by Russell Moon
What the hell was he doing, driving out on the bridge during his own party? Did he go nuts too? Was it the beers? Was it something about the beers he was drinking and feeding me? I’d like to ask him. I’d like to talk to him. I’d like him to be alive.
Somebody is talking. I make like I need to restrain Chuck, and crouch down behind the cop who’s taking details from Murphy, Doone’s buddy. Chuck gives me an annoyed look, but I grip him harder.
“He might have…I guess…but he was fine. He could drive fine, officer. He maybe took a little something, but…he was fine. We were out back, and then she comes running up, from over that way toward the woods. She was pretty upset, kinda babbling and looking all, like, disheveled…so Doone said he’d take her home….”
Oh god. Oh god. What happened? What the hell happened? Where is Jules? She was running…from me? She was in the Hummer? Was she? Maybe he got her home first. Jesus god, he got her home first, didn’t he?
Both Murphy and the cop turn around, spooked, as I topple over into the back of the officer’s legs. I fall, right onto Chuck, onto both of them, as my world blackens again.
“You all right, son?” the police officer asks, lifting me by the elbow. “You okay? You want me to get you some help? I can call one of the—”
“I’m okay,” I say, steadying myself with the help of Chuck, who’s pressing hard against the side of my leg.
“You sure?” he asks, looking hard into my eyes from three inches away. He is probably doing this all over the place, trying to find out which of us are whacked from the party, and which of us might be able to help.
I look away. “I’m fine,” I say, and as I turn I notice what I did not notice before. That here are two boats out farther downriver, with their noses pointed into the lazy current and spotlights trained on the rushing water. Divers bob to the surface and then disappear again.
They are searching for somebody else. They are trying to get her before the river dumps her into the ocean.
I can feel the policeman clutching at my shirt as I pull away, both hands covering my mouth as I dash for a roadside hedge.
“Kid,” he says, then lets me go and do what seems the only thing to do.
Chuck sticks by me as I throw up, over and over again, into the hedges. I am on my hands and knees, and I cannot seem to stop and cannot seem to stop the rush of tears that fall off my face like I am some kind of twisted, demonic garden fountain.
When I finally catch some of my breath, I cough out a flurry of speech that tears at me even more than the vomiting.
“He was rescuing her, Chuck,” I say, words without voice, words shaped by terror breath, by gasps. “He was saving her…from me. What did I do, what did I do, Chuck? Where is she, Chuck?”
Chuck tells me nothing. He sits like a normal dog sits, but he is staring into me like no normal dog could. I have inched up to him, to get as close as I can, and he refuses to either respond or to look away. He turns me back toward myself.
“Is this all me, Chuck? Am I responsible for this somehow?”
The lights of the vehicles are at his back. The natural light of night is in his face. Chuck freezes into a blue-granite dog.
I have to avert my eyes. I look at the ground.
“There’s no sense to it, but I feel responsible. What did I do? What can I do? I can move things, right, big deal. I can move a rock, or a cow, or…”
Christ.
Or a car? If I went, like, completely psychotic, and Jules escaped in a Humvee with a beautiful rich boy…Did I move them? Did I move them? I look up and suddenly, violently, grab both of Chuck’s floppy, velvety ears. “Did Jules get into his truck, and then I threw the two of them off the bridge?”
It appears, for all the worlds, surreal and otherwise, as if Chuck is unaware of my squeezing and pulling at his ears.
I am aware of it, though. I let go and stare at my hands. I am seized with the terror that I don’t half control them anymore.
I grab two fistfuls of my own hair and pull as hard as possible, drawing myself face-first toward the ground. I can feel hairs coming out of my scalp.
An urgent sound tears into the settling sad quiet of the night. A car, up high, peels over the bridge, going about a hundred miles per hour toward the scene. It is Jules’s parents’ car. There is no way…no way can I be here to face them….
Chuck rubs up against me deliberately as he walks past, back the way we came. I follow.
