Point B (a teleportation love story)

by Drew Magary

  Oh no.

  She tiptoed back to Room 24. Down the stairwell shaft, her dorm-mates cracked their doors and stuck their heads out over the railing for a peek upward at the commotion. Anna tried the turn the knob as gently as she could, but it was a hilarious failure. The door squealed like it had an alarm attached to it. She kept up the self-delusion that she was being discreet and eased into the room, still hoping to be unheard. When she closed the door, it squealed again. She may as well have brought a live seal into the room with her.

  Anna leapt into bed and cracked open the common read, then flipped the pages every time the alarm clock moved a minute ahead. She didn’t read a word. This was as subtle as her eavesdropping got.

  “Your first day,” Kirsch bellowed from behind the door. “Your very first day and I’ve already got Dean Vick calling me.”

  “Mom, it’s no big deal.”

  “Nothing’s a big deal to you because nothing HAS to be. You’re an average child, and you’ve never aspired to be anything more than that. It’s disappointing. You lack anything resembling your brother’s ambition and intellect.”

  “He’s an asshole,” Lara said.

  “And what are you?” Emilia asked. “You are a distraction.”

  “That’s not fair.”

  “Maybe I should have Jason pay you a visit.”

  “Don’t you dare.”

  “Well then, you’d best get your act together. If you’re gonna smoke drugs all day, I can have you do that at a public school for free, with the rest of the welfare kids who get ported in from the ghettoes and shitholes.”

  “I wasn’t smoking anything.”

  “Lara, I spend my entire work day arguing with elite minds and defeating them, your brother included. Do you really expect to win this fight? This is a demo argument. You’re a remedial thinker, and now I’m concerned that you’ll stay that way even if I leave you here.”

  “You didn’t send me here to make be better. You sent me here to be rid of me.”

  “Who can blame me? And yet, you get here and instantly manage to cry for attention. Shape up, and stop hanging out with your loser of a roommate.”

  “I’ll hang out with anyone I want to,” Lara snapped back. “That goes for Anna especially. Maybe I’m not the genius you were hoping to raise. But I trust my soul, and I know you sure as hell don’t. And I know exactly how much gin you need to forget that every night.”

  Anna heard a sharp smack and Lara crying out in pain. Then, another smack, this one signaling Kirsch’s abrupt exit. Now there was nothing coming from behind the door but stifled crying. Anna turned in her bed and buried her face against the wall. She wanted to blend into the plaster and become nothing but a great white blank, forever unnoticed and unseen by anyone ever again.

  She felt homesick now, but for what home? For the past year, she and Sandy had lived in one crummy ShareSpace after another—Rockville, Columbus, Munich, Hartford, São Paulo, Brisbane, Budapest, Denver—all the while keeping their crap in a locked, windowless trailer pod in Rockville, a mile away from the house that Sandy had abandoned in both grief and in crippling debt. Like the rest of the Newmads (as ShareSpace affectionately dubbed their customers), they would shuffle back to their locker over and over for clothes and toiletries, and then they would emerge in some other ShareSpace assigned to them, rootless and jaded.

  Like everyone else, they kept hoping the next place they ported to would be better than the last, only to immediately begin searching for new ground once they arrived. Whatever elements of home they once had—rooms, possessions, neighbors—all of those had been forcibly split up and consigned to new, separate economies. Home was an illusion. Home was broken.

  Even when they ported away for a night to somewhere cool, they invariably ended up in yet another ShareSpace. The subscription was all that Sandy Huff could afford, and so they’d trudge into yet another glorified hostel, with a room of their own and a common area and kitchen stocked with plain potato chips and even plainer neo-gypsies: old folks, tourists, vagrants, chirpy young professionals banging away at chrome laptops. They were comfortable places to stay, but vacancies filled quickly. They were never yours, and they never felt safe. There was nothing that was the Huff family’s own anymore. So Anna was crying not because she was homesick, but because she was lost, and she had never realized HOW lost she had been until just now.

