Wilde Stories 2018

by Steve Berman

D274: can feel the other me sumtims

  D274: like were connected

  D274: maybe were all connected

  I8804: maybe if we get too close to our other selves we make a crack.

  I8804: a crack big enough to fit through.

  Breaths wet in the back of his throat, Asad closed the app, clutching at his phone.

  Then he uninstalled it, wiped the address from his browser history, and pressed his face into his pillow until the cool wet cotton stuck to his cheeks and he couldn’t breathe for the soaked cloth filming his mouth.

  11

  Another week passed before he saw himself again.

  The raw, aching pain of it had faded somewhat. The loneliness. The loathing, when he looked in the mirror and saw not plump, smiling cheeks but haggard hollows above his jawline. He could deal. He was like the water in that glass, and water always found an equilibrium.

  He’d read once in class that the human brain was wired for unhappiness. That unhappiness made humans try so hard to make bigger and better things; every time they found a peak that felt like happiness, the brain reset where happy was so happy became normal, and normal wasn’t enough. The goalposts always kept moving, because an unhappy person was a hungry person, and a hungry person fought to claw higher and higher just to be able to eat.

  He thought sadness might be like that, too.

  He thought sometimes you got so used to the sadness it became normal, and then not so bad at all.

  He was kicking an old dented Pepsi can toward that corner bus stop at Blue Hill, going long for a gutter shot to beat Tarif and make a final goal, when they came on it. That prickling, and this time it came so sharp and full of static fire that Tarif and Asad stopped at the same time. That feeling, Gam had told them when she was first in the teaching, that’s what they mean when they say it’s like someone walked over your grave. It’s like you shiverin’ with the cold, but it’s all heat. All the heat at the heart of a star.

  The crack split open right in the wall of the bus stop. Walk around the stop and it was empty except the stink of hobo piss and a crushed juice box some kid left on the bench. But look through the wall, look through the crack, look inside, and he was there.

  Right fucking there.

  Sitting with Avondre, hand in hand, leaning on each other and talking in low murmurs. Through the wavering-shimmer breach Asad couldn’t tell what they said, nothing but quiet distorted sounds, but it translated into a hard, trembling language of heartbreak, striking him with every word.

  He stared, his hands clenching in his pockets. Tarif stood next to him, then leaned over, pressing the solid warmth of his arm against Asad’s, reminding him what was real.

  “This what you saw, ain’t it,” Tarif said. “This why you cried when you thought I was asleep.”

  Asad nodded, gulping in thick breaths. “Yeah.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It ain’t fair.”

  “What ain’t?”

  “Everything went right for them,” Asad whispered, as his other self leaned in and nuzzled Avondre’s shoulder. “They made all the right choices, and they got the good life. They get to be happy, and safe. But us…” His chest constricted. He wanted to look away, but couldn’t. “Too many wrong turns. I know we the ones who broke everything, but…”

  “…but if we could just…turn back.” His brother’s voice cracked.

  “Yeah. That. Do you think it’ll ever get better for us?”

  “Maybe. Not in our lifetime, though. Just like the worlds didn’t first break in our lifetime. Universe don’t count in human lifespans.” Tarif nudged Asad’s arm until one hand fell from his hoodie’s pocket, and then Tarif’s thick, soft fingers curled in his, gripping tight and hot and steady. “It counts in the lifespans of stars.”

  “It still ain’t fair.”

  “You want his life?”

  “Maybe not his life.” Asad lingered on Avondre’s laughing eyes, the way he kept his arm around the other Asad as if he wanted to protect him. “But I want one thing he has.”

  Tarif sucked his tongue against his teeth, making a sympathetic sound. “No good looking at things that way. Everything’s different over there. The lines that led him to what he found only happened ’cause of different choices they all made in the past.” Tarif squeezed his fingers. “We so far off their path…it’s a damned miracle we even see ourselves in them at all.”

  “…at least he’s happy.”

  “Yeah. There’s that.” Tarif sighed, and his hand slipped free from Asad’s, leaving a chill where it had been. “We gotta seal it up, Saad.”

