A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip (12 page)

Gingerly he steps past them and peeks into English. Everyone is motionless. A John Paul Wornock statue is standing at Miss Vincent’s desk, leaning his weight onto her stapler. A Cindy Jones statue is asking a Paige Adair statue a question. The window is spotted with raindrops. Behind them the sky is the meaty gray-brown of an oyster. Is it raining or is it not?

Down the hall Kevin steals a glance into Coach Strand’s class, then into Mrs. Bissard’s.

Statues.

So the odd balding man in the lunchroom was right: no one is going to interrupt them.

He can’t resist a quick step outside. At the bottom of the stairs, before he approaches the extra door, the one opening into the kitchen, he tries another, the door leading to the wooded slope in back of the building. It takes him a moment to comprehend the view and to reassure himself that he recognizes it. The rocks, the trees, the bricks, the air conditioner—one by one he marks them present in the roll book. They are all exactly where they should be, fixed against the backdrop of the highway—yes—but not frozen like the people upstairs. Their shapes are cut through with movement, their colors filled with a simmering brilliance, as if every one of them is a world of small explosions. The sweet gum balls flicker like candles in metal cups. The pine needles glow like spray lamps. He watches a squirrel trip by in a cluster of sparks, the particles of its body throbbing and
dancing, then plunge through the brush and into the forest. What would become of him if he followed it, he wonders, if he let the door shut behind him and strode out into the trees?

In the lunchroom the man is leaning over the table, rubbing his eyelids. Kevin sits down and asks him, “What exactly happens if I press the escape switch?”

“Your life will no longer have taken place.”

“Yeah, but where would I go?”

“Where do you think you would go?”

“I think my friends would believe I had died. Wouldn’t my friends believe I had died?”

“Your friends would have no idea who you were, because you would no longer have been born at all.”

“I don’t see how that’s possible.”

“Maybe not, but creatures are disappearing from existence as if they had never been all the time. The ones who die aren’t the ones who disappeared. They’re the ones who decided to stay.”

To his left an elderly woman with hair dyed the color of an emery board strokes the lush red curls of a little girl. To his right two globes of what looks like Elmer’s glue wobble across the floor on a cushion of static electricity.

“Look, think of the world as an ocean whose volume is constantly changing. Remove a drop of water or add one, it doesn’t matter. The ocean will simply accommodate the difference. There’s an effect, of course, but it’s negligible. Now if a whale disappeared, it might change the fortune of its pod. If a ship disappeared, it might change the fortune of its fleet. But we’re talking about the water itself, and the water is
always flowing. You’re a drop of water mistaking yourself for a whale.”

“So do I know people who have pressed the escape switch?”

“You mean
you
you? No. But some other version of you, in a different world? Almost certainly. Except that that other version was transformed into this one when the people who would otherwise have shaped your life disappeared.”

Kevin pictures himself with a tremendous gang of duplicates, hundreds and hundreds of them trailing away behind him, like the long tunnel of images he can control from his barber chair at Fantastic Sams, each earlobe, cheekbone, and shoulder a millimeter deeper inside mirrorworld. The sight of those thousand Kevins in their thousand black smocks has always been his favorite part of getting his hair cut.

“And what if I don’t want to press the escape switch right now? Will I get another chance?”

“Well, no. That would make the whole dilemma meaningless, wouldn’t it? Like wishing for more wishes.”

“So this is it?”

“It. Absolutely.”

“Then here’s my question. Let’s say my life keeps going. What will happen with Thad and Kenneth and me? Can we be friends again?”

“Hmm.” The man is tugging at his beard, gathering it into a devil’s point. “Here’s what I know. Starting today, they’ll leave you alone, or mostly they will—but no, Kevin, I’m sorry, you won’t be friends again. The two of them will transfer to public school after eighth grade: Forest Heights and then Hall. You’ll hardly see them again. One night, during your junior year, they’ll turn into your driveway when they
spot you hauling the trash to the curb—I don’t know why. Some reflex. They’ll sit there with the motor running, trading
hi
’s and
what’s-going-on
’s with you, all of you old enough to drive, on the verge of vanishing into your adulthoods. By then they’ll seem like emissaries from a different world.
Oh, that’s right
, you’ll think.
Thad and Kenneth. We were best friends once
.”

“You know all that?”

