The Phone Company
Page 26
Steve looked at his phone. It seemed like the first few times he’d called this morning, he’d gotten Bill’s usual outgoing message. Which was actually Bill, not some automated phone tree.
He knew that, typically, Bill wouldn’t listen to voicemail unless they were messages for work. Bill hated voicemail. He would, however, read and respond to personal texts.
Steve began to type out a text on his tiny numpad. He got sick of hitting a button three times only to start all over again whenever he punched the wrong one.
“Sarah, would you text Bill, ask him where he’s at? His number’s—”
“Done,” Sarah said.
“I didn’t even give you his number.”
She rolled her eyes. “Dad. You don’t have to know someone’s number, you just look them up.”
“Huh.”
Sarah went back to playing her Tether, and Steve stared at his crappy old phone and the little roaming triangle in the status bar.
Scuffed, scratched, sandy in one hinge from six years ago when they’d taken Janice on her last trip to the coast—Steve knew he needed a new phone. He simply wanted to know why they weren’t made like this one anymore. Just simple phones.
He reached into his black sweater jacket and pulled out his home phone, an exact duplicate clamshell, same gray, same everything. Only the weathering was different. And the content.
Sighing, Steve opened some of the pictures stored on the home phone. Grainy, blurry, and only about one square inch, the pictures sucked. They were like Polaroids, though. No duplicates. No negatives. The phone was so old it didn’t even have the most rudimentary data transfer port.
Some of the pictures were selfies. Janice, trying on a new lipstick; Janice, hugging her best friend Lily; Janice, making the infamous duck face. That last one made Steve grin every time. If only she knew how uncool she’d be in just a few years.
“Hey, Sarah?”
“What,” she said, her thumbs chattering across her Tether.
“You think if I took this to PCo, they’d—”
Her head snapped around. “We’re going to PCo? Are you activating your Tether?”
“Well, I was wondering. You know, if they’d be able to show me how to get the pictures off this one.” He held up the home phone, and Sarah immediately lost interest. “And, yeah, maybe. With the roaming charges on these . . . I’m at least thinking of giving up one line. I just want the pictures first.”
“We should definitely go,” Sarah said. “That would be awesome.”
“Yeah,” Steve said, staring down at Janice’s duck face, trying to maintain a smile. “We definitely should.” With a quick sniff, he clapped the old clamshell shut and got up. “Okay, it’s time.” Steve left a five-dollar tip for Cathy. “JJ, come on.”
Still passed out on the table, JJ didn’t respond.
“Hey, butthead,” Sarah said, smacking the bill of her brother’s hat.
Steve cringed, waiting for JJ to shoot back at her. He didn’t. He simply lifted his head.
“Huh?”
“Time to go,” Steve said, not liking the dark bags beneath his son’s eyes. It struck him how much JJ resembled Janice, too. Today. Especially Janice in the first stages of her sickness.
JJ dragged himself out of the booth, grabbing his backpack.
“Oh, little Stevie, hello,” Mrs. Hayworth said at the diner bar. “How are you? How are the kids?”
Steve gave her a surprised smile. “You remembered me.”
“Yes, of course, how could I forget?” Mrs. Hayworth peeked over Steve’s shoulder at the empty booth. “And where’s little Billy this fine morning?”
“That’s an excellent question,” Steve said, grinning and nearly shaking his head. Mrs. Hayworth hadn’t been this lucid in years. “I was actually wondering that myself.”
“Oh, I meant to tell you. I saw that dog of yours, Barksdale.”
“You did?” Steve said.
“Yes, he was walking down my hill. Toward town, I think.”
“Hmm,” Steve said. This part didn’t sound as lucid. “Like he was coming down from the mountain, or . . .?”
“Yes, I guess he was, wasn’t he?”
“Huh.” Steve scratched his chin.
Barksdale was such an independent dog, he would sometimes go days without coming home. Steve would see him wandering around town or sleeping on the bench at the barbershop. Some people actually left dog dishes in their garages where Barksdale could come in through the doggy door and have a midnight snack, or they’d put out a little doggy bed where he could curl up and catch a nap. If he wasn’t Steve’s dog, then Barksdale was the dog of the whole town.
People liked having the shepherd around. Barksdale cut back on raccoons and all sorts of midnight bandits. All the mountain lion attacks had stopped as well, and people swore their gardens and flower beds flourished without all those rutting deer.
Barksdale definitely was known for getting around. Yet it had never crossed Steve’s mind, not once, not in all these years, that Barksdale would actually climb over the entire mountain. What would drive him to do something like that?
The corner of Steve’s lips sprouted a grin.
Barksdale, you dog.
He grew a full smile and patted Mrs. Hayworth on the shoulder. “Well, if you see Barksdale again, tell him to quit chasing tail and get his butt home, will you please, dear?”
“I definitely will, Stevie, I will.”
“It really is nice to hear you’re doing well, Mrs. Hayworth. Have a good—”
“Yes, it’s amazing what technology can do, isn’t it?”
“Oh, are you on some kind of new program, or . . .?”