  His heart dropped down to his knees, threatened to fall out and slip through the cracks in the sidewalk. “But—”

  “We gotta. I’m sorry.”

  Asad told himself he wouldn’t cry again, but that wetness was in his nose, making it hard to breathe. “Can I…can I have one more look?”

  “Sure.”

  “Alone.”

  Tarif gave him a long, thoughtful look. “Don’t do anything stupid, baby brother.”

  “I won’t,” he promised.

  But when Tarif disappeared around the corner, giving him one last moment, one last look, one last chance when the odds were nil of this crack ever opening at this right place, at this right time…

  Asad pressed his palm to the bus kiosk over Avondre’s cheek, and imagined he could soak in the radiant warmth of his skin.

  12

  Another night. Another walk around the block. Another long evening in class, and when he sketched Avondre’s face in the margins of his notebook, he tried to capture the shape of his lips with every precise scratch of the pencil’s tip.

  And when Tarif ran off to be with Shawna again, Asad managed to smile for his brother while Asad walked their blocks alone.

  Yet he wasn’t alone, tonight. Tonight, new shadows drifted out from once-empty apartment buildings, and turned their faces up to the moon. They haunted the streets like ghosts, people Asad didn’t know but recognized like family. The nightkin knew each other, and this moment, this ritual of moonlight and the whispering black, was communion, rooting them into the earth of a new place, a new city.

  Asad wondered what city had gone dark now, and left these drifters washed up ashore.

  At the corner of Blue Hill, he sank down on the bus bench and watched the dark ones stroll past, taking in their new streets with their new eyes, now and then nodding to him in passing with something too close to deference for his comfort, even if this was his post and his place and that honor was rightfully his.

  He still didn’t know how to feel. And he was relieved to recognize, among the drifters, a familiar shuffling gait: Miss Marsha Roberts, with her big gray church curls and little pillbox hat and an old housecoat that was half dress, half disco-era upholstery. She was made of the same stuff as Gam; every family had one, bowed and stoop-shouldered matriarchs who smelled of sweet pecan pralines but turned into steel when you tried to make their sugared edges crumble.

  She had her cane, with its four-pronged rubberized tip, and she limped and leaned and rolled toward him until he stood and took her elbow and eased her to a seat.

  “Miss Marsha,” he murmured.

  She hooted and sighed and grinned; her two front teeth were missing, and her words whistled through the gap. “See you mindin’ your manners and staying on your side now, eh?”

  He bowed his head. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be apologizing for doing what’s necessary.” She sat with her knees spread wide, her tan diabetic socks rolled at the top. Her freckled brown face shone in the moonlight as she watched the streets. “Crowded out here tonight.”

  “Who are they?”

  “New folk. Refugees. More’f ’em coming up now.” She leaned back against the kiosk. “Hear Tuscaloosa gone dark. All dark.”

  Asad sat down next to her. She had that warmth like Gam, too, thin skin made of burning paper. “What happened?”

  “People got scared. Left
. Not enough to hold it together, so the cracks stayed open.” She clapped her hands on her knees. “Saw it happen once myself in Biloxi, back where your Gam came from. They’d run people like you and me out, after dark. Call ’em sundown towns. No negroes allowed in the city limits.” Her laugh was a cough both merry and cynical, a knowing thing rattling in her throat like tin cans. “Learned the foolishness in that real fast, after a few of them pretty white women they so hot to protect fell through into the dark places. Suddenly we all that stands between them and the dark. Suddenly they got time for us. They call us welfare queens and lazy gov’ment freeloaders, but they quick to pay that due when the world turn strange and they get scared.”

  Why? Asad wondered. Why did it fall on us to clean up a mess they made?

  Why we gotta fix they trouble?

  But all he asked was, “Why us?” Then, “Why we the only ones who see it?”

  “It ain’t all of us. Not by a long shot.” She turned her strange-colored eyes on him. Cataracts had turned them odd and rough and milky, brown clouded through with blue. “It’s those of us who still got hope left. Who still got something good in us. That something good can feel what’s right, feel what’s on the other side. Like it’s reaching for it.”

