Point B (a teleportation love story)

by Drew Magary

  Anna heard the low roar of Route 101 in the distance, the only passable thoroughfare for trucks and tanks to get to I-95. Trucks and tanks were nearly all that were left of the automotive universe now: big lumbering beasts crisscrossing the country, frantic to either supply porters with goods or to wipe them out entirely.

  Mrs. Ludwig led Anna over to the dilapidated remains of a nearby parking lot. There was only one car on the lot that hadn’t been entombed in rust, and it was the low-slung, black 1965 Shelby Cobra that Mrs. Ludwig talked about more than she did about her own husband. Anna reached out and led her hand along the Cobra’s voluptuous frame, feeling along the ragtop fastening studs and steel gas cap, grazing her fingers down the glossy white racing stripe down the center of the hood like she was a hot spokesmodel in an old car ad. In the sunlight, the frame shone like vinyl.

  Mrs. Ludwig pointed to two black, bazooka-wide tailpipes running under the doors and alongside the chassis.

  “These pipes, they get very hot,” she warned Anna. “Don’t touch them, yeah?” She unlatched the passenger side door. Attached to the seat was a body harness with a heavy iron buckle at the sternum, a thick leather guard flapping down from it. “What you do is you put your butt against the top of the seat and then slide down.”

  “Slide down?”

  “Yep.”

  Anna stepped in, rested her butt against the top of the concave, leather-upholstered passenger seat, and then nestled down into the belly of the Cobra. The dashboard looked like it belonged inside a small airplane: nothing but black switches and tiny gauges, all with beveled corners and rimmed in chrome. The windshield was so tiny that the wipers each measured less than a foot long. The car was so low to the road that her ass was nearly touching the pavement. Between the driver’s seat and passenger seat was a fire extinguisher. Anna had never seen one so prominently featured inside a car and worried that there was a good, proven reason that it needed to be kept so handy.

  Mrs. Ludwig latched the passenger door shut and ran a hitch pin through it.

  “Put the harness around your shoulders and buckle it tight,” she told Anna.

  Anna complied. She felt like she was about to go skydiving. Mrs. Ludwig came around, got in, took the Club lock off the steering wheel, and gunned the engine to life. Every other ambient sound was drowned out in an instant. Earplugs. Earplugs would have been a wise idea. Mrs. Ludwig shouted more instructions but all Anna could she see were moving lips. Then her dorm mom knocked open the glove compartment, revealing a pair of driving goggles that were better suited for World War II bombing sorties over London. Anna strapped the goggles to her face. Mrs. Ludwig put on a her own plus a pair of fingerless driving gloves, then she shouted more inaudible things before laughing and grabbing the stick shift.

  The coupe reared back a couple inches and then exploded out of the lot and down the road.

  Thirty miles an hour in the Cobra felt like 60. Sixty felt like 90. Every time Mrs. Ludwig hit the gas, the car seemed to lift off the ground and blast them into orbit. When Mrs. Ludwig got onto Route 101 and could really let it out, it was like passing through a wormhole with her eyes wide open. The wind and the engine ganged up on Anna’s eardrums and pummeled them without remorse. Mrs. Ludwig hit 120 on the speedometer. The rearview mirror mounted on top of the dash started to rattle. Anna’s passport card flapped up and smacked her in the face. When they zoomed past trucks and military supply vehicles it was like watching a time-lapse video. Anna was nauseous and thrilled all at once. The raucous wind blowing all around her reminded her of Sarah and those evening drives to Rockville Town Center.

  “FASTER.” Anna ordered. Mrs. Ludwig couldn’t hear her. Anna pointed to her lips and shouted the word again.

  “Yeah?” Mrs. Ludwig mouthed back. Anna nodded.

  Mrs. Ludwig upped it to 140 and now Anna’s insides were turning to paste. She discreetly put a finger to her throat and checked her pulse, which now roughly matched the speed of the car. She was dying to grab the stick shift and give it a little wiggle.

  “Faster.”

