sexy mother?”

  I didn’t grin back.

  “Because I’m white.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Right. You see? The rules are not your friend. Racists made the rules. Racists enforce them.”

  I put the picked-clean drumstick down.

  Case said, “Whatever,” and the word was hot and long, a question, an accusation. “The world put you where you are, Sauro, but fear keeps you there. You want to never make any decisions. Drift along and hope everything turns out for the best. You know where that’ll put you.”

  The lady with the change cup walked by our table. Snatched a thigh off of Case’s plate. “Put that down right this minute, asshole,” he said, loud as hell, standing up. For a second the country-bumpkin Case was gone, replaced by someone I’d never seen before. The lady scurried off. Case caught me staring and smiled, aw-shucks style.

  “Stand up,” I said. “Go by the window.”

  He went. Evening sun turned him into something golden.

  Men used to paralyze me. My whole life I’d been seeing confident charismatic guys, and thought I could never get to that place. Never have what they had. Now I saw it wasn’t what they had that I wanted, it was what they were. I felt lust, not inferiority, and the two are way too close. Like hate and love.

  “You make me feel like food,” he said, and then laid himself facedown on the floor. “Why don’t you come over here?” Scissored his legs open. Turned his head and smiled like all the smiles I ever wanted but did not get.

  Pushing in, I heard myself make a noise that can only be called a bellow.

  “Shh,” he said, “everyone will hear us.”

  My hips took on a life of their own. My hands pushed hard, all up and down his body. Case was tiny underneath me. A twig I could break.

  Afterward I heard snoring from down the hall. Someone sobbed. I’d spent so long focused on how full the world was of horrible things. I’d been so conditioned to think that its good things were reserved for someone else that I never saw how many were already within my grasp. In my head, for one thing, where my thoughts were my own and no one could punish me for them, and in the cloud, where I was coming to see that I could do astonishing things. And in bed. And wherever Case was. My eyes filled up and ran over and I pushed my face into the cool nape of his sleeping neck.

  My one and only time in court: I am ten. Mom bought drugs at a bodega. It’s her tenth or hundredth time passing through those tall tarnished-bronze doors. Her court date came on one of my rare stints out of the system, when she cleaned up her act convincingly enough that they gave me briefly back to her.

  The courtroom is too crowded; the guard tells me to wait outside. “But he’s my son,” my mother says, pointing out smaller children sitting by their parents.

  I am very big for ten.

  “He’s gotta stay out here,” the guard says.

  I sit on the floor and count green flecks in the floor. Dark-skinned men surround me, a
ngry but resigned, defiant but hopeless. The floor’s sparkle mocks us: our poverty, our mortality, the human needs that brought us here.

  “Where I’m from,” Case said, “you could put a down payment on a house with two thousand dollars.”

  “Oh.”

  “You ever dream about escaping New York?”

  “Kind of. In my head.”

  Case laughed. “What about you and me getting out of town? Moving away?”

  My head hurt with how badly I wanted that. “You hated that place. You don’t want to go back.”

  “I hated it because I was alone. If we went back together, I would have you.”

  “Oh.”

  His fingers drummed up and down my chest. Ran circles around my nipples. “I called that guy I know. The porn producer. Told him about you. He said he’d give us each five hundred, and another two-fifty for me as a finder’s fee.”

  “You called him? About me?”

  “This could be it, Sauro. A new start. For both of us.”

  “I don’t know,” I said, but I did know. I knew I was lost, that I couldn’t say no, that his mouth, now circling my belly button, had only to speak and I would act.

  “Are you really such a proper little gentleman?” he asked. His hands, cold as winter, hooked behind my knees. “You never got into trouble before?”

  My one time in trouble.

  I am five. It’s three in the morning. I’m riding my tricycle down the block. A policeman stops me. Where’s your mother / She’s home / Why aren’t you home? / I was hungry and there’s no food. Mom is on a heroin holiday, lying on the couch while she’s somewhere else. For a week I’ve been stealing food from corner stores. So much cigarette smoke fills the cop car that I can’t breathe. At the precinct he leaves me there, windows all rolled up. Later he takes me home, talks to my mom, fills out a report, takes her away. Someone else takes me. Everything ends. All of this is punishment for some crime I committed without realizing it. I resolve right then and there to never again steal food, ride tricycles, talk to cops, think bad thoughts, step outside to get something I need.

  Friday afternoon we rode the train to Manhattan. Case took us to a big building, no different on the outside from any other one. A directory on the wall listed a couple dozen tenants. ARABY STUDIOS was where we were going.

  “I have an appointment with Mr. Goellnitz,” Case told a woman at a desk upstairs. The place smelled like paint over black mold. We sat in a waiting room like a doctor’s, except with different posters on the walls.

  In one, a naked boy squatted on some rocks. A beautiful boy. Fine black hair all over his body. Eyes like lighthouses. Something about his chin and cheekbones turned my knees to hot jelly. Stayed with me when I shut my eyes.

  “Who’s that?” I asked.

  “Just some boy,” Case said.

  “Does he work here?”

  “No one works here.”

  “Oh.”

  Filming was about to start when I figured out why that boy on the rocks bothered me so much. I had thought only Case could get into my head so hard, make me feel so powerless, so willing to do absolutely anything.

  A cinderblock room, dressed up like how Hollywood imagines the projects. Low ceilings and Snoop Dogg posters. Overflowing ashtrays. A pit bull dozing in a corner. A scared little white boy sitting on the couch.

  “I’m sorry, Rico, you know I am. You gotta give me another chance.”

  The dark scary drug dealer towers over him. Wearing a wife beater and a bicycle chain around his neck. A hard-on bobs inside his sweatpants. “That’s the last time I lose money on you, punk.”

