Bullettime (10 page)

Time to go, Mr. Holbrook
, Dave thinks, and he takes the opportunity to squeeze into the dead spaces between clumps of students to get onto Pavonia Avenue. He has the idea to just head into the city. The PATH train is only a buck, one way. He could make a day of it. Every decision is a universe unto itself, and in a dynamic group there were many decisions—turn left or right, duck down or rise up to the balls of one’s feet, stay still or run for it—that every kid filling the street outside the school could make. And here comes a fire truck, despite the absence of fire, or even smoke. There’s a world where I stayed put, paralyzed by anxiety and curiosity, and then just shuffled back into the school building like everyone else. One where I ran for it, made it to Manhattan, and stayed there for four cold nights before going home; and one where I made it to Manhattan and stayed there for three years, living in a squat till my blood grew poisoned and I died. One where I just went home and stayed truant for three days till my father threatened to call the police.

But this world—the one I’m watching now—is the one where Dave turns and runs, and walks right into a waiting fist. Dave doesn’t know who the guy is, but he had been in the cafeteria, and had sussed Dave out as the catalyst for his ruined morning. The bone that makes up his eye socket crunches hard, and his face and eyes fill with blood. The crowd hoots and
ooohs
. He doesn’t even fall to the ground before his assailant grabs a fistful of windbreaker, picks him back up and punches him again on the side of the head. That first blow was a miracle of brutality, but the next few don’t do much. Dave already has a broken nose, after all. He’s unconscious and hard to actually hold up with one hand. It’s like smacking around a rag doll, except that this one is built to bruise. Dave’s eyes flicker open and he thinks he sees something. Huge black wings. Oleg and his trench coat, on the back of the attacker, trying some goofy wrestling hold. Oleg gets shrugged off. He throws two ineffectual punches at the big kid’s back. There’s laughter everywhere. Someone else—Erin obviously, though Dave can’t tell Erin from a telephone pole at the moment—grabs Dave by the shoulders and leads him away to sit on the curb. Oleg hits the asphalt hard, and then the cops swoop in, truncheons in hand. More sirens—police this time, not fire trucks.

“Not bad, eh?” Erin says to Dave.

Dave opens his mouth to talk but Erin holds up a hand. “Don’t talk. Keep working on your breathing. And don’t blow the blood out of your nose; your eyes will swell shut. With a fire truck comes an ambulance, always, so just hang on, okay?”

Dave nods.

“You know, they say high school is the best time of our lives, and that we should do all we can to enjoy these carefree days before entering the real world. I have to agree. What a sunny day. It’s great to be outside instead of trapped in those stuffy old classrooms,” she says. “It’s like I can smell the asbestos. Good thing there was a real fire, eh?”

Dave says, “Whus goin’ on? Why?” He raises his arms, trying to encompass the whole scene before them. A dozen cop cars have arrived. The businesses along the street are closing early, pulling metal gratings down over their display windows. A helicopter hovers right over the school. The soap operas and morning news programs have been pre-empted for the live media feed. Somehow, Dave and Erin are invisible in the midst of the discord.

“You know, you’re totally going to wake up in the hospital,” Erin says. “I wonder how your folks will deal with it. Think they’ll finally pull you out of this shithole school?”

Dave shakes his head. “Mah duh wond . . .”

“Don’t speak, don’t speak,” Erin says, a finger on his lips. “You sound like a retard.” She takes his hand and puts it on her chest. “There. This is a first for you, isn’t it?” Dave swoons, and falls to the curb.

P
rison is a lot like high school. By that I mean that every motherfucker here deserves a fucking bullet in their head, with their mamas watching on TV as it happens. I’m famous enough that I have a cell to myself; it’s full of books and presents, and I even have my own computer. I’m like Mumia Abu-Jamal in here. French fucking novelists visit me, and their interviews with me appear in prestigious Communist literary journals. This is the life. Shooting up Hamilton really did solve all my problems.

Like I was telling one of those French fags the other day on Skype, “It’s all about carving out a little bit of free will. Aren’t all of you people supposed to be beret-wearing existentialists? You should know that you’re free all the time, but afraid of it. Well, something happened to me and then I wasn’t afraid anymore.” Sadly for the world, the art of the follow-up question has been lost, so he didn’t ask me what happened. What turned me from Dave into
I
, into the Kallis Episkopos! What made it so easy for me to pick up a machine gun and, with no experience in shooting at all, paint the hallways red.

I credit my existential cosmic freedom to cough syrup. I feel sorry for the youth of today. When I was in high school, you could walk into any drugstore and buy the stuff with little grief. Now they want to see ID, they keep records, take photos. I’m not even talking about the sizzurp—the prescription stuff—I mean plain old over-the-counter meds sufficient for a little robotrippin’.