  Mrs. Ludwig was incredulous but took it to 160 anyway. This was not a road built for such speeds. While Route 101, unlike residential thoroughfares, was blessed with semi-regular maintenance, that didn’t stop it from accumulating potholes the width of a small dining table. Shredded tire bits dotted the road like black tumbleweeds. There was litter everywhere. Mrs. Ludwig swerved and careened around all the potholes and stale asphalt brownies littering the road at top speed. The hard molding of the door dug into Anna’s upper arm. A tiny ball chain dangling from the cigarette lighter swung wildly with every nudge of the steering wheel. A horse—a fucking horse!—trotted across the highway and they had to swerve to miss it. Mrs. Ludwig laughed as they passed it. Anna did not. Alongside the road she saw makeshift crosses and piles of rocks left to honor Route 101’s assorted victims. Beyond the crosses were neighborhoods with houses built directly on top of old, now-unused residential lanes.

  “Faster.”

  The Cobra couldn’t go any faster. Anna checked her pulse and it was similarly maxed out, frantically tapping out emergency cries for help in Morse Code. Here was the “shit white” moment Mrs. Ludwig had talked about. This was good enough. She turned to Mrs. Ludwig and stuck her thumb out.

  “Go back.”

  Mrs. Ludwig nodded and pulled onto an exit ramp that was choked with quackgrass and spent dandelions. They buzzed over 101 and got right back on the highway, Ludwig ratcheting the speed back to 160 as the Cobra blitzed west, dodging fallen pines and deer carcasses. At cruising speed they sank so close to the road that Anna felt like it was poised to sand her ass into fine dust.

  When they pulled back into the lot, Anna jumped out of the car, careful to avoid the broiling tailpipe lurking beneath, and frantically ran in place. They went through Druskin Gate and Anna kept high stepping furiously, pushing her heart rate until all the beats were poised to join together into single, frozen contraction. Sweat came off of her in sheets and she almost slipped on the runoff. The armed guards openly laughed at her.

  “What are you doing?” Mrs. Ludwig asked.

  “I’m just fired up!” Anna said. “I forgot how much I enjoy going fast and now I’m just so goddamn fired up!”

  “Would you like a pretzel?”

  “Gimme ALL your pretzels, Mrs. Ludwig.”

  Mrs. Ludwig led her back to Sewell and opened her apartment door. Anna bounded in and kept running in place.

  “May I use your bathroom?” she asked.

  “Are you going to keep running while you do your business?”

  “NO.”

  “All right.”

  Anna chopped her feet down the hall and grabbed one of Mrs. Ludwig’s white cats along the way. She locked the bathroom door, whipping off her mary janes and her damp socks. Then, in one swift motion, she took the tracking anklet off of her leg and placed it around the cat’s neck, discreetly tucking it under her collar. The cat didn’t make a sound. Anna checked the collar for a name tag.

  SHELBY.

  “Heh.”

  She took out one of the Blackheel anklets that Alyssa had smuggled into past the Harkness Wall for Burton and slipped it onto her opposite ankle. Then she dried off her entire body with a hand towel, threw up into the toilet, walked out, and helped herself to a Bavarian pretzel the size of dinner plate. She’d earned it. She had passed a cat off as herself quite capably. Burton was wrong. Go fast enough and you can fake anatomy.

  One hour later, Bamert knocked on Mrs. Ludwig’s door, holding a bouquet of daisies and asking for his own joyride.

  DEAN’S RESIDENCE

  Wednesday struck again. Anna built up a healthy dread for every session in Vick’s lab. The dread would ebb on Thursdays, and then slowly work back into a froth as the days ticked away. All over again, she would be back in his little dungeon clinic, staring daggers at a mute Brendan McClear and listening to the familiar voice on the laptop ticking off instructions to Vick as she held the
kettle bell and stepped into the wormhole and her body exploded. Over the past few weeks, she could tell that the hole was sucking in more of her body on each attempt, grabbing what it could of her and pulling her apart like string cheese before rejecting her.

  But on this night, something different happened down in that basement. Vick sat at his laptop and ordered Anna to step forward, and when she did this time around, she felt the crisp, refreshing snap of a successful port take hold. In an instant, she was ten feet from her original spot, the kettle bell still firmly in her grasp. No pain. No pins and needles.

  Vick cocked his head and then went back to typing.

  “Status?” the voice on the laptop asked.

  “Passed,” said Vick.

  “I ported,” Anna said, in disbelief. Brendan McClear looked up at her, and then stared right back down at his tablet when she caught him.

  “You’re done now,” Vick told her. “You don’t have to come back.”

