Bullettime (19 page)

He walks to school in the morning twilight and gets there an hour early, as planned. As usual, the metal detector hasn’t even been plugged in but the doors are open for the teachers and the custodians. The security guard doesn’t look up from his breakfast. Even after Columbine, nobody worries about a nerdy white kid who gets the shit kicked out of him all the time. It’s getting hard to think. His mind is hazy, full of twisting black clouds.

If I see Erin, I’m going to shoot her.

I wish I had some Robitussin.

I should have brought my Gameboy to pass the time.

“Mr. Holbrook!” It’s McCann.

Dave turns. Why is he here? Why is he here with an Uzi in hand, another hidden in a safe spot? Erin’s guns. Of course she wouldn’t be here today, and neither would his parents. Nobody to shout, “See what you made me do!” at, while pointing at a few bullet-riddled bodies. It’s too late now. McCann has to be on to him. The gun’s just barely hidden.

They have a brief conversation about McCann needing some help. Dave brandishes the gun. Then the world splits. In one, he doesn’t shoot. In one, he does. Then the world splits again. McCann falls in both, screaming and clutching his side. In one, Dave runs right out of the school. In the other, he shoots the guard, then turns on his heel and heads deeper into the school.

A few minutes go by and a crowd gathers—students, teachers, Vice Principal Fusco. McCann’s alive, the guard isn’t. Sirens in the distance already. Dave opens a second-story window right over the school entrance and empties the magazine into the crowd, just in time for the cops to roll in to a generalized panic.

Hamilton’s an old urban school. Lots of hallways, plenty of corners, difficult to surround. Almost nobody is inside, so that’s a blessing. The JCPD uses an old playbook—circumscribe the building and wait. Dave conserves the second magazine as best he can. He’s not a great shot, and the Uzi isn’t a sniper rifle, so all he can do is run from one side of the building to another and occasionally plink at an ambulance, or a cop car. The door to the principal’s office is locked, but he puts a few bullets through the marbled glass window on the door and manages to wing a secretary. She cries and calls for help on the phone. Her voice is an echo in Dave’s mind. He loves it.
If only Erin was here.

Dave isn’t in very good shape. After thirty minutes, he’s coated in sweat from all the running. He’s nearly out of ammunition. He decides to head down to the basement and retrieve the second Uzi, but first he fires a single shot in the air and screams as loudly as he can. Only after does he realize that people who shoot themselves in the head probably can’t scream right after, but he hopes the police will be lured in anyway.

In the dark, he has a conversation with Erin. An imaginary one.

“Happy yet?”

I’m always happy, Dave.

“Did I kill anyone outside? I guess that security guard is dead, huh?”

I think someone out there is going to die. But it might be because of a heart attack, or from falling in a dirty puddle and getting an infection in her wound.

“Her
wound?”

You know the girls deserve it too. They’re why the guys spend all their time punching your lights out. To show off. They get blowjobs and cupcakes in exchange from those bitches.

“Lucky me—you never gave me anything like that.”

You wouldn’t have liked my cupcakes.

“If you were here right now, I’d fucking shoot you too.”

You’d try.

Nothing for a while. Then in Dave’s head, Erin’s voice again. I hear too, from the Ylem. It’s distinct from the imitation Dave was doing.

Well, I will give you a present now.

“What?”

There’s a fuse box by the boiler room that runs the fire alarm system. Open the box, mess with the fuses, the alarm will go off. Then the cops and the fire department will have to storm the place.

Dave has nothing to say to that. He’s hungry. He’s bored. Running down the hallways was nothing at all like a video game, thanks to McCann and his own nervous trigger finger. He doesn’t even know if he managed to nail any of his tormenters with his random bursts out the window.

So he walks to the back, pulls the alarm, and then heads back up the ladder to the trapdoor. He feels like a grunt in Vietnam, half-hidden in a foxhole. The door’s heavy atop his head, and he doesn’t have a great shot, but when the cops check the auditorium they likely won’t see him in the pit until it’s too late.