“I’m not as foolish as I look.”

“What about girls? Girlfriends?”

“I’m not going to lie to you, that’s going to take a while. I’m not sure I should tell you. You’ll be just shy of thirty.”

“Jesus!”

“I know, I know, I’m sorry.”

There they go again, his glasses, over his eyebrows and onto his forehead.

“But then you don’t really want a girlfriend, do you? What you want is to
wish
for a girlfriend—and you can do that
now
, by yourself, without relying on anyone at all. You want the little pulse of drama that comes from feeling you adore a girl, and that your life and hers might be transfigured at any second, and that the reason your Friday night at the football game or your Saturday afternoon at the movies isn’t as wonderful as it could be is because there’s someone out there who hasn’t quite realized she loves you. The truth? I think you want to fantasize about girls without actually accommodating your life to one. You don’t want to risk disappointing yourself by coaxing your way into some girl’s affections and failing to love her. You don’t want to
choose
somebody, because that will mean you can’t choose somebody else. And
the only way you can keep believing you’re secretly irresistible and yet doomed to live without love is by never putting yourself to the test. It’s a mess. A wilderness of contradictions. Every year it will leave you feeling uglier and uglier, more and more tired. You’ll have to become much more limber if you intend to maneuver your way out of it.”

Kevin draws his breath to speak, but doesn’t say anything.

“Sarah Bell? No. In ninth grade, she’ll sit directly in front of you in English. You’ll prop your leg along the edge of her chair occasionally, letting your calf settle against her hip. It will feel like the absolute outer limit of your bravery. One day you’ll place your hand on the shoulder of her chair, and she’ll cross her own hand under her arm, where no one else can see it, and lay it on top of yours. The rest of your body will go completely lifeless, but your palm? Your fingers? Man! They’ll flare with these ten thousand points of heat, as if all the nerve endings have turned to match heads. Neither of you will move—will so much as
twitch
—until the bell rings. The thing is, you’ll never be able to decide if she was flirting with you or just screwing with you. You’ll be twenty-eight and teaching creative writing at UALR when her cousin tells you she’s gotten married.”

“Wait. So I’m going to be a teacher?”

“No. Well—every so often. Mainly you’re going to write books.”

Books.

“Like the
Myth
series?” Kevin asks.

“What’s that now? Oh! Those. I had forgotten about those.” A slanted nod, and the man says, “Maybe a little like the
Myth
series. Not much.”

“Will I do the covers, too?”

“Just the writing.”

“So I’ll be famous.”

“Well, no, I wouldn’t say so.”

Kevin imagines himself filling sheet after sheet of notebook paper, in cursive, in some impossibly distant future, his hand traveling over the pages in jags and quivers, as swiftly as the needle of a lie detector, while he sits at the kind of desk that lawyers use, in a chair so plush and imposing he will feel like a preschooler nestled in someone’s lap. The image is rich with detail, but when he tries to visualize his own face, he sees only a grown-up scramble of pores, stubble, and wrinkles, some white hair here and some pink lips there and two dark eyes shining like thumbtacks.

“How old will I be when I die?” he asks.

“How old will you be when you
die
. That I can’t tell you.”

“What else
can
you tell me?”