“It’s this Tether,” Mrs. Hayworth said. “The memory games are really helping.”
“Oh yeah?” Steve pulled out his last few dollar bills and tucked them under Mrs. Hayworth’s teacup, as was tradition. “Just something a little extra for Cathy, okay?”
“Oh, you’re such a dear.”
“Thanks, Mrs. Hayworth. Have a good day.”
“Yes, and you the same. Oh, and Steve. Please tell Janice I said hello. Whenever you speak with her next.”
Steve felt a small twinge in his chest. So the Tether hadn’t miraculously cured Mrs. Hayworth after all.
“I will,” he said, and he and the kids left for school.
* * *
“You don’t want shotgun?” his dad asked. The voice echoed in JJ’s earpiece.
“Huh?”
“I assumed you’d move up to the front the second we dropped your sister off.”
“Oh,” JJ said, “just tired. I’m fine.”
“Oh. Okay. Whatever.”
They fell quiet, and JJ listened to the road. Usually his dad listened to talk radio, or he’d have some crappy old music playing. Simon and Garfunkel. Jim Croce. They were the worst. Today, though, he had turned the radio off.
JJ stared down at Vedder’s character in Drones. He didn’t play, he just sat there watching.
He tried to process everything that had happened last night, but couldn’t keep the molasses from leaking in through his ears. It was hard enough keeping his eyes from gluing shut.
As if the air itself were the molasses, JJ slowly swiped his thumb across the Tether. The hand onscreen did the same, leaving tracers and pixel smears.
Since he’d gotten up that morning, JJ and Vedder had become the same person in Drones, so that when JJ looked into the phone, he saw a first-person perspective of himself looking down at the same phone. Same black hoodie, same crescent of dirt under the left thumbnail. And, of course, the same alien head on their chests.
JJ could hear everything, too. Not just with his naked ears, but in the echo of his
earpiece. Everything echoing. Doll within doll for eternity.
He tried to understand it, to make sense of what had happened last night with Red Beard and Marvin, the blood on his shirt. He thought he’d been controlling Vedder, until he saw this: JJ, both JJs, tilted their Tethers. They both reached into the backpack that Vedder had left for them, or that JJ had left for himself—he was still working out that part.
He unzipped the bag and retrieved something, something he remembered collecting last night—something Vedder had collected, or rather something he had collected using Vedder’s copy of Drones.
“We’re here,” his dad said.
JJ looked at HMS. “Are we?” he asked, rubbing together two giant coins he’d taken from the backpack. “Where is here?”
His dad stared at him for a second, staring at him through the phone as well. “You need to start going to bed earlier.”
JJ nodded. Not real coins, he thought, rubbing them together. Video game coins, big and golden. The type you get when you kill a bad guy.
He wasn’t bad, JJ thought. He wasn’t bad at all, just crazy.
His dad glanced down at the coins in JJ’s hand. He either didn’t see them, or he fully accepted them as real. JJ didn’t know the difference.
He dragged ass behind his dad into HMS. As he walked toward first period, his classmates all stared. It was weird, hearing everything two times through the earpiece, all the chattering and rustling and morning gossip assailing him twice and all at once. Voices in his head, whispering.
Their faces weren’t symmetrical, not perfectly, not like the inkblots. He noticed that now. On that side there was a zit, or the nostril was more flared. They each were ugly in their discrepancies, each and every one.
Except for the blood spot, the alien head was perfectly symmetrical. Something to worship.
Mini Mark walked by, and JJ stared at him. Mark didn’t say a thing, didn’t even acknowledge JJ at all, except when he realized JJ was still staring at him. Mark flipped him the bird before disappearing into the crowd.
JJ had stared, not because of Mark, but because of what hovered above Mark’s head. And now he saw the same thing hovering above the crowd.
They all had numbers. Each and every student, and the teachers and staff, too. Above all their heads, a number and a big golden coin.
Drones buzzed. A tooltip, a little tutorial, had popped up. It explained that the numbers represented the exact change each non-playable character held in their pockets.
JJ blinked.
Not real, he thought.
That made sense.
It was like he’d woken up in some retro video game, rated E, complete with Mario Bros. coins. It was as if he hadn’t woken up at all. But if this was a dream, he’d never had one this life-like, with this much bodily control.
Lucid dreaming? he thought.
JJ swiped again at his screen and swiped again at his screen—everything echoing.
He was no longer the boy walking around the school, he realized that now. He was the boy behind the screen. And in his inventory, in his backpack, was something heavy, something to remind him of last night and what they’d done to Bill.
CHAPTER 25
Most days when Bill woke up, the sun was still hiding under the covers of the mountain. He woke that way on weekends, too, no alarm clock. He’d do a quick check around town and tell the sun it was okay now, there was no such thing as monsters.
This morning Bill snapped awake on his hardwood floor in a pool of sunshine and vomit.
He’d built the ground floor of his house, which sat atop a walk-out basement, oriented to the sun. He’d installed windows all the way around, so that even outside fall or spring equinox, Bill would catch some early morning rays over the mountain.
