by K. L. Denman
“What the hell! Why?”
“I sucked.”
Dad leans forward and squints at me. Finally, he says, “Kit, I’ve watched those boys play for years, and I know darn well you’re one of the best.”
“Not anymore.”
“Is there something you’re not telling me?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean maybe they’ve got some rules about academic standing? Your grades were sliding on your last report card. If they aren’t acceptable, you can’t play?”
“My grades are fine.” That’s probably a lie, but by the time the next report card comes out, I won’t be around to worry about it.
And then his face goes white. He stares at me, all weird, and says, “You’re doing drugs, aren’t you?”
“What?”
“That would account for everything. Sweet Jesus, Kit. How could you? You know better.”
“Yeah. I do know better. I’m not doing drugs, Dad. You think I’m stupid? Jeez, maybe I should do them if that’s what you think.”
He keeps his eyes glued to mine, and then slowly, gradually, he eases back. He passes a hand over his face, and when it’s gone, he looks older, tired. “I don’t know,” he mutters. “Doesn’t seem like you’re lying, but none of this makes sense to me, Kit.”
I look away from him.
“Come on, Kit. Talk to me. What’s going on?”
I can’t look at him. I spoon a mouthful of soup into my mouth and it tastes terrible, like it was made with sweaty socks. “This is gross.” I lean back on my pillows and close my eyes.
He’s quiet for a few minutes. Then he sighs and says, “Sorry. Guess I shouldn’t come down on you when you’re under the weather. But I think I’ll have a talk with your coach.”
I keep my eyes shut and mutter, “Whatever.” The coach probably had the same idea, but I deleted the messages he left on the phone.
“Damn it, Kit. I’m worried about you.”
“Don’t be.”
“Can’t help it. You’ll understand when you’re a father someday.”
I open my eyes and say, “I won’t be…” I stop.
Dad smiles. “No, not for a long while, you won’t. At least, I hope not.” He gets quiet again, then says, “Hey, you know what? There’s a documentary on TV tonight about a tomb they just discovered in Egypt, in the Valley of the Kings. Sounds like a good one, eh? We should watch it.”
Dad and his documentaries. They’re his favorite thing on TV. He got me hooked on them years ago, and we used to watch a few every week. History, science, nature, we watched them all. Seems like we haven’t done that lately. “Sure,” I say. “I mean, if I’m feeling all right by then, I’ll come down.”
“Good stuff.”
After he leaves, I finish most of the soup, then nod off into a half sleep. Later, I hear Dad come in again, telling me it’s time for the show. I keep my eyes closed, my breathing even. He steps into my room, moves to my desk, and I hear the shuffle of papers. What is he doing? He’s snooping around like a sneak thief. How dare he go nosing through my things! My muscles clench, and I’m about to launch from the bed, confront him, tell him to get the hell out, when he sighs and steps toward my bed. He pauses, and I swear I can feel his eyes gazing down at me. I’m going to explode any second now—boom, splat— but somehow I remain still.
“Kit?” he murmurs.
I don’t react. He sighs again, picks up the soup bowl and moves to the door. He switches off the light, and a moment later the door closes softly behind him. I heave my own sigh, and my tight muscles go limp. I feel weak. Maybe I really am sick. Funny how pretending something can make it feel real.
Or maybe I’m just in really bad shape. Playing basketball used to keep me fit. It was there, on the court last year, that I first saw Melissa. She was new in town, and she’d joined the cheerleading squad. It was the craziest thing, because she zeroed in on me, out of all the guys on the team. I could feel her gaze following me, and every time I glanced in her direction, our eyes met.
I’d look away fast, stay cool, keep my head in the game. At least, that’s what I told myself. I told myself I was imagining it; she wasn’t after me, she couldn’t be, not this girl. She seemed so different from the others. It didn’t feel like she was just trying to get me to notice her because I was a basketball star, a status symbol. That’s how it was for some of the guys and their girlfriends; they went around posing, showing off to everyone what perfect couples they made.
