Bullettime (14 page)

So Dave got the very top grades in that class, by sitting on the top of the steps, transcribing arguments between his parents as they happened. Reyes loved the pieces because they sounded so authentic, and plus Dave knew the basics of spelling and didn’t try to mess with the margins or font sizes in order to meet the four-page minimum for stories.

Dave thinks about that class now, as he walks down Newark Avenue. He has nothing to do, so he heads downhill, almost by instinct, toward the Newport Centre Mall. He can dick around in the small bookstore there, and the game shop, and even check out a movie. It’ll be a matinee, and cheap, and he might even be the only one in the theatre.
It’ll be like being rich and having a personal screening room in the basement
, Dave thinks. Ms. Reyes was pretty cute, with a wide mouth and deep red lipstick artfully applied each morning. She left Hamilton after a single term, but had to live close by. Maybe she’d be at the movies too, her days free because she had published several poems in literary magazines and royalties were almost certainly pouring in.

Ms. Reyes isn’t at the mall. Erin isn’t at the mall. It’s actually pretty desolate for the early afternoon. Some older white people wander back and forth as though the long arcade of stores is a running track, knots of Indian women and Latinas pushing baby wagons full of purchases chat away happily, and then there are the various workers in their awful synthetic vests, not doing very much at all. They’re like school kids, except so beaten down that they don’t even have the energy to plot and gossip. Dave feels a surge of power. There’s a CVS on the first floor and he decides to get a little cough syrup to make whatever movie is playing upstairs in the multiplex more interesting. And then there’s Ann.

“David,” she says, surprised.

She sounds odd.
Sober
, Dave realizes. He knows what to say, he thinks. “What are you doing here?”

“What are
you
doing here?” his mother asks. “That’s a better question.” She’s sharp.
She is sober.
Then she looks at Dave’s face. The bruise, the bandage over his nose, the something or other in his eyes that unnerves her. “Let’s get lunch,” Ann says, “then go see a movie.”

“Really?” Dave’s voice squeaks; it’s still breaking. He’s a bit of a late bloomer.

She slides her arm into his and leads him to the cash register. Dave should be embarrassed—normally he would be, like any other teen boy seen out with his mother—but ultimately he’s just relieved.

The afternoon is dreamy and odd. Dave even takes a swig of the cough syrup his mother paid for without going through the preliminaries of pretending a hacking cough, a scratchy throat. He’s ready for a fight, for a mid-mall meltdown, ready to shout
But you drink all the time, Mom
! but Ann only lightly hmms when he drinks. It’s not enough for a physical buzz, but enough for Dave’s brain and autonomic nervous system to do half the work. The flavour coating his tongue is the one associated with the drowsiness, the little fever, the colours, and his body obliges even without a full dose. He likes his cheesesteak just fine, and the salty rough-cut fries that come with it, and his mother lets him pick the movie. Samuel L. Jackson is in it, which is enough for Mr. Holbrook, cineaste. The film is even about a powerful hallucinogenic drug that happens to be a placebo, but Dave doesn’t get the irony as he sits there and pretends to hallucinate colourful trails on the edges of his own vision. After the movie, they do a little more shopping. Ann treats Dave to a long peacoat. It’s not quite a trench coat, but it’ll do for winter, and he won’t look quite so childlike and weird as he did in his puffy down jacket with the fuzzy hood last year. “Who are you, Ralphie from
A Christmas Story
?” some kid asked him back then before tripping him and sending him headfirst into a pile of grey slush.

And Dave could hide a gun in that coat. Or even a samurai sword. Or, he thinks with a barely suppressed giggle, a large baguette or oversized salami. Robotrippin’ makes a man silly sometimes.

Then it’s off to Shop Rite for a few groceries, and in Shop Rite there is a separate liquor store. Dave always gets a kick out of it—in New Jersey, supermarkets cannot sell the hard stuff, so some genius emptied out part of the inventory storage area and put in a liquor store with its own cash registers, employees, and employee vests. Ann loads up with her usual wine and vodka, and sends Dave to buy even more orange juice for screwdrivers later.

Later was ten minutes later, back at the house. “Sit,” she tells Dave before he can make it up to his room, to his computer.

