Nebula Awards Showcase 2016

by Mercedes Lackey

  “Yeah.”

  “That must be scary.”

  I grunted.

  “They say most guys leaving foster care end up on the street.”

  “Most.”

  The street, the words like knives driven under all my toenails at once. The stories I had heard. Men frozen to death under expressways, men set on fire by frat boys, men raped to death by cops.

  “You got a plan?”

  “No plan.”

  “Well, stick with me, kid,” Case said, in fluent fake movie gangster. “I got a plan big enough for both of us. Do you smoke?” he asked, flicking out two. I didn’t, but I took the cigarette. His fingers touched mine. I wanted to say It isn’t allowed in here, but Case’s smile was a higher law.

  “Where’s a decent port shop around here? I heard the Bronx ones were all unhygienic as hell.”

  “Riverdale,” I said. “That’s the one I go to. Nice office. No one waiting outside to jump you.”

  “I need to establish a new primary,” he said. “We’ll go tomorrow.” He smiled so I could see it wasn’t a command so much as a decision he was making for both of us.

  My mother sat on the downtown platform at Burnside, looking across the elevated tracks to a line of windows, trying to see something she wasn’t supposed to see. She was so into her voyeurism that she didn’t notice me standing right beside her, uncomfortably close even though the platform was bare. She didn’t look up until I said mother in Spanish, maybe a little too loud.

  “Oh my god,” she said, fanning herself with a damp New York Post. ”Here I am getting here late, fifteen minutes, thinking oh my god he’s gonna kill me, and come to find out that you’re even later than me!”

  “Hi,” I said, squatting to kiss her forehead.

  “Let it never be said that you got that from me. I’m late all the time, but I tried to raise you better.”

  “How so?”

  “You know. To not make all the mistakes I did.”

  “Yeah, but how so? What did you do, to raise me better?”

  “It’s stupid hot out,” she said. “They got air conditioning in that home?”

  “In the office. Where we’re not allowed.”

  We meet up once a month, even though she’s not approved for unsupervised visits. I won’t visit her at home because her man is always there, always drunk, always able, in the course of an hour, to remind me how miserable and stupid I am. How horrible my life will become, just as soon as I age out. How my options are the streets or jail or overclocking; what they’ll do to me in each of those places. So now we meet up on the subway, and ride to Brooklyn Bridge and then back to Burnside.

  Arm flab jiggled as she fanned herself. Mom is happy in her fat. Heroin kept her skinny; crack gave her lots of exercise. For her, obesity is a brightly colored sign that says NOT ADDICTED ANYMORE. Her man keeps her fed; this is what makes someone a Good Man. Brakes screamed as a downtown train pulled into the station.

  “Oooh, stop, wait,” she said, grabbing at my pantleg with one puffy hand. “Let’s catch the next one. I wanna finish my cigarette.”

  I got on the train. She came, too, finally, hustling, flustered, barely making it.

  “What’s gotten into you today?” she said, when she wrestled her pocketbook free from the doors. “You upset about something? You’re never this,” and she snapped her fingers in the air while she looked for the word assertive. I had it in my head. I would not give it to her. Finally she just waved her hand and sat down. “Oh, that air conditioning feels good.”

  “José? How’s he?”

  “Fine, fine,” she said, still fanning from force of habit. Fifty-degree air pumped directly down on us from the ceiling ducts.

  “And you?”

  “Fine.”

  “Mom—I wanted to ask you something.”

  “Anything, my love,” she said, fanning faster.

  “You said one time that all the bad decisions you made—none of it would have happened if you could just keep yourself from falling in love.”

  When I’m with my mom my words never come out wrong. I think it’s because I kind of hate her.

  “I said that?”

  “You did.”

  “Weird.”

  “What did you mean?”

  “Christ, honey, I don’t know.” The Post slowed, stopped, settled into her lap. “It’s stupid, but there’s nothing I won’t do for a man I love. A woman who’s looking for a man to plug a hole she’s got inside? She’s in trouble.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  Below us, the Bronx scrolled by. Sights I’d been seeing all my life. The same sooty sides of buildings; the same cop cars on every block looking for boys like me. I thought of Case, then, and clean sharp joy pushed out all my fear. My eyes shut, from the pleasure of remembering him, and saw a glorious rush of ported imagery. Movie stills; fashion spreads; unspeakable obscenity. Not blurry this time; requiring no extra effort. I wondered what was different. I knew my mouth was open in an idiot grin, somewhere in a southbound subway car, but I didn’t care, and I stood knee-deep in a river of images until the elevated train went underground after 161st Street.

  WE ARE THE CLOUD, said the sign on the door, atop a sea of multicolored dots with stylized wireless signals bouncing between them.

  Walking in with Case, I saw that maybe I had oversold the place by saying it was “nice.” Nicer than the ones by Lincoln Hospital, maybe, where people come covered in blood and puke, having left against medical advice after spasming out in a public housing stairwell. But still. It wasn’t actually nice.

  Older people nodded off on benches, smelling of shit and hunger. Gross as it was, I liked those offices. All those ports started a pleasant buzzing in my head. Like we added up to something.

  “Look at that guy,” Case said, sitting down on the bench beside me. He pointed to a man whose head was tilted back, gurgling up a steady stream of phlegm that had soaked his shirt and was dripping onto the floor.

  “Overclocked,” I said, and stopped. His shoulder felt good against my bicep. “Some people. Sell more than they should. Of their brain.”