But with Melissa, when our eyes met, it felt like she saw the real me, saw right inside me and liked what she found, wanted to know more. I couldn’t stop looking for her, and sure enough, those dark eyes would be waiting, and her smile made me want to see inside her too.
This went on for a while, and then some of the other guys started to notice it too. “Whoo, Kit, that new girl is hot for you.” Or “Hey, check it out. Kit has a groupie.” And “So, what are you going to do, Kit? Come on, she’s yours for the asking. Easy. What’re you waiting for? She’s got a nice set of…”
“Shut up, will you?” I hated them talking about her like that. She seemed so authentic, not someone the guys should be allowed to trash-talk in the locker room. Some of them did that plenty and I never liked it, but when they started on her, I wanted to stuff the basketball down their throats.
I went out of the locker room that day, still feeling the heat of the game in my muscles and the heat of anger toward those guys, and there she was, hanging out with a couple of other girls. I started walking past, and she said, “Hey. You’re Kit, aren’t you?”
I stood there and she said some other things, but I have no idea what because I just drank her in, and pretty soon we were walking along, just the two of us.
It was getting dark, and we looked up and saw the moon rising, a crescent moon, and I said, “Do you ever look at it and think about how astronauts went up there and planted flags?”
She laughed and shook her head, and I felt like an idiot, but then she took hold of my hand, and hers felt so small and warm. That was it. I was hers.
SEVEN
They are the size of bacteria, invisible to the naked eye. They number in the thousands: tiny, perfectly engineered, mindless. When released in the bloodstream, the nano-bots circulate freely, each propelled like a jet by capacitors generating magnetic fields that pull conductive fluids through one end of an electromagnetic pump and shoot it out the other end. They carry weapons, not of mass destruction, but of minute destruction.
Some have probes. Others are armed with minuscule knives and chisels capable of hacking away at bits of matter the size of nanometers. One nanometer is equal to one billionth of a meter, almost nothing. But just as the sea can grind rock to dust, one particle at a time, the power of the nano-bots is not in their numbers but in their persistence.
There are other weapons. Electrodes, in pairs, can generate a current. Tiny lasers can burn away material. Cavities within the robots can carry chemicals. How much? Almost nothing.
“Almost” is of the utmost importance. Much like the difference between dead and almost dead.
The nano army is awash in black ink. The ink is composed of magnetite crystals, powdered jet, wustite, bone black, and amorphous carbon from combustion (soot). Now the army is immersed in a chemical mixture of water, amino acids, proteins, carbohydrates, lipids, hormones, vitamins, electrolytes, dissolved gases (oxygen, carbon dioxide and nitrogen) and cellular wastes. In other words, blood.
The army is entirely aimless. It must await the direction of a powerful magnet, one that, when wielded, will attract the unquestioning to follow. The army is not really invisible; if one were to examine the country it has invaded with an mri machine, its presence could be detected. If one wished to withdraw the troops, they could be retrieved via a magnetic homing device, positioned at one of several portals: the throat, for example.
I rise out of sleep in spastic leaps. My mind grasps at the shards of the craziest, scariest, most amazin
g dream of my life. Such incredible detail! At the same time, my mind wants out of there, to be free of the nightmare, to waken and shed the clinging bits swimming with me into consciousness.
My eyes snap open and roam the familiar comfort of my bedroom, and I groan with relief. But I need to remember. It was important, I know; almost as if my dreaming mind was superintelligent and playing a special documentary, just for me. I sit up and every movement of my body, every ordinary object my brain registers, is a step away from remembering.
Then Mom comes in. “How are you today, Kit? Feeling better?”
I gaze at her, struggling to understand why she’s asking this question. Does she know about my dream?
“Kit? Are you still sick?” She strides toward me, and there’s that hand on the brow again. “Hmmm. You feel a touch warm, but I wouldn’t say you have a fever.”