“I’m sorry I played hooky, Mom, it’s just that—”

“Eh, I don’t give two hoots about that,” Ann says. She’s still sober, but her tumbler is the size of a bucket and her drink is a vat of vodka with a splash of OJ. In about five minutes, Dave figures, it’ll be all about his mother not giving two fucks. “I wouldn’t go to that school either. Not if you paid me. Look at your face!” Then,
sotto voce
, “My poor little boy.”

Dave wishes he could pull a swig of his cough syrup, or make himself a screwdriver for that matter, as Ann goes on about how sad and afraid he must be all the time. Does he have a girlfriend, or are all the girls at Hamilton sluts? Dave can’t bear to mention Erin—does what he did at the Barnes & Noble in Hoboken count as slutty? By the time Ann’s glass is two-thirds empty, she starts.

“It’s those niggers ruining everything,” she says. “They ruined this whole town. The Hispanics are okay, I guess . . .” Ann always was a lightweight; never had any tolerance for alcohol despite her regular, almost frantic consumption. She mixes herself another and takes a gulp. “Can’t leave the orange juice out for long, it’ll go sour,” she says to nobody.

“White kids pick on me too,” Dave says.

“But who broke your nose? Who stabbed you?”

“Who gave me a concussion?”

“That’s two against one,” Ann says.

“This family is two against one,” Dave says. “Just pull me out of school. Homeschool me. Let’s move to the suburbs! Do something!”

Ann laughs. “A teenage boy who wants to move to the suburbs.” She is really tickled—she
tee-hees
between breaths, and sips. “When I was your age, I was all about the city. I’d go out there and dance all night. All night,” she says.

“Gee, Mom, isn’t the city full of niggers?” Dave says, snotty.

Ann’s face contorts into a sneer. “Fuck you, you pathetic fucking little nerd. I’m sitting here trying to teach you something. Something about life. I don’t want you growing up to be a loser; I’m trying to protect you. If I were in school these days, I’d have all those bastards wrapped around my little finger. I used to be good-looking. I was like a short Cindy Crawford.” She finishes her second tumbler full of vodka.
At least she’ll calm down now
, Dave thinks.

And she is calmer, but she still simmers. “We’ll take you out of school. You can go to a Catholic school. Saint John Pope Paul the Second, or whatever the hell that one in the Heights is.” She raises a finger. “I don’t want you believing in any of that nonsense though. We’re Protestants.”

“Well,” Dave says. “Okay.” We were actually entirely irreligious. I never believed in anything, in any timestream save the Ylem from which I deserve all outcomes of my life, where the existence of the supernatural could not be denied. Even the Kallis Episkopos doesn’t believe. He just decided that pretending to believe was the same as believing, like pretending to hallucinate is the same as hallucinating.

Dave Holbrook fancies himself a junior scientist of sorts. He earned good grades in his science classes, watched every sci-fi movie that came out, and knew his way around a computer. When he was a kid he read all sorts of books about young boys who tinker with electronics—Danny Dunn, The Mad Scientists Club, Tom Swift—but he lacked the resources to emulate them. No backyard, no friends, no children’s world away from the constant surveillance of adults, and no piles of radio gear and lumber left to be nonchalantly discovered and exploited by omnipotent authors. Kids aren’t free till high school, just in time for the fucking and the violence and the drug abuse to start.

Back in his room, Dave finishes off his cough syrup. His limbs are heavy; he wants to puke it all up and paint his keyboard purple. He Googles for guns again. There are books, blueprints, suggestions. He could build a gun—if he had a lathe. If he even knew what a shaft collar was. A generation ago, he could have been a tinkerer, like the boys in the books he used to read. He really just wanted something to wave around, something to scare people off with.

T
wo weeks ago a teenage girl in Youngstown, Ohio scarred her stomach with a razor, then walked out in front of a truck. She was a chub and thus largely intact even after the collision, which was useful for the police because they could more easily identify the design of the cuts on her flesh. Even so, at first the cops thought she had tried to carve herself into a jack-o’-lantern thanks to the jagged-tooth pattern. It was mid-October and Halloween was coming up. Finally, they figured it out that it was the sign of The Resistance, and I got my television interview just in time for November sweeps.