Nothing makes sense. Nothing is what it was. The ugly, rancid joke is on me, and somewhere there’s got to be a blackhearted joker pulling the levers, because this is not me. I wouldn’t hurt Jules. I wouldn’t hurt anybody.
At least I am certain about Chuck. I believe in him, trust him. I need to trust him.
Because I apparently can’t trust me.
I turn left at the intersection, and Chuck proceeds straight across it ahead of me.
What now? To the hospital to see Doone? Back to the water to join the divers and find my Jules and hold her and tell her how sorry I am for whatever it was I did? What, Marcus, What? “Chuck?”
He does not heed me.
“Chuck,” I try again.
He stops briefly, regards me with all seriousness, then proceeds on his way toward home. He keeps on treading his serious path, but occasionally looks back at me over his shoulder, scowling.
“Should I go to the police, Chuck?” I ask as we walk. What would I even know to say? I couldn’t confess if I wanted to, because I don’t know what the hell happened.
The more I go on, the faster Chuck walks. I feel a desperate need to keep up with him, as if losing him means losing contact absolutely. Like if he ran too far ahead, I would get to the house and find there was no house, no Chuck, no Eleanor.
“I’ll stop, Chuck, I swear.” I am wheezing, and my eyes are blurring over again. “Just please wait.”
Chuck slows, then walks at a leisurely pace. We keep it like that, keep it slow and quiet for the rest of the route. Like a couple of nursing-home escapees grown scared and cold, so they come creeping back to the home.
Eleanor is asleep, this time in her bed. The computer is off, and she breathes almost silently, the way she does. There are no ticking clocks, no buzzing electronic anythings, as we have packed just about everything to throw into the back of the pickup tomorrow.
I walk around the house. Hallway, kitchen, hallway, bedroom, hallway, living room, and all over again. Sticks of weathered, crappy furniture haunt the rooms, and boxes dominate the halls.
“Jules,” I whisper.
If I don’t understand anything anymore, then nothing has to make sense. “Jules,” I whisper. If anything is possible now, then anything is possible.
But Jules is not here.
Is Jules anywhere?
I cannot sleep, no way, no how. I walk through the rooms one more time, like a dog doing circles before settling in front of the fire. Then I sit down in front of my last-to-be-packed necessity.
I power up Brainwave, start up Gaul, and commence fighting. The stick, as I grip it, squeeze it, toggle it around, feels substantial, real, right. I am in control. Everything before me does as it is supposed to, does as I say. Go right, go left. Thrust, Warrior. Jump, Messenger. I inch my chair closer. My face is three inches from the screen.
Chuck settles in on the floor next to me, and I lean harder and harder into my game of swords and sticks. I am good. I am great. I wonder if anyone anywhere is as good at this as I am and I think, No, nobody is. Which is only fair, since this is it for me. The only activity I can claim as mine aside from moving things. I cannot dance or run or hit a ball particularly well. I cannot win a debate, give a lecture, sing, or even speak to my peers without difficulty. We are shortchanged, I think, in some places, but compensated in others.
I live in here, in the game, the way I don’t ever fully live out there. I have keys and joystick and thumbpad and rules here. It is probably where I belong. It is probably where I should have been tonight, instead of
trying to be what I was not, do what I could and should not. I am not parties. I am not beer and songs and socializing, and I have known that for always.
And I am not Jules. No, I am Jules, totally, but in my way. I should have left her alone. I should not have been the prince sweeping her up and off to my castle far away. Loving Jules is me, but loving her from a distance.
You shouldn’t mess with things as they should be.
I am cutting off heads now, the way a florist trims stems for the masses on Valentine’s Day. There is more blood than usual. There is loads of blood. Heads are popping off, rolling on the ground, turning to look at me. I cannot stop. I cannot stop chopping. Warrior is not Warrior. He is Marcus Aurelius, and he is rampaging. The game is making sounds it has never made, Marcus’s feet making liquid squelch sounds as he wades through ankle-deep blood, exploding coconut noises as he continues to hack at skulls of people who are already well dead. I remove my hand from the controller, rub my tired eyes, then return to the screen to find Marcus is still at work without me. I move the stick to reverse him, but he doesn’t heed me. He goes on slashing, chopping.