Right. I’m sick. I was throwing up yesterday, wasn’t I? And there’s something else, something to do with blood.
“Maybe I should get the thermometer and we’ll take your temperature.”
I shake my head. “No.” She is not sticking anything down my throat. No way.
Mom raises her eyebrows. “So you’re better? You’re going to school?”
“No.”
“Kit…” She frowns. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Like you…hate me.”
I stare at her.
She takes a deep breath. “Sorry. I didn’t mean that. Hate is a terrible word. It’s just that you look so angry. All I suggested was taking your temperature. That’s not a crime, is it?”
“Mom. Forget it. You’re making a big deal out of nothing.”
“Am I? I wonder if I should make an appointment for you with the doctor. You just don’t seem like yourself these days, Kit.”
“I’m fine, okay? Jeez. It’s just a freakin’ stomach bug.” A stomach bug. A fragment of my dream surfaces, and I concentrate, trying to catch it.
“Just the same, it wouldn’t hurt to see the doctor.”
The fragment shatters beyond recognition. “I’m not going to the doctor.”
She folds her arms across her chest. “So you’re going to school?”
“Mom. I’m not feeling good, okay? Not good enough to go to school. But that doesn’t mean I’m sick enough to go to the doctor. Since when should people go to the doctor for every little thing? Isn’t that what you always say?”
She opens her mouth like she’s going to say something but snaps it shut again. She glances at her watch and then back at me. “Fine. If I don’t get moving now I’m going to be late, but this discussion isn’t over. We’ll talk more later.”
I shrug. “Whatever.”
“Kit!” Her voice has that warning note, the one she always uses when she’s close to launching into a marathon tirade.
“Okay, okay. Later.”
By the time she’s gone and the house is quiet, I’ve completely lost my dream. I throw my sheets in the wash, eat toast with peanut butter and jam, and finally remember what started all this. My tattoo. I check it in the mirror and it’s a mess of ink and raw, oozing scabs. I really screwed up the word Ötzi. It looks more like Clzi now. Crap. I wonder how much it’ll cost to get it fixed, but there’s no way I’m going back to any tattoo parlor. No damn way. I should never have gone there in the first place, and going again would be sheer suicide.
Suicide. What a joke. Isn’t that what I’m doing? Or is it? Why do people kill themselves anyway? I guess they can’t stand living anymore, but that’s not what it’s about for me. I’m doing it for posterity. More like a martyr. A hero even.
I won’t tell Ike that I think this whole deal is heroic because I know he’ll laugh, but it makes me feel good to see it in this light. Doesn’t this mission require courage? Isn’t it about self-sacrifice for the greater good of humanity?
It’s time I got back to work on my manifesto, but I’m stumped. How do I explain life as I know it? When the manifesto was just in my head it seemed so clear, but now it seems vast and chaotic. Maybe I need categories. But what categories? School is broken down into separate subjects. Should I use those? English, math, science, geography, history… that seems so lame.
Wait a minute. It’s obvious. Education is a category. What else? Work. And the basic stuff it takes to live, like food and shelter. Those are categories too. I pull up the document on my computer and start writing.
Category One: Language
I am worried that you won’t be able to read this. Even though plenty of people speak English today, it’s a language that keeps changing. Also, it’s the language that started out in England and was originally spoken by mostly Caucasian (white) people, but maybe there won’t be any more Caucasians left in another thousand years or so. We’re not breeding as much as other races, and there are lots of inter-racial marriages, fine by me, maybe there won’t be any separate races at all. This is a good thing because it will likely stop people from having stupid problems about something as superficial as skin color.
Human sexuality seems foggy now, with gay and bi people it’s like the edges are blurred. Plus there are advances in science with stuff like cloning and test tube babies etc., so maybe there won’t be such a thing as male and female anymore since who will need that for reproduction? This is relevant to language because………….in English, people are divided into male and female by the language. We don’t have a word for someone in between him or her. It’s one or the other. Turkish and Tagalog don’t have this problem. I’ll bet English will get that way too.