  This was the first night she’d spent alone in a room in years: without her mom sleeping in the bed next to her and without a gun tucked under Sandy’s pillow. She wouldn’t need earplugs to sleep at Druskin. She wouldn’t need melatonin to ward off port lag, which always hit whenever she ported around too much and her body clock went schizo. She couldn’t sneak away and foolishly port somewhere lethal, the way that one kid did on Mount Everest. She could close her eyes this night and hear the world in full: crickets and swaying oak branches and very distant portclaps coming from behind the Harkness Wall. It was all so terribly pleasant, and yet here Anna was, warding off trauma coming on from all new fronts.

  Lara’s door flew open and she stormed over to Anna’s bed. One side of her face had a long, thin welt from where Emilia had slapped her. She grabbed Anna’s shoulder and yanked her away from the wall, then jabbed a finger at her. Two angry fingers in one night.

  “You told.”

  “I didn’t, I swear!”

  “I don’t know if I can believe you.” Oh, and the words were so sharp. They cleaved Anna right in half. Lara was definitely her mother’s daughter. The scowl she borrowed from Emilia was real this time, and no less formidable.

  “Lara, if you had any idea what I just agreed to keep quiet.”

  Lara started pulling her own hair. “God, this place is so fucked. Every place is fucked now! I needed someone. I needed you. I needed you so much more than you understand. I wish things could have stayed real between us. I wish we could have gotten away.”

  “I. Didn’t. Say. Anything.”

  “I can’t take this. I can’t. I’m sorry I put you in the middle of my bullshit.”

  She stormed back into her room and slammed the door shut. Slammed Anna’s whole world shut.

  The next morning, Anna was shocked awake by two distinct claps coming from Lara’s bedroom. When she gathered up the courage to get up and crack the door, she discovered that Lara Kirsch was gone.

  SEWELL/PHILLIPS HALL

  Lara’s bedroom was cleaned out from corner to corner. Save for a fluorescent light buzzing overhead, it was as empty as a hole. Anna surveyed the barrenness, dried tears crusted around her eyelids. You never got to watch anyone leave anymore. Everyone just vanished. Anna walked over to the window and looked out at the hill leading down from the dorm, a little patch of grass with lounge chairs that all the girls christened Sewell Beach even though it wasn’t a beach of any sort. Lara and Anna could have hung out on Sewell Beach. Could have. She opened Lara’s desk drawer and found a Post-it note, with a single word written in glittery purple ink:

  Anna slipped off the rose pink bracelet and tucked it, along with the Post-it, into her pillowcase for safekeeping. The only person who spoke to Anna that morning was a kindly Mrs. Ludwig, waiting in the common room with a basket of fresh milk rolls and a tray of chicken drumsticks slathered in sticky sweet barbecue sauce for all the girls. When she saw Anna looking despondent, she stopped munching on a drumstick, wiped her hands, and then hugged Anna tight as one of her cats came by and nibbled away at the pastries.

  “I know you got in some trouble there, but everything will be fine, just fine.”

  “Where’s Lara?”

  “Anna Hoof, I’m not important enough to know the answer to that.”

  Everyone else in Sewell Hall gave Anna the silent treatment. When she said “hey” to the dreaded Jubilee in the bathroom, there was no “hey” back. When she went to the bathroom, she cracked open the Shit Memoirs and, against her better judgment, gobbled up the new entries.

  “Anna Huff is a fucking rat.”

&nb
sp; Fucking sweet. Great to hear.

  “There’s a stupid diver who got Lara Kush put up on the first night of school.”

  That’s not quite accurate.

  “Paul Bamert goes here. Everyone knows he’s a sack of shit.”

  Hey! Lay off!

  A couple of girls averted their gaze when they saw Anna on the stairwell. Along the fresh asphalt path down the hill to Phillips Hall for English class, more students did likewise, while a handful of others did the opposite and delivered withering stares. Everyone knew. Everyone knew this was the girl who fucked up and drove Lara Kirsch away from Druskin. Maybe they knew how Anna felt about Lara to boot. She wanted control over that particular bit of information, but she learned long ago that she lived in a world where everyone knew you better than you knew yourself. She kept her head down and bulldozed through the fog of rushed judgments. Meanwhile, PINE choppers crisscrossed overhead, snipers eager for more port immigrants to gun down.