“Here, you want the rough outline? At fifteen, you’ll leave CAC for an arts magnet—Parkview, down past the Target on John Barrow. You know the beginning of
Nova
, that shot where all the planets go spinning off into the distance? At first it will feel like that, as if the Earth is hurtling away from you, fast, but give it a report card or two, and Parkview will surprise you by becoming your life, and a better life than the one you’ve left behind. By the end of tenth grade, you’ll lose touch with everyone you used to know at CAC, all of them but Ethan Carpenter. Oh, sure, you’ll hear about people in bits and pieces—that Bateman has started a lawn service, that Alex is coaching basketball, that Margaret is working at a bank—but you won’t be involved with them anymore except in memory,
so the news won’t be gossip to you, just journalism. In your twenties you’ll see Chuck Carnahan at the airport and marvel at his Southern accent. Has his voice changed that much since junior high, or did you simply fail to notice the drawl he had back then because you had one, too? High school—that’s when you’ll make the friends you’ll keep. Three perfect years of falls and winters and springs. It will feel as if the seasons are defining themselves once and for all. You’ll envision yourself as a lawyer your sophomore year, an actor your junior year, a writer by the time you graduate. You’ll play at being in love, and once or twice you’ll wonder if you really are. You’ll leave Little Rock for college and grad school, and then you’ll return. You’ll never drink. You’ll never smoke. You’ll write stories, and eventually they’ll add up to books. You’ll experience your twenties as a decade of timidity, doubt, suspension, and your thirties as a decade of illness. I suppose if you walk through life saying
no, no, no
often enough, it’s only a matter of time before the world starts saying
no
back. Eventually, slowly, like someone picking his way out of a rockfall, you’ll begin to feel better, though you’ll never really trust the foundations of your life again, or believe that they’re solid enough not to crumble. Sometimes you’ll suspect that you made your home once and for all at age seventeen, and that everything that’s happened since will always seem slightly alien to you, slightly contingent. Your instinct will tell you that answering machines truly exist, but not cell phones. Computers, but not the Internet. Your puberty, but not your hair loss. There was a time you understood, you’ll think, and you’re living in its aftermath, and even though you’ll see the world’s changes shimmering around you with their own reality, you can’t help
expecting that they’ll all disappear one day and you’ll wake up at home before you left. You built your stronghold years and years ago and sent yourself into adulthood as a kind of advance scout—that’s how it will feel. And you’ll keep thinking that someday soon, with the knowledge you’ve gathered, you’ll go back in time and begin again. Surely it must be possible.”

Behind him two bent old men, twins, sit mumbling in their suits and bow ties. The one in the hat gives a teacherly shake of his finger. The other laughs out loud, his front teeth picture-framed in gold.

“There’s more,” the man says, “but I’m afraid that’s as far as I can take you.”

“Wait. Okay. So now that I know all this stuff, won’t everything be different? Can’t I use what you’ve told me to change my future?”

“No. If you decide to return to the time stream, you won’t remember any of this. It’s the same for everybody. One opportunity to answer the question. Then you either resume your life, just as it was, or you extinguish it.”

“So all of this—?”

“A scene on the cutting room floor.”

“Who are you exactly?” Kevin asks. “Will I see you again?”

“No.” The man squeezes his mouth shut, takes a shuddering breath, and sighs through his nostrils—his attempt at a polite yawn. “Or not like this at least. Forgive me. Long day. But yes, in a way, eventually you’ll see me. Absolutely. So then.” He digs his thumb into the cord of muscle at the side of his neck. “Have you made up your mind? Would you like to press the escape switch?”

Watching him, Kevin feels a tightness in his neck. He massages it with his fingers. He thinks about the awfulness of riding to school these last few mornings, the way his feet seem to pin him to the floorboards. He thinks about the rain honeycombing the screen of his bedroom window, the laundry basket giving off its smell of sweat and plastic, his cat’s voice box motoring away on top of the VCR. He thinks about the Tupperware pitchers in the refrigerator—the orange one filled with Crystal Light, the yellow one with iced tea. He thinks about the racks of comics at Gadzooks. He thinks about Thad and Kenneth stalking him through the school, saying his name like a curse word, and about houseflies and candy bar wrappers and blades of grass, all of them filled with the boiling brightness of the sun. He has a test in PE this afternoon. The tapes he ordered from Columbia House must be in today’s mail, and if not in today’s then surely tomorrow’s. He might turn out to love his life. Who can say?

“Send me back.”

The man nods
all right
. He gestures for Kevin to follow him. Together they leave the lunchroom, walking past a young girl with an infant in her lap, then two carpet-like masses of swaying brown fiber, then two willowy figures with tunnels of empty space where their eyes should be, stray circles of wall and vending machine showing through them from behind.

On the landing at the top of the stairs, Kevin lowers himself to the floor. He waits to see what the man will do next. Again he feels as if he is getting his hair cut, but his least favorite part this time, bracing himself not to giggle as the trimmer buzzes up and down his neck. The man makes a motion so small it is barely a motion at all. For a moment the stairwell looks like
a drawing of itself, the steps and the baseboard, the uprights and handrail changing into black lines on white paper. Kevin rubs his eyes. His body seems to swim with light. He hears Miss Vincent call his name from the corridor, but he is sitting directly beneath the grated window, and she can’t see him. “Kevin?” she repeats, and a wild guilt goes sprawling through him. He wishes that he understood where it came from.