On the blueprints, he’d labeled the ground floor the “Sun Dial.” He’d even put in some skylights and had helped frame and roof the place. Summers, he could cook eggs in his boxer shorts and work in a tan all before ten.
Bill sat up in the Sun Dial and nearly puked up whatever was left of his guts. The pressure in his head squeezed his eyes until he saw the night again, just darkness and stars.
“Not this. Not again.”
Hangovers.
Sheesh.
Bill realized now the reason he’d vomited. He would have vomited again if he’d had anything left. He knew that from experience.
What day is it?
Bill flinched. Strands of hair, slick with vomit, licked his finger as he felt the side of his head. He pushed back the soiled strands and found the nautilus shell of the earwig wrapped around his ear.
He looked down at himself. “When did I . . .”
Vaguely, Bill remembered leaving for the Speakeasy, but everything after that might as well have been a traumatic car accident. He couldn’t remember a thing.
Bill always made sure to dress in plainclothes before going to the Speakeasy. So why, then, was he in uniform?
Bile and flecks of puke stained his shoulder straps and the top border of his deputy sheriff patch.
“Badge,” Bill said, patting his chest and looking around the Sun Dial. His face paled even further when he patted his breast pocket and realized what else he’d lost.
Flask.
The Sun Dial had been built to mirror the valley, open and spacious. The kitchen island, along with the couches on the opposite side, created the only blind spots. Bill didn’t see his personal effects anywhere.
Bedroom, he thought.
He’d hung up his uniform in the walk-in closet as he usually did, with clothes-iron precision. Groaning, burping up acid, Bill climbed to his feet and waited for the earth to stop moving.
* * *
JJ came out of the bathroom, wiping at his lips, wishing he could wash out the taste of vomit.
His footsteps echoed in the hallway. Everyone except JJ had gone to first period, which came as a huge relief. All those coins in the air—the nausea had all but forced his head into the toilet.
It wasn’t just the disorientation, it was the indicators. It was the fact that they weren’t life bars, but coin counters. As if, in this world, life was only worth its weight in shiny 8-bit discs.
JJ’s stomach roiled again when he saw he wasn’t alone. Down the hall, a giant arrow, the same cartoonish gold as the coins, floated above the exposed aggregate.
He had seen it once before, that night he’d sneaked out of the Dick’s house. The arrow had pointed him toward Meg Disney’s, but when he’d blinked, it had become road signs.
He blinked again.
The arrow brightened full force and persevered, flashing toward the south wing. JJ rushed away from it, his footfalls smacking the lockers as loud as his feet smacked the floor.
Near the eighth grade hall, he glanced back. The arrow was no longer there, no longer floating in the entryway.
Thank G—
The arrow hit him in the face.
“Holy shit!” JJ said, stumbling back toward the south wing.
Shaking his head, JJ pulled out his Tether. The character onscreen pulled out his Tether, too, and they both navigated to the menu to uninstall Drones.
JJ’s thumb trembled over the button, eyes ticking back and forth. He thought of Mini Mark, the changes Mark’s game had made to Cracked Rock, the idea that real life took longer to update.
What if this is real life? JJ thought, this funhouse he’d found himself in, where people’s lives were measured out in little pixel coins? What if all of existence was a program loaded on someone’s stupid smartphone? Because, IRL, you weren’t supposed to see magical floating arrows.
Not In Real Life, you wer
en’t.
And the real world did eventually update; Grumpier Cat had taught him that. The smaller apps from independent developers weren’t sophisticated military applications like Drones. Smaller games like Mark’s Minecraft rip-off (and JJ’s fun little cat-skinning game) weren’t robust enough to update in real time. But Drones was. JJ had discovered that last night, controlling Vedder.
He’d also learned, controlling Vedder controlling Bill, that the two worlds were slightly out of sync. Bill had puked first, followed a second later by Vedder. When JJ hadn’t puked, though, he’d assumed he’d lucked out. A second and a half after that, he’d been running to the half bathroom with cheeks like balloons.
Was that why it took so long for certain apps to update the real world? Because they were so many levels removed?
JJ’s Tether caught the fluorescent lighting of HMS, and in the random smear of rainbows and oils, he thought he saw an inkblot coating his screen. It was only half a face, but he remembered this one, that therapeutic little Rorschach depicting the real-life JJ blowing out his real-life brains.
Tears began to bubble up, and JJ clenched his stomach only to vomit up a sob.
* * *
After brushing a bit of vomit off his shoulder, Bill had retraced his steps. He’d searched his entire house twice. His closet, his dresser, even the dirty laundry.
This was no half-assed search, either. It was a full-scale police raid. He’d moved the washer and dryer to check underneath. He’d turned his jeep and cruiser inside out, all over the apron of his garage. He would have gutted his own couch, too, if he thought it would turn up a body.
With those leads exhausted, Bill started to canvass. He called the Speakeasy. Nothing in their lost and found box, and the owner hadn’t seen anything.
“I’ll keep an eye out, though. What’s your badge number? City? County?”
Bill hung up on her.