  “You think I still got hope in me?”

  Miss Marsha smiled, and poked him with her bony elbow. “Boy,” she said, “you too young not to.”

  13

  He couldn’t help himself. He came back to the bus stop, night after night, searching. Waiting for that prickle that should be warning, but to him only meant a breathless promise, something to hold on to, something to long for.

  He wanted to cross the street, to step onto Roberts land, but Tarif caught his hand and held him back and shook his head.

  “They got pains too, you know,” Tarif said. “They got pains and hardships and losses. It ain’t a perfect life. No such thing as a perfect life.”

  “Maybe not,” Asad answered, and turned away from the building with its painted-on pictures of something sweeter, something brighter. “But they got different rules.”

  “Rules still rules.”

  “Yeah, but you ever wonder what it’s like when the rules actually fair?”

  “I try not to,” Tarif murmured, and pulled Asad away. “Wondering that makes it hard to live with the rules we got.”

  “Maybe we shouldn’t,” Asad said, staring up at his brother, pleading. “Maybe we shouldn’t live with the rules we got, Rifi.”

  But his brother said nothing at all.

  14

  School was more crowded, now, mostly in the younger classes. Spent less time learning, more time talking about zoning, figuring out what to do with the new ones, how to train the babies. Some talked of sending them dayside. Giving them a different life, letting them leave the darkling world.

  Nobody said a thing about giving Boston’s first ones some relief, letting them walk away.

  “What’s ours is ours,” Gam said. “And ours it’ll stay.”

  What was his felt like his alone, tonight, as Asad kicked his soles against the sidewalk until they made rasping sounds to fill the silence of the night. Tarif was gone again, sneaking off with Shawna, and Asad thought Gam might know but that boy was damn fool in love, and nobody was gonna steal his joy. If Gam didn’t trust Asad to do things alone, she’d have said something. But she let him go, let him handle things.

  It was something, that he had Gam’s trust.

  But still he lingered on the corner of Blue Hill and Callender, looking at the building where a hole had opened in the world and shown him what might have, could have, should have been.

  No sign of Miss Marsha, or her dumbfool son.

  Asad looked to the left and then the right, saw no one, and crossed the street to climb those outside stairs, grip the edge of the roof, and hoist himself up.

  He watched moonset from the rooftop, sitting on the edge and counting the stars as they winked out. Somewhere, in another universe, those same stars were winking out for the other Asad, and maybe Avondre was tucked in next to him, their limbs tangled up all smooth and brown and their sleeping breaths mingled. It wasn’t his…but it was someone’s, and he liked the slow way his blood moved when he thought about that world, that life, that belonged to someone who had his face.

  Footfalls rattled on the stairs below, and he sighed. Tarif had found him. He closed his eyes, held that little bit of sparking rebellion against his chest, and waited for the scolding.

  Those steps scuffed up behind him, then fell still. No scolding. Just quiet. He waited, and then a low, drawling voice spoke, gravel at the edges, molasses crumbled into sugar when it dried.

  “Almost sunup,” someone said. Not Tarif. “Should be heading in, yeah? Or they do things different up here?”

  Asad snapped his eyes open, staring across the Boston skyline. He’d only heard that voice in murmurs and in dreams. Couldn’t be. Couldn’t damned well be. He tried to talk but his words were sticks in his throat, and he barely rasped out, “Depends where down there is.”

  “Tuscaloosa,” the other boy said. “And in Tuscaloosa, we go in before the sun comes up.”

  “Why, though?” Something fierce burned in Asad’s chest, something ignited by that voice, and he was so fucking scared to look but he wanted to, needed to, but he held himself back because he couldn’t stand to lose his hope, his fire. “Just because they afraid of the night, why we gotta hide from the sun? That ain’t in the rulebook. Never was. I wanna watch the sun rise, and I’m gonna.”

  “Reckon as I’ll watch it with you, then.”

  The other boy sat down next to Asad, body heat and, in his peripheral vision, long thin legs in battered jeans covered with Magic Marker designs. Asad risked a glance, and that burn in his chest burst into a supernova.