  “I don’t?” She hated feeling grateful to him for the news. She hated feeling like she had accomplished anything.

  Vick didn’t answer her.

  “What is it you did to me?” she asked him.

  Again, nothing. He kept on typing. She looked at the door and dashed away. On the way back to Sewell, she dropped to her knees on the asphalt path and burst into tears. You shouldn’t have to cry. They should.

  Other kids stared.

  THE LATIN ROOM

  Edgar Bamert awaited his son in The Latin Room: a small room next to the fetid Assembly Hall with its own distinct stench of wood polish and mildew. This was the room where Druskin students were put up for getting into trouble, subjected to a kangaroo court of deans and humorless seniors who already knew a troublemaker’s fate well before the poor troublemaker did, but still allowed the offender a meek defense before casting him out. There was no shortage of trust fund kids and overachievers waiting for a spot at Druskin, so expelling a student was a relatively minor hassle for the powers that be. Vick happily condemned kids to the Latin Room any time they were caught drinking, vaping, fucking, cheating on an exam, cursing out loud for spilling a Coke, or doing one of the zillion other things that constituted “Un-Druskinlike Conduct,” as outlined in the school’s 300-page student manual.

  On this day, Paul Bamert and Anna Huff were awaiting a wholly different form of judgment. Here now was Edgar Bamert: scion to a banking dynasty and a man as staid and conservative as his son was flamboyant. The elder Bamert sat opposite from Paul and Anna at a giant wooden table (by now, Anna had decided that the school’s affinity for large tables was officially a fetish). He was clad in a crisp blue suit, a gold watch chain running from his lapel to his breast pocket. His fingernails were perfectly cut and buffed. His skin was smoother than fresh cream. The only telltale sign that he was J. Paul Bamert’s father was a gold-plated tie bar adorned with a Clemson logo that kept his orange tie pinned to his dress shirt. He didn’t get up to greet Paul or Anna when they entered the room. Edgar Bamert was a proudly severe man, rarely smiling because so few people were worthy of his approval, not even his own son. Especially not his own son.

  “What is all this?” Edgar asked Bamert. He had a thick Virginia drawl that made Bamert’s sound like a cheap knockoff by comparison.

  “We have a business proposal, sir,” Bamert told him.

  “And what kind of business would that be?”

  “Kebabs.”

  “Kebabs ain’t a business, son.”

  “Actually, they’re quite a lucrative one. I’ve run the numbers.”

  Bamert slid a small folder over to his father, but the old timer raised a palm.

  “I don’t need to see the damn numbers. Your idea for sellin’ a bunch of Arab food is nonsense, boy. Besides, you already got your own line of credit, and you got the fundraising skills of a Bamert. There’s nothin’ else you require from me, boy. Sink or swim.”

  “Dad, that line of credit isn’t enough.”

  “Is that right? Because it’s downright ostentatious from my vantage point.”

  “It’s not. And the Bamert fundraising prowess you canonize is hindered by the fact every rich kid here at Druskin cries broke if you so much as ask them to spot you a chicken finger sub from Romeo’s on a weeknight.”

  “And what’s with the young lady?” Edgar Bamert cast an eye on Anna. Anna was wearing a pair of eyeglasses with non-prescription lenses to the meeting, to pass herself off as an intellectual. “Who are you, sweetheart?”

  “My name is Anna Huff, and I have offered Paul my services as CFO of the consortium.”

  “Don’t you two lovebirds have classes to go to?”

  “We’re not that,” Anna told Mr. Bamert. She offered little beyond that. She had a feeling Bamert’s father would offer a strong opinion if she further elucidated her sexual preferences.

  “Well, I shoulda known you two weren’t a pair,” said Edgar. “That would have been far too reassuring.”

  “Dad.” Bamert began.

  “Ahem.”

  Bamert rolled his eyes. “Sir. Sir, you sent me to this place because you wanted me to get my act together. Well here I am, doing just that. I’ve found a business partner, and we’ve showed initiative by outlining a solid, workable business plan on top of an already heavy course load. What more, sir, do I have to do to prove myself worthy of your largesse?”

  “Well, you could shave. You could tame that wild mop on top of your head. You could wear respectable clothing instead of dressing like some sort of ghetto street pimp.”

  “Why?” Bamert asked him. “So I could look like you? And what have you done with that polite, respectable look of yours?”