No. No, this is precisely what is not supposed to happen here. Not here. Not in Gaul, not in Brainwave. The controls are supposed to work here, all the time. The controls are supposed to work.
I turn to Chuck, who is well into snorty dog-sleep.
I look back at the game. There is a film of condensation on the screen. Marcus is grimly harvesting everything that moves. I frantically work the controls, but I have no effect. I reach and shut off the power, but again, it is as if I am not there, or as if the players in the game are real, and it is I who am the illusion.
All the victims have familiar faces now, but this does not matter to Warrior/Marcus. He is killing everybody, mutilating everything he touches, until up comes Messenger. He pauses, pauses.
“Jules,” I say, out loud. Messenger is my Jules. She stands, placid, eyes closed and hands folded across her chest. While every other character has been dressed in some sort of Middle Ages warrior garb, Jules is dressed in the same homemade hippie-girl outfit from the party. Only her hair is matted and extra dark, and she’s all over…disheveled.
I, the offscreen, in-the-flesh I, have caught Warrior/Marcus’s notice. He turns to me. He is walking my way, growing larger, larger, with his enormous sword raised. He is getting larger, closer…I pull back from the screen…he is coming through…his face, red and explosive, fills the entire screen. All I can do is wait. I no longer control that Marcus, and for the moment, not this one either. I am paralyzed.
A small cry, a whimper, comes from behind him, from Jules. He starts, mismatched eyes going wide as if he’s being awakened from a trance. He looks at me once more, fails to recognize me, then turns away.
The bastard lets me live. Makes me live.
Jules too turns away from me. They are heading off, into the hills of Gaul, backs turned to me.
I am reaching out with one hand, stretching, yet getting no nearer to her. I am choked, with immovable sadness. I try to call out, but can barely croak, “It’s a dream, Jules. What else could it be?”
“Marcus Aurelius,” Eleanor says, gripping both of my shoulders.
I open my eyes. I have been playing blind all along—if I have been playing at all. I blink my eyes maybe a million times, and still there is a sort of film fogging them, but I can see the screen in front of me. I am shushing down the sheer face of a white mountain, skiing even in my state of unawares. Skiing in perfect, unblemished powder.
And in daylight. It is a new day. Greet the new day, Marcus.
I am still relatively motionless, gradually bringing all my being into play. I am moving only my eyeballs, like a cartoon owl, as Eleanor comes around from behind me and stands a safe few feet to my side, her hands folded in front of her.
“Hi,” I say as if we are meeting for the first time.
“Hi,” she says a little more familiarly. A little. “You get any sleep last night?”
I look around for Chuck, as if I can’t make it through even this conversation without him.
“I put him out already,” she says.
“Oh,” I say, and go back to snowboarding.
“So?” she asks.
“Well, you just saw me, didn’t you? Sleeping, I mean.”
“In front of your screen? You call that sleeping?”
“You do it,” I say.
“That’s different,” she is quick to point out. “What I do is…academic. It’s research, it’s work, it’s our future.”
I look up at her.
She sighs. “Should I make you breakfast?” she asks.
“I don’t think I could eat, Eleanor, really.”
She is being very careful with me, and I am getting scared.
Careful because I am giving off insanity like a musk? Careful because God knows what parts of last night she saw, heard, felt?
How much did she see, hear, feel? What does she know? What is there to know?
Maybe I never even went to any party. Maybe I Brainwaved all night. God, that would be wonderful, if I just Brainwaved. The game is so real…you can believe anything if you go too deep.
“I don’t want to sound like I know everything,” Eleanor says gently, “and in fact I don’t want to know everything. But I know it’s natural to feel the way you’re feeling right now. There’s a lot of stuff going on inside you right now, and you might not know how to react…but just trust me that it’s normal, and that it will pass.”