  Sell enough of it, and they’d put you up in one of their Node Care Facilities, grim nursing homes for thirty-something vegetables and doddering senior citizens in their twenties, but once you were in you were never coming out, because people ported that hard could barely walk a block or speak a sentence, let alone obtain and hold meaningful employment.

  And if I didn’t want to end up on the street, that was my only real option. I’d been to job interviews. Some I walked into on my own; some the system set up for me. Nothing was out there for anyone, let alone a frowning, stammering tower of man who more than one authority figure had referred to as a “fucking imbecile.”

  “What about him?” Case asked, pointing to another guy whose hands and legs twitched too rhythmically and regularly for it to be a dream.

  “Clouddiving,” I said.

  He laughed. “I thought only retards could do that.”

  “That’s,” I said. “Not.”

  “Okay,” he said, when he saw I wouldn’t be saying anything else on the subject.

  I wanted very badly to cry. Only retards. A part of me had thought maybe I could share it with Case, tell him what I could do. But of course I couldn’t. I fast-blinked, each brief shutting of my eyes showing a flurry of cloud-snatched photographs.

  Ten minutes later I caught him smiling at me, maybe realizing he had said something wrong. I wanted so badly for Case to see inside my head. What I was. How I wasn’t an imbecile, or a retard.

  Our eyes locked. I leaned forward. Hungry for him to see me, the way no one else ever had. I wanted to tell him what I could do. How I could access data. How sometimes I thought I could maybe control data. How I dreamed of using it to burn everything down. But I wasn’t strong enough to think those things, let alone say them. Some secrets you can’t share, no matter how badly you want to.

  I went back alone. Case had somewhere to
be. It hurt, realizing he had things in his life I knew nothing about. I climbed the steps and a voice called from the front-porch darkness.

  “Awful late,” Guerra said. The stubby man who ran the place: Most of his body weight was gristle and mustache. He stole our stuff and ate our food and took bribes from dealer residents to get rivals logged out. In the dark I knew he couldn’t even see who I was.

  “Nine,” I said. “It’s not. O’clock.”

  He sucked the last of his Coke through a straw, in the noisiest manner imaginable. “Whatever.”

  Salvation Army landscapes clotted the walls. Distant mountains and daybreak forests, smelling like cigarette smoke, carpet cleaner, thruway exhaust. There was a sadness to the place I hadn’t noticed before, not even when I was hating it. In the living room, a boy knelt before the television. Another slept on the couch. In the poor light, I couldn’t tell if one of them was the one who had hurt Case.

  There were so many of us in the system. We could add up to an army. Why did we all hate and fear each other so much? Friendships formed from time to time, but they were weird and tinged with what-can-I-get-from-you, liable to shatter at any moment as allegiances shifted or kids got transferred. If all the violence we visited on ourselves could be turned outwards, maybe we could—

  But only danger was in that direction. I thought of my mom’s man, crippled in a prison riot, living fat off the settlement, saying, drunk, once, Only thing the Man fears more than one of us is a lot of us.

  I went back to my room, and got down on the floor, under the window. And shut my eyes. And dove.

  Into spreadsheets and songs and grainy CCTV feeds and old films and pages scanned from books that no longer existed anywhere in the world. Whatever the telecom happens to be porting through you at that precise moment.

  Only damaged people can dive. Something to do with how the brain processes speech. Every time I did it, I was terrified. Convinced they’d see me, and come for me. But that night I wanted something badly enough to balance out the being afraid.

  Eyes shut, I let myself melt into data. Shuffled faster and faster, pulled back far enough to see Manhattan looming huge and epic with mountains of data at Wall Street and Midtown. Saw the Bronx, a flat spread of tiny data heaps here and there. I held my breath, seeing it, feeling certain no one had ever seen it like this before, money and megabytes in massive spiraling loops, unspeakably gorgeous and fragile. I could see how much money would be lost if the flow was broken for even a single second, and I could see where all the fault lines lay. But I wasn’t looking for that. I was looking for Case.

  And then: Case came knocking. Like I had summoned him up from the datastream. Like what I wanted actually mattered outside of my head.

  “Hey there, mister,” he said, when I opened my door.

  I took a few steps backwards.

  He shut the door and sat down on my bed. “You’ve got a Game Boy, right? I saw the headphones.” I didn’t respond, and he said, “Damn, dude, I’m not trying to steal your stuff, okay? I have one of my own. Wondered if you wanted to play together.” Case flashed his, bright red to my blue one.

  “The thing,” I said. “I don’t have. The cable.”

  He patted his pants pocket. “That’s okay, I do.”

  We sat on the bed, shoulders touching, backs against the wall, and played Mega Man 2. Evil robots came at us by the dozen to die.

  I touched the cord with one finger. Such a primitive thing, to need a physical connection. Case smelled like soap, but not the Ivory they give you in the system. Like cream, I thought, but that wasn’t right. To really describe it I’d need a whole new world of words no one ever taught me.

  “That T-shirt looks good on you,” he said. “Makes you look like a gym boy.”

  “I’m not. It’s just . . . what there was. What was there. In the donation bin. Once Guerra picked out all the good stuff. Hard to find clothes that fit when you’re six six.”

  “It does fit, though.”

  Midway through Skull Man’s level, Case said: “You talk funny sometimes. What’s up with that?” and I was shocked to see no anger surge through me.

  “It’s a thing. A speech thing. What you call it when people have trouble talking.”

  “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 towards 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.