  The drug dealer grabs him by the neck, rubs his thumb along the boy’s lips, pushes his thumb into the warm wet mouth.

  “Do it,” Goellnitz barked.

  “I can’t,” I said.

  “Say the fucking line.”

  Silence.

  “Or I’ll throw your ass out of here and neither one of you will get a dime.”

  Case said, “Come on, dude! Just say it.”

  —and how could I disobey? How could I not do every little thing he asked me to do?

  Porn was like cloudporting, like foster care. One more way they used you up.

  One more weapon you could use against them.

  I shut my eyes and made my face a snarl. Hissed out each word, one at a time, to make sure I’d only have to say it once.

  “That’s.” “Right.” “Bitch.” I spat on his back, hit him hard in the head. “Tell.” “Me.” “You.” “Like it.” Off camera, in the mirror, Case winked.

  Where did it come from, the strength to say all that? To say all that, and do all the other things I never knew I could do? Case gave it to me. Case, and the cloud, which I could feel and see now even with my eyes open, even without thinking about it, sweet and clear as the smell of rain.

  “Damn, dude,” Case said, while they switched to the next camera setup. “You’re actually kind of a good actor with how you deliver those lines.” He was naked; he was fearless. I cowered on the couch, a towel covering as much of me as I could manage. What was it in Case that made him so certain nothing bad would happen to him? At first I chalked it up to white skin, but now I wasn’t sure it was so simple. His eyes were on the window. His mind was already elsewhere.

  The showers were echoey, like TV high school locker rooms. We stood there, naked, side by side. I slapped Case’s ass, and when he didn’t respond I did it again, and when he didn’t respond I stood behind him and kissed the back of his neck. He didn’t say or do a thing. So I left the shower to go get dressed.

  “Did I hurt you?” I hollered, when ten minutes had gone by and he was still standing under the water.

  “What? No.”

  “Oh.”

  He wasn’t moving. Wasn’t soaping or lathering or rinsing.

  “Is everything okay?” Making my voice warm, to hide how cold I suddenly felt.

  “Yeah. It was just . . . intense. Sex usually isn’t. For me.”

  His voice was weird and sad and not exactly nice. I sat on a bench and watched him get harder and harder to see as the steam built up.

  “Would you mind heading up to the House ahead of me?” he said finally. “I need some time to get my head together. I’ll square up things with the director and be there soon.”

  “Waiting is cool.”

  “No. It’s not. I need some alone time.”

  “Alone time,” I smirked. “You’re a—”

  “You need to get the hell back, Angel. Okay?”

  Hearing the hardness in his voice, I wondered if there was a way to spontaneously stop being alive.

  “I got your cash right here,” the director said, flapping an envelope at me.

  “He’ll get it,” I said, knowing it was stupid. “My boyfriend.”

  “You sure?”

  I nodded.

  “Here’s my business card. I hoped you might think about being in something of mine again sometime. Your friend’s only got a few more flicks in him. Twinks burn out fast. You, on the other hand—you’ve got something special. You could have a long career.”

  “Thanks,” I said, nodding, furious, too tall, too retarded, too sensitive, hating myself the whole way down the elevator, and the whole walk to the subway, and the whole ride back to what passed for home.

  When the train came above ground after 149th Street, I felt the old shudder as my cloud port clicked back into the municipal grid. Shame and anger made me brave, and I dove. I could see the car as data, saw transmissions to and from a couple dozen cell phones and tablets and biodevices, saw how the train’s forward momentum warped the information flowing in and out. Saw ten jagged blobs inside, my fellow cloudbounds. Reached out again, like I had with Case. Felt myself slip through one after another like a thread through ten needles. Tugged that thread the tiniest bit, and watched all ten bow their heads as one.

  Friday night I stayed up till three in the morning, waiting for Case to come knocking. I played the S
kull Man level on Mega Man 2 until I could beat it without getting hit by a single enemy. I dove into the cloud, hunted down maps, opened up whole secret worlds. I fell asleep like that, and woke up wet from fevered dreams of Case.

  Saturday—still no sign of him.

  Sunday morning I called Guerra’s cell phone, a strict no-no on the weekends.

  “This better be an emergency, Sauro,” he said.

  “Did you log Case out?”

  “Case?”

  “The white boy.”

  “You call me up to bother me with your business deals? No, jackass, I didn’t log him out. I haven’t seen him. Thanks for reminding me, though. I’ll phone him in as missing on Monday morning.”

  “You—”

  But Guerra had gone.

  First thing Monday, I rode the subway into Manhattan and walked into that office like I had as much right as anyone else to occupy any square meter of space in this universe. I worried I wouldn’t be able to, without Case. I didn’t know what this new thing coming awake inside me was, but I knew it made me strong. Enough.

  The porn man gave me a hundred dollars, no strings attached. Said to keep him in mind, said he had some scripts that I could “transform from low-budget bullshit into something really special.”

  He was afraid of me. He was right to be afraid, but not for the reason he thought. I could clouddive and wipe Araby Studios out of existence in the time it took him to blink his eyes. I could see his fear, and I could see how he wanted me anyway for the money he could make off me. There was so much to see, once you’re ready to look for it.

  Maybe I was right the first time: it had been hate that made it easy to talk to my mom. Love can make us become what we need to be, but so can hate. Case was gone, but the words kept coming. Life is nothing but acting.

  I could have:

  Given Guerra the hundred dollars to track Case down. He’d call his contacts down at the department; he’d hand me an address. Guerra would do the same job for fifty bucks, but for a hundred he’d bow and yessir like a good little lackey.