Normal? Normal?
“And even if you don’t quite feel hungry, it is best that you try to eat a good breakfast. You are probably tired, a bit of a nervous wreck, and we have a long, hard day ahead.”
All I can do is stare, gape-mouthed. I see out of the corner of my eye that my snowboarder is in the middle of an accident that will have him in the hospital if he survives.
If he survives.
“I won’t bring it up anymore, Marcus, but if you want to talk…just know I am available.” She stares at me, like I just did my first communion or something. Then her lip starts to quiver. “I’ll make breakfast,” she says, and leaves.
Oh. Oh, oh.
Sex. She thinks this is all about sex. Would it help either of us if I told her it was about insanity and spooky powers and maybe death?
I look back to the screen in front of me, and even Brainwave seems foreign to me now. Frightening. Slowly, like I’m with the bomb squad all of a sudden, I reach out, extend one finger, and press the Power button.
A blank screen. I have successfully turned it off. My heart is thrumming with this small sweet return to a basic.
I hear the back door open as Eleanor lets Chuck back in. He comes trotting around the corner, as he always does, and finds me. I am standing now, and joyful to see him.
He plunks himself down at my feet.
“Hey,” I say, just as anyone would greet a best friend.
He wags his tail, looks at me blankly.
“Please,” I say, stretching my knotted back muscles, touching my toes, holding my arms up as if to signal a touchdown. “Please, Chuck, knock off the dog impression, okay? I’m going to need you today.”
He stops wagging his tail. Good. He gives me his old, appreciative, “you’re my master and I love you no matter what heinous crap you’ve done” look.
“That’s nice,” I say, “but I need the other thing more. I need to know what to do.”
Chuck’s expression does not change. I brush past him and go to the kitchen.
It’s French toast and bacon. I love this stuff, but I don’t think I can do it. I stare.
“Can I have some coffee, Eleanor?” I ask.
She is already bringing it around, along with the bottle of Log Cabin maple syrup. She goes back and gets her own coffee, then sits across from me.
“Thanks,” I say. I raise the steaming drink to my lips, am about to drink, then notice her milky, lost eyes over the top of my cup. I stop and offer a
weak, unconvincing toast.
“To the new life,” I say, mustering all the gusto I can, which is not a great deal of gusto.
“To the new life,” she repeats, with a little more life.
We are still eyeballing each other as we sip. We are still eyeballing each other after we stop.
“All packed?” she finally asks.
“All but a few clothes and my machine,” I say.
“Same here,” she says.
I push food around on the plate, trying the trick of arrangement in lieu of consumption. It doesn’t work if they’re watching, though.
“Please try, at least,” she says.
I try. I spear two cubes of French toast—yes, she has even cut them for me—and manage to get them into my mouth. Without any enthusiasm, without even the basic satisfaction of preserving life and limb by doing the minimum of feeding myself, I chew. The food, though it is as always perfectly done, feels and tastes like squared hunks of cold, live fish-flesh, with scales.
“You going to miss her?” Eleanor says softly.
The food is all but down my throat, and I stop. I try and cannot manage the last bit of effort it will take to swallow. I jump up from my chair, run to the bathroom, and spit up the toast and a lot more. I am in there for probably ten minutes, progressing from vomit to retching to panting to slumping. I roll to all fours, push myself up off the tiles, flush, and return to the kitchen.
She appears not to have even twitched. I sit across from her.
“Yes,” I say in a hoarse whisper.
Eleanor leans forward, her coffee cup protectively between us though we are clearly approaching something deep and intimate. “I know I said I wouldn’t pry—”
I hold up my hand between us. I have to stop her. I don’t want to be rude—I love my mother to bits—but I don’t want to talk to her. She is great to me, and I trust her completely, and we have a solid relationship. I haven’t been able to tell her about my ability to move things, but I have always told her most everything else. If she is not there for me when I come home at the end of the day, then I get a little jumpy, but I don’t want to talk to her. I want her there, but I don’t want her to ask.