  She walked into Phillips Hall and climbed a wide Carrara marble staircase that was so worn down from decades of student footfalls that the lip of each step was half as thick in the center as it was at either end. Like the Academy Building, the entire hall predated modern air conditioning. The airflow inside this dump hadn’t re-circulated since 1926. This was air that had dimensions to it like a runny cheese: damp, rusty, and thick.

  When Anna opened the door to Mr. Nolan’s classroom, Bamert was waiting for her, clad in a lime green suit and matching bowtie, sitting at the head of the giant mahogany table in the center of the class. His head seemed to fill the entire room. He patted the open seat between him and Burton, like it was a prize for her to claim. She trudged over. Through the grimy windows she saw the old brick dorms framing the manicured quad, eager preps damn near skipping along its smooth paths. They all had so much more to look forward to than her. So much promise. Her time here at Druskin was already over. From now until whenever she left, she would be the campus undead. She dreaded the idea of seeing Vick ever again.

  “And how was your rendezvous last evening?” Bamert said.

  “I don’t wanna talk about it,” she whispered. The more kids filled the classroom, the lower her whisper went.

  “Everyone else would, though.”

  “Everyone else can piss off,” she told him.

  “Yes, well as you mourn your social life, you should be aware that our little Burton may or may not have had a breakthrough last night.”

  She turned to Burton, “Really?”

  “Do you realize that the dining hall doesn’t serve any cashew milk? What am I supposed to put on my cereal?” Burton asked.

  Anna glowered at Bamert. “That’s his breakthrough?”

  “No, he’s just being a moron. Burton, tell her about the thing.”

  “I’m not gonna tell her about the thing,” Burton said. “There are people here.”

  “Well, that thing better be a good thing because I’ve had ten hours of nothing but bad things,” said Anna.

  “Anna, do you really think you’re the only kid on this campus right now who feels angst?” Burton asked her. “We’re here because we’re all anxious. I take Ambien to sleep at night, and Ambien is for sixty-year-old ladies and shithead jocks who can’t get their hands on other drugs.”

  “Listen to Young Burton,” said Bamert. “I have the blood pressure of a sitting President. We are not a healthy lot.”

  “Especially if the dining hall is giving us those milk options.”

  “H. Christ, enough about the milk already. Dairy cows were put on this Earth to give man epicurean pleasure, Burton. Meanwhile, you’re in the dining hall bitching for nut water.”

  “I need both of you two to shut up right now,” said Anna. “Whatever good advice you think you have for me, I promise: you don’t have it.”

  Just then, Mr. Nolan rolled into the class in a wheelchair, sporting a bowtie of his own. He was an ancient man. Sickly looking. The bags under his eyes weighed his whole face down and kept the bottom of his eyelids permanently ajar. You could see the pink flesh gleaming under his eyeballs. Anna wanted to hook up an IV to him.

  Nolan had presided over this classroom since 1990. An assortment of books and tchotchkes littered the room and served as living artifacts of the man: a musty globe, a red clay pot, a stuffed squirrel, forty years worth of framed portraits of the English faculty at Druskin with Nolan wearing an equally dorky bowtie in each of them. There were also multiple editions of the same Joyce book on the shelves, purchased over and over because Nolan would mark up the old ones and run out of room. He was the first unarmed teacher Anna had seen since the first grade.

  Nolan rolled up to the table and took out a book from a leather valise he kept on his lap. When he scratched his face, Anna was afraid his whole cheek would fall off.

  “You’ve all had a chance to complete the common read.” He got a smattering of timid grunts in affirmation. “What’d you think of it? What did you think of Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man?”

  The entire class went mute, except for Burton. Burton held his copy up and let it flop open. The binding was split. Two of the pages fell out.

  “Why did they have us buy such cheap copies?” Burton asked.

  “Come again?” Nolan asked.