  Bamert, stop.

  “Young man—”

  “Who’s the young man? You’re the ne’er-do-well, Dad. You go to your golf club and you port to Bermuda and you throw very polite Derby parties that make you look like a captain of industry, but tell me a thing you’ve made that’s been worth a damn. You sit there like you earned all this, like you didn’t win at birth and coast along on the backs of industrial titans who were bones in the ground before you were even a thought in grandpappy’s head. You could have spent all these years in glassblowing school and it wouldn’t have mattered because our money makes money anyway. Rip me all you want with your antebellum disdain, good sir, but at least I know I’m a fraud. At least I know I am the absolute worst kind of freeloader, and I don’t try to pretend I’m some kind of bullshit paragon of rectitude.”

  Anna didn’t move. It was like she had a personal Harkness Wall around her entire body. She already knew the seed money was gone. She just hoped Mr. Bamert’s reply wasn’t as verbose as his son’s, so that they could get out of that room before Vick stumbled in and decided to hold a spontaneous put-up.

  Edgar Bamert gave his son a wide, condescending smile. He was like Vick; his smiles were rarer and angrier than his frowns.

  “I’ll give you your money, boy.”

  Juh?

  “Know this, though,” Edgar continued. “It’s the last dime you’ll ever get from me. You’re gonna fail yet again, and you’re gonna fail hard. And it’ll be the best damn gift I ever gave you.”

  “I haven’t told you how much I want,” Bamert said.

  “Send the number to Louise, and then never hassle me about money again. I have a golf date with Robb Caraway now. Go Tigers.”

  “Go Tigers, sir.”

  Mr. Bamert took out his phone and hit PORT, the portclap resonating out of the Latin Room and echoing through the innards of the barren Assembly Hall next door. Bamert the younger rocked back in the ancient wooden desk chair and tucked his hands behind his head.

  “Well, that was highly on-brand for him,” he told Anna. “I just love him so much. And he’s golfing with the head of PINE! What a delightful pair.”

  “That was very dramatic just now!”

  “We have that same fight twice a year.” Bamert stood up and offered her his elbow. “He’s so bored he’ll fig
ht with anyone. Let’s get a sandwich.”

  The Man Behind PINE

  Broadcast Date 10/8/30

  Correspondent: Elena Roth

  Segment Producer: Grant Holloway

  Transcript posted: 10/9/30

  ROTH: With nearly $200 billion in annual funding, the Port Immigration and Naturalization Enforcement Bureau, or PINE, now represents the largest independent branch of the U.S. Department of Defense. And with WallTech’s Great Smartwall Project—the largest smartwall effort ever undertaken—experiencing massive delays and cost overruns, PINE’s role in controlling port immigration into the United States has become even more vital.

  But critics, including members of Congress, say that the bureau lacks oversight, operates in near total secrecy, and eschews due process in favor of brute force, a great deal of it targeted at port immigrants from non-Western countries.

  The man in charge of the agency, Robb Caraway, has never given a public interview until now. Sitting with me tonight, he gives a robust defense of an agency one major news outlet has branded “a government-sanctioned hate group.”

  CARAWAY: This is not an easy job. That’s the first thing you need to understand. We were given the thankless task of enforcing the laws of this nation and to secure its borders when its borders were, in an instant, destroyed. For centuries, we were one of the most secure and powerful nations in the world because we were surrounded by ocean on both sides.

  ROTH: Those oceans have been rendered irrelevant.

  CARAWAY: 100% irrelevant, okay? The two greatest natural military barriers in history: gone just like that. That means any Black Shard terrorist or drug smuggler who wants to port into this country can now do so. They are coordinated and extremely dangerous. This is a crisis. You saw what happened in Austin.

  ROTH (narrating): Caraway, of course, is referring to the 2024 port attack on the Austin City Limits music festival that left nearly 500 people dead. According to a Congressional investigation, three members of the religious extremist group Black Shard allegedly ported in en masse, each one carrying a SIG516 carbon fiber assault rifle, preferred by port terrorists because its carbon fiber frame is light enough to fit within the YOU PLUS TWO rule of antihydrogen teleportation. It was that attack that prompted the formation of PINE and gave birth to the law that stated U.S. citizens have to wear passport or state ID lanyards at all times when out in public.