I’m so dangerous it was done via Twitter. I got to tweet, with a hack breathing down my neck behind me, presumably in case I attempted to upload myself to the Internet. Jersey’s corrupt enough to let the media do whatever they like with us lifers, but with the cameras flashing the state doesn’t want to look
unprepared
or anything.

What do you miss most about life outside?

Eris, the goddess of discord, who walks among you till this very day!

How do you feel when you hear of some naive teenager listening to your garbage and killing herself in such a shocking and public way?

Ladies and gentlemen, that question was from my publicist. Answer: how does the Prez feel when body bags come home?

Do you regret the Hamilton shootings?

Does the Prez regret her war record in Syria?

Do you get it up the ass in prison a lot, you punk bitchfag?

Does the Prez . . . never mind. I’m a giver, not a taker.

Do you realize that you are going to burn in Hell for all eternity, but that the choice remains yours?

False: Typhon, the hundred-headed father of monsters, will consume the universe first.

Also, can people stop asking questions with “do you” in it? Try. Think different, like the billboards used to say.

If you were President, what would be your first act?

Martial law. I always wanted to be popular with the masses instead of my stupid cult following.

Respond to this plz: I hate who steals my solitude, without really offer me in exchange company.

When I declare martial law, I will make it impossible to Google the phrase “Nietzsche quotes.”

Look out behind you!

It was a joke so old I had to play it. The hack laid in to me hard. He couldn’t help but tweet that tweet, then drop his phone to the floor with a clatter, and try to take my head off with his baton. It took an extraction team to get him off of me. Luckily, there was such a team already stationed outside the door, albeit one whose primary job it was to protect the Fox News laptop and webcam I’d been issued for the interview. So now I am in the infirmary and can make my escape. The hack was a cousin of the fat Ohio girl, so the warden thought he’d be eager to cave my head in. Of course, just like the girl, he was one of mine, just another loser kid from Clifton who busted his ass to get a CO job just to get close to me, to see me go about my day, to make sure none of the other inmates fucked with me too hard.

Vicodin doesn’t normally generate hallucinations, but past entertainments have done a number on my kidneys, and it’s easy enough to get extra pills, so I can have visions while under the influence. I saw glimpses of my life that one night, what will be and what could have been, but the details were often vague. I know that I’ll be free, but not how to be free. If there’s a sci-fi paradox in looking into the future to figure out the present, I embrace it, as I embrace all contradictions, all things that sunder logic and reason. Tweet that! So I take my pills, breathe deeply, still my limbs and wait for the latest revelation. I am going to be the man on the glacial throne. I just need to know how I get from here to there.

And here it is: what the Kallis Episkopos doesn’t know is how his life ends. The drugs don’t help him catch a glimpse of me, or any of the other
I’s
, as he would put it, this time. Instead he just sleeps and dreams of high school again, like any other arrested adolescent who peaked at sixteen. His confederates continue with their planning—they steal uniforms, bribe orderlies, arrange for a safehouse in the Pine Barrens, and from there an airplane to Florida and a boat to Dominica. Somehow, he—
I
—would get to Marrakech, as Morocco has no extradition treaty with the US. That was the plan. But no, there was no timeline where any Dave Holbrook made it out alive.

So the Kallis Episkopos awakens, the escape plan already mid-execution. He’s in a laundry cart being pushed into the yard when he wakes up, but he succumbs to sleep again after a few moments. When he wakes again, the ambulance he’s in is roaring down the highway, sirens blaring so intensely that at first he doesn’t realize he’s hearing the sirens from police cruisers in hot pursuit. Light floods the cabin in bursts—the spotlight from a helicopter, though whether it belongs to the police or the media is beyond him. The Kallis Episkopos gets to his feet just as the ambulance pitches hard to one side and skis on a pair of wheels. Then the police start shooting. He hits the deck and holds on as best he can. He’s not sure why the ambulance stops, and it seems a long time before anything happens. A door slams, some muffled orders are barked. Then he hears something at the door to the cabin.