  “This isn’t reinforced binding. They may as well have just given us a Xerox of the book. There was a Vintage edition of this that was the same price from port retailers, and it uses animal protein glue binding. This is thermal. Thermal is downright shoddy. There’ll be a family of silverfish crawling through this thing by next week.”

  “Does anyone else have thoughts on the book?” Mr. Nolan asked aloud.

  “If I may,” said Bamert, “I believe my compatriot here, in a very roundabout and annoying way, has pointed out the physical flimsiness of this tome as a way of also condemning its intellectual flimsiness.”

  “That’s not what I was doing at all.”

  “Shut up, Burton.”

  “Go on,” said Nolan.

  “It’s an indulgent book. A relic. I think you would agree with me that Joyce doesn’t actually care much for Steven Dedalus, right?”

  Nolan smiled. Suddenly he didn’t look so dead after all. “Maybe.”

  “Definitely! He’s a weenie!” The rest of the class laughed. Bamert had them all now. “This book is a classic, but only by assignation. It is self-indulgent and dated. Masturbatory. Why not let the pages fall out of it?”

  Nolan turned to Anna. “Do you agree with this?”

  “Honestly, Mr. Nolan, I didn’t like it because I didn’t understand any of it. And I don’t think the author cared much if anyone did.”

  “That’s Joyce for you now, isn’t it?” Nolan joked. “What is your name?”

  “Anna Huff.”

  “Anna Huff, do you think that, when you’re older, you might understand this book more?”

  “Probably.”

  “Do you think, when you’re older, that you might view your younger self with similar contempt, as Joyce does?”

  “I don’t need to age another day for that.”

  Other kids pepped up and the class breezed by. When Nolan excused the kids at the top of the hour, he rolled over and gave Anna a soft tap on her waist.

  “Would you mind staying for a moment?” he asked her. She nodded and Nolan closed the door behind a nosy Bamert and Burton, both of them loitering next to the doorway to eavesdrop.

  “You were placed on ‘stricts last night,” Nolan said to her.

  “I was.”

  “You’ll learn a lot here, Anna Huff. I saw your records before today and it’s clear you have a swift learning curve.”

  “Not when it comes to that book.”

  “Yes, Joyce’ll stymie even the quickest of minds. Regardless, perhaps the vital thing you’ll need to learn here is how to properly get into trouble.”

  “I don’t suppose there’s a class for that.”

  “There isn’t, but I’m certain you’ll get t
he hang of it. And with great speed!”

  Anna was staring at Nolan’s wheelchair. You’re staring too long. Stop doing that. Why are you still staring? You’re the fucking worst. Don’t ask him.

  “Can I ask you something?” Idiot.

  “Of course,” said Nolan.

  “How do you—”

  “I can’t. Not without great difficulty. PortSys didn’t devise their little gadgets with someone like me in mind.”

  “So you’re just here, all the time?”

  “Do you think that’s so terrible?”

  “Oh my god, no. No. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to imply—”

  “No one ever means to.” He gestured to the shelves in his classroom. “I have my books and that is all the transport I need. Besides, why port when I can be the destination that others seek, hmm? I have students like you come to me, Anna Huff. You’re good and interesting kids, and I needn’t bother zapping myself everywhere to have the pleasure of meeting you all. Isn’t that grand? Tell me, where was the last place you ported before you ported here?”

  She couldn’t remember the last place she ported. She couldn’t even remember the first place she ported. It might have been Baltimore.

  “I think I was in Denver,” she told him. A pointless lie that could easily be sniffed out.

  “For what purpose? Fun? Work?”

  She sighed. “I don’t remember, sir. I don’t remember anything about anywhere.”

  “Well, if it comforts you, you are now in a place that will almost certainly remember. In the meantime, read more carefully. You never know what good things you might have missed.”

  Anna pointed to the stuffed squirrel in the corner of the room. “What’s with the squirrel?”

  “Oh, Fred? I keep my classroom open at all hours, so that my students can study here if they feel like it. You’re welcome to do so as well. If I’m not around, I have Fred there to keep an eye on you.”