  High cheekbones. Long, twisting braids. Angular fingers, a strong jaw, broad shoulders and dark eyes and maybe he was a little thinner on this side, maybe a little more raw about the edges, maybe a jagged thin pink scar cut from the corner of his eye down to his neck, and maybe his skin didn’t shine with gold dust, but luminous bronze glowed underneath rich brown nonetheless.

  And maybe he wasn’t the one Asad had seen, but he was just the right one for this place, this now, this quiet and aching need.

  “Hi,” the other boy said, his thoughtful, heavy-lidded eyes scrunching at the corners with his smile. “I’m—”

  “Avondre,” Asad breathed. “Von. I know.”

  Avondre blinked, cocking his head. “How you know my name?”

  “I just do.” And Asad smiled: a silly smile, a goofy smile, a smile so big it could seal every crack in the world and every crack in his heart. “Think I saw you at school. Wanna go for a burger after sunup?”

  “Sure,” Avondre said, and smiled back—so shy, so wonderful, all brightness and softness. “Sure. I’d really like that. But I’d like it even more if you told me your name.”

  “Can’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  Asad grinned wider. “Because I’m a superhero, and we never tell anyone our real names.”

  “I’ll find out.” Avondre laughed, eyes glittering slyly. “If you’re a superhero, I’m gonna be Lois Lane.”

  Asad leaned closer. He didn’t know what he was doing, but he did, and every day should be like this, every night, with a smile on his lips and a wondering, a wishing, a hoping what if. “Lois was in love with Superman,” he mock-whispered, and Avondre smirked.

  “Don’t get too big with yourself.”

  Asad laughed. “Asad.” He offered his hand. “Saad. My family calls me Saad.”

  Avondre slipped his hand into Asad’s. Squeezed, his palm dry and hot and smooth. A prickle sparked through Asad, a prickle like the sensation of a rift opening close by, yet it was within him. A crack opening inside him, spilling out all the awful, all the pain, until he was Pandora’s box with nothing left inside but the pure bright fire of hope.

  Gam had warned him agains
t wanting, against the sin of covetousness, of greed.

  But she hadn’t said a damned thing about hope.

  “Nice to meet you, Saad,” Avondre said.

  “Yeah,” Asad replied, and didn’t let go of Avondre’s hand. “Yeah, it really is.”

  THE FUTURE OF HUNGER IN THE AGE OF PROGRAMMABLE MATTER

  SAM J. MILLER

  Vashti’s polymer was purple-flecked, fist-sized at normal density, and we all watched dutifully while she tapped at her phone and cycled through the rather stale parlor tricks of turning the lump of soft pseudo-styrene into a tiny dinosaur, a sword, a little stripper who shrank to the size of a quarter and then ballooned to Labrador-Retriever proportions. The roast was taking too long and Trevor was in the living room being charming instead of mixing up the salad dressing—and why did I have to have such a charming boyfriend?— and the doorbell was ringing and no one was answering it and I huffed my way to the door and forced a smile onto my face as I wrenched it open.

  As soon as I saw him, I knew I was doomed.

  “Hi,” he said, “I’m Aarav.”

  “Vashti’s brother,” I said, seeing his bear-beard and wolf-smile and feeling my stomach plummet, “of course.”

  His hand was hot in mine.

  I’d been doing so well. I’d fought temptation at every turn. I’d never cheated on Trevor, not once, never mind how every stroll down a Chelsea block flashed a couple dozen lean-and-hungry golden-boy-or-silver-fox grins at me, and surely just once wouldn’t hurt—except that I knew, from the still-raw psychic wounds of my momentarily-vanquished crystal meth addiction, that once was all it took to bring your life crashing down into the gutter. Not because one snort would wake you up covered in blood at Central Booking or Lincoln Hospital, but precisely because it would not, because you’d get away with it, and remember how magnificent it was, and forget every awful consequence, and keep doing it, until you’d lost everything.

  And now Once had walked into my living room, his ass perfect and his eyes alive with the knowledge of what a weak creature I was. And I was doomed.