Erin’s present works very well. The first SWAT guy to enter the auditorium gets his ankles chewed off, and the room’s too large to gas effectively. Dave gets to empty a whole magazine into the bulletproof vests, replace it, fire off a few more shots, then drop back down into the basement, throw the gun away, and wait on his belly with his arms behind his back for his arrest. Shooting cops is much cooler than shooting kids, he decides. It’s not like these cops will shoot him in cold blood. Not until he’s a grown up.

The Uzi is recovered with ten bullets still in the clip. From prison Dave explains that those ten bullets belong to the world now. Ten bullets for the picked-on kids, for the oppressed peoples across the planet, to deliver as they see fit into the heads of their tormentors.
Does not the schematic symbol for resistor have ten points?
The esoteric meaning is so clear it’s actually exoteric. When selling antinomianism to high schoolers, the Kallis Episkopos had to keep things simple.

Then there’s the world where Dave ran. The gun was like a snake in his hand—terrifying, dangerous, and strangely compelling all the same. He couldn’t drop the gun and surrender, but hearing McCann howl like an animal, seeing the fat security guard switch off like an old machine, drained the fluid from Dave’s spine. He bolted back down the steps, Uzi in hand. He smelled like hell.

Officer Ford is on the corner. He spots the gun and bellows for Dave to stop. Dave points the Uzi and says, “No, you! I mean . . .” Then he turns and runs. His fingers feel huge, the gun so small. He couldn’t pull the trigger if he wanted to. He wants to throw the gun away, but there’s no turning back. There’s still a small rational part of him saying,
You can’t go back home. You can’t go anywhere. All you have is that gun. You can trade it. You can sell it. You can use it to get out of here. Don’t worry, you won’t have to shoot anyone else.

That small rational part of him was me. I often wonder if Erin put me here in the Ylem just for this reason—to keep David alive beyond the end of the day. Once he entered the school with the gun, a near-infinity of alternative lives ended, like a tree being pruned of almost all its branches. I could guide him away from putting the gun to his own head, from turning the wrong corner and being gunned down by the police.

Erin’s house!

Let the cops find him there. Either she’s home and is just a semi-messed up girl, and it doesn’t matter; or she’s not home and it doesn’t matter; or she is Eris the goddess of discord and can deal with a SWAT team blowing away her pig-fat golem of a father and sending a wall of bullets right at her, then she raises her palm and the bullets stop mid-air and fall to the ground like it’s bullettime for real, and then everything matters.

Sirens are already everywhere, and Dave’s lungs feel like they’re full of hot coals. He zig-zags his way through the crowds on the streets, his borrowed coat flapping like broken bat wings. A familiar car roars his way. He thinks it’s Jeremy’s at first and is ready to empty a clip into the windshield, but this is an older, dumpier Nissan, and it jumps the curb right in front of him.

Uncle Bill sticks his head out the driver’s side window. “Get in!” he shouts. Dave makes a grab for the back door and throws himself onto the seat. The car takes off before he can slam the door shut behind him, and he nearly gets the edge of the duster caught, but he finally closes it.

Uncle Bill takes a portable blue light from the seat next to him, puts it on the dash, and clicks it on.

“Holy shit, you’re a cop!” Dave trembles hard, vomits a little. I scream at every one of his nerve endings
Don’t shoot
! and he manages not to.

“I
was
a cop. Then I got mixed up with a little bitch of our mutual acquaintance,” Uncle Bill says. “Ended up working for her papa in the restaurant, just to be near her. Then they moved to Jersey, and I didn’t get to see her nearly as much.” He looks old and worn out now—a young face, but his skin is a little ashy, there are wrinkles around his eyes, and his black hair is splattered with grey. “Sorry about the stabbing. I did it for her.”

“She told you to stab me . . .”

“Naw,” he says. “I just did it because I had the feeling she wanted me to.”

“Where are you taking me?”

“First, out of Hudson County. Then out of New Jersey.”

“Are we going to meet her somewhere? In the city?”

Uncle Bill just laughs and laughs.