Maybe it’s not going to be a problem for you after all because I’m not going to talk about that anyway. For the record, I know a little French because we have to take that in school, but I don’t know enough of any other language besides English. I could make up a language like J.R.R. Tolkien did (his books were mega-best-sellers). He made up Elvish. Elves are a different race, sort of like humans with pointy ears (like Mr. Spock), but they’ve all gone to the far green country. I don’t know where that is. It could be Ireland? Or the planet Vulcan. They went by beautiful boats, and I did think of making one like that.
Category Two: Education
I have been partially educated by our public school system. I’ve learned about reading, writing, Math, science, computers, history, and geography. A lot of this is useful, and there are plenty of places where kids don’t get a proper education. In some places, little kids have to work or even join armies, and some girls don’t go to school. Just because they’re girls. Very weird.
I guess education is okay, but there are many things they don’t teach us. We don’t learn how to grow food in case the whole system collapses due to conspiracies (there are many conspiracies) or anything about what’s really going on in the world. I think they try to distract us by forcing us to memorize useless facts and maps. Regarding Maps, there is one called the Piri Reis map which was made in Constantinople in AD 1513. It shows the coast line of Antarctica very accurately— without ice. Everyone knows ice has covered that coast for thousands of years, so how did that cartographer know what the coast line looked like? It was only in 1949 that a seismic survey could see through the ICE and figure out where the land hidden underneath lies. Piri Reis says he used older maps to make his, but then, who made the older maps? Someone from maybe 6,000 years before, when the ice wasn’t there, right? And who was that?
It was the civilization from long ago and they just ignore it in school because for some reason they don’t want us to know that an advanced civilization was here before and it mostly got wiped out. How? Who knows some people think it was a massive flood, like the one in the bible. In some ways I’m sorry that I won’t be getting further education there are a lot of things I’d like to learn more about. However, knowledge is irrelevant when you’re dead.
Yeah. A lot of things are irrelevant when you’re dead, but I’m not dead yet and I’m hungry. I head down to the kitchen and start po
king around in the cupboards. There’s some funny stuff. A can of corn that says Fresh from the Fields. Gimme a break. There’s a jar of dill pickles too, cucumbers preserved in salt water and vinegar. I look at them for a while. They still sort of look like cucumbers. Only now they’re pickles. I don’t want to eat them. Maybe a sandwich? I’m trying to decide if I want a grilled-cheese sandwich or KD when Ike shows up.
“How did you know I was here?” I ask.
“I checked at your school and since you weren’t there, it wasn’t too hard to figure out the alternative. What are you doing?”
“Having lunch. Want some?”
“Sure. What are you making?”
“Grilled cheese.”
“Sounds good. Then we should get going.”
I look up from the bread I’m buttering. “Get going?”
Ike says, “Yup. We’re running out of time.”
EIGHT
“How can we be running out of time?” I ask Ike.
He says, “Time is speeding up. You’re dragging your sorry ass, and we’ve got to pick up the pace. Have you got the artifacts?”
I shake my head. “No, man. I’ve hardly got any. And I’m not done with the music collection or my manifesto…”
“Excuses. I should have known. You’re not going through with it, are you? Man, you make me sick.”
I feel like crying. I can’t cry in front of Ike, no way. But it’s too much. All I’ve been doing is trying to get ready, and now this? I don’t answer him. I get the cheese and keep making the sandwiches.
“So you are giving up, aren’t you?” he asks.
“Go to hell.”
“Yeah,” he laughs, “I just might. More interesting than hanging around here with a guy who breaks his word. Hey, since you’re a liar, I’ll probably meet you there, huh?”
“I didn’t say I was giving up. I just said I’m not ready.”
He sighs heavily. “Okay. So what do you still need? You’ve got the vodka, the clothes, the computer, the tattoo. It won’t take more than a couple hours to do your stupid manifesto, will it? And then finish getting the music and voilà. Done.”