The siren makes the traffic part, renders traffic lights irrelevant, and even lets Dave zip by real police cars. But there’s no radio in the car, no barrier between front seat and back, nor any of the other stuff he expects to see even in an undercover cop car. Uncle Bill is silent, his eyes slits as he drives.

They get on the turnpike, and the light isn’t enough. Bill clicks a button and a siren starts, but it sounds like it’s coming from the car radio speakers, and doesn’t quite match the siren sounds Dave has heard before. Regardless, the cars part like the Red Sea and the Nissan blows past commuters by the dozen.

“Where are we going? Pennsylvania?”
Too far.
Dave knows nobody down there, doesn’t even know where the good neighbourhoods and the bad ones are. In the distance, the Meadowlands. Dave knows it. Uncle Bill’s police stunt has cleared the traffic on both sides of the vehicle. In the air, a helicopter swoops in. News or police, Dave can’t tell.

Do it!
I tell him, and amazingly, he does. He opens the door and throws himself out. Adrenaline takes over. Even in the Ylem, I’m as drunk with it as he is. He doesn’t feel the wound on his side re-opening, or the tooth loosening when he hits the asphalt. He’s back up, gun out to ward off traffic in five stumbling steps, and he runs for the guardrail. Uncle Bill’s Nissan screeches as it fishtails. Dave hops the guardrail and hits the grass hard.

On your belly
! I tell him.
Crawl
! One of us had some military training—National Guard when Jeremy refused to pay for college, and what one Dave Holbrook knows, I know, and I told Dave the routine:
I’m up
!
He sees me
!
I’m down
! Uncle Bill drove up to the railing, got out of the car, and vaulted over the rail. We were extremely lucky. He had his hazard lights on—still putting on the cop act—and left his keys in the ignition. Dave wanted to take a shot, but it was hard enough to crawl in the muck, to push forward on elbows and knees, hard to breathe in the shit. He almost passed out, but managed to loop around while Bill searched the underbrush. Another burst of speed was all he needed to get into the car and lock himself in.

Dave had some small experience behind the wheel—no driver’s ed class, but a few spins around the parking lot and one harrowing night when Ann made him take the PATH to Hoboken and drive her back home from a bar—but I had a lot more. I pushed as hard as I could from the femtosecond in front of him. He got the car in reverse and slammed on the accelerator. The light afternoon traffic gave Dave a wide berth.

Dave had never been to Kearny, but I knew something about it. As an adult—as the man who’d brandished his gun at Mr. McCann but
did not shoot
—I’d been there once on an abortive third date. Third dates are dealmakers or dealbreakers. Either you get laid or get laid off. The woman, her name was Louise and we’d met at work, revealed the existence of her five-year-old son by way of introducing him. Cute kid, looked more like his white father than his black mother. His name was Louie, named for his mother. And we went to a local carnival. It was a typical Jersey night—hot and sticky and swarming with mosquitoes. Kearny is just twelve miles from Manhattan, and about one hundred years away.

We were walking down the midway, mostly pulling the boy past the crooked games and other joints the charms to which long hours and low wages at the state lottery commission had immunized us, when a barker outside the dark ride called Summer Tentacular started to tell a joke into a megaphone.

“Hey, I got a funny story for you all! This nigger walks into a bar—” Louise’s head snapped to. “Oh! There’s one here!” he blurted out. The boy started to cry. Louise picked him up and started walking back toward the parking lot. A few people dared jeer and call out to her, “Hey, it’s just a joke! What’s
your
problem!” Her face was stone. We didn’t kiss goodnight. I didn’t know what to say except “Sorry” and she wasn’t interested in even that. “Did you know that this fucking town,” she told me as she put Louie in his car seat over his wiggling, wailing, protests, “is named after a Civil War general?”

So yes, Kearny would do. We found the exit quickly enough and drove through Harrison, which I remembered well, right into the centre of town. Then we abandoned the car, parking it in front of the pork store from
The Sopranos
. Kearny is all squat little brick buildings, and the occasional public monolith—a small town that once had hopes to be a bigger one.