I used to use a lot. It changes your perceptions. I understood things other people couldn’t. I knew that the goddess of discord, Eris herself, was a student at Hamilton, and she was attempting to manipulate events to create a bloodbath. Why New Jersey? Why the twenty-first century? Let’s just say that there’s always a bloodbath going on somewhere, and it’s hardly beyond the ability of a goddess to be in more than one place at a time.

And I saw something else. I saw myself, sitting atop the world, where the ice caps meet the sky, in a throne made of glacial ice. And due to my body heat, the ice began to melt and the trickling slush formed a thousand rivers and a million tributaries. And my face was reflected in the tiny chunks and particles of ice. Every little stream was a life of mine. The great big me atop the throne could see them all at once, and frown, or shake his head, or smile at his endless mistakes. But I, the me in my little purple drank haze, had to do it the hard way. Follow every stream to its end. Killed by the police. Dead in the incubator at three weeks old from a lung infection. Bad tin of sardines at age thirty-one. Or me, shooting my way through school and surrendering to the police. It’s a scandal.
Things
are blamed: video games, the Internet, lax morality, my supposed homosexuality, drunk mother, distant father, and, of course, race. I get poorly written fan letters from the chinless daughters of white supremacist Pineys to this day. I saw it all coming. I chose the path, chose to be manipulated by Eris, and have set myself up in the best of all possible worlds. A world that stretches before me, into infinity.

I tried to tell this all to my shrink, a few times. I knew she’d refuse to engage me—can’t feed into a patient’s delusions by taking them seriously enough to challenge, after all. But I also knew she’d finally cave in.

“Fine, then,” she said. “You know, already, everything about your life.”

“I do.”

“As though you are someone else, observing yourself from the outside. Watching a video of your own life, from beginning to end, and you can rewind, or freeze frame—”

“And listen to, and record my own director’s commentary as a special feature!”

“But you cannot change your fate. Dave Holbrook is just the main character in the video. Is that correct?”

“More or less. I mean, I decided which DVD of
I
to watch. And live.”

“So then, you must have at least skipped to the end of all of them in order to choose which life was most satisfying.”

“That’s right.”

She raised her palms to the cracked ceiling and gestured around us. “And this is the one you chose.”

“That’s also right.”

“So then, how does Dave Holbrook die?”

I just stared at her. She rolled her eyes. I suppose that the superior breed of psychologists end up working in places a little tonier than East Jersey State Prison. “How does
I
die?” she asked.

“How do I die? Or how do you die?” I laughed at my own little joke. It gets funnier every time I tell it to her. She raised her right hand and pointed her finger at me like it was a gun. I lifted my own finger and drew my symbol—three toothy little peaks and valleys—in response.

“Resistance. Electricity. Everything moving very quickly, as if superheated, and then it all stops at once.”

“You’re not on death row, Da—I. New Jersey eliminated the death penalty five years ago. There’s no electric chair in your future. Old Smokey is a museum piece.”

“Just try to act surprised when it happens, all right?”

“Our time is over for now, Mr. Holbrook.”

Ironically, there’s something very freeing about knowing one’s own fate. Some Spic tried to shank me the other day, but I knew it wasn’t going to work. The hacks had been tipped off—by me, having forged a note from one of their preferred drug customers—and they tackled the guy and broke his arm while I sat in the common area, playing countertop football with a bit of folded paper against my friend the retarded sex offender. I wasn’t able to act surprised, but that just adds to my mystique. In my vision, there was a web of tributaries branching off the stream of my prison sentence. In some I’m punked so hard and so often I go fag and prance around in lipstick and bleach-blonde hair. In others, I don’t make it that far—choked out and left to die in solitary by a hack whose cousin had gone to Hamilton but never graduated thanks to me. But in this particular babbling brook I’m wading through, nothing goes wrong until the end. I never get to see the outside again, or take a bus, or see her, but life is good. Conjugal visits from groupies with too much eye makeup. The occasional sit-down interview with a crusading journalist—I give them a three-star looney-toon act as requested—and a law library with which to amuse myself. My life is better than my shrink’s life, that’s for sure. It’s good. It’ll be a good, long life.

D
ave wakes up in the hospital. This is the awakening he remembers. First he spat out some gibberish to the EMTs on the trip to St. Mary’s Hospital in Hoboken. He tries to walk out of the ER and into the parking lot while being triaged. When he wakes up for the third time, he stays conscious and remembers. Dave’s entire face feels the way a 3D movie looks—like it’s floating in front of him in exactly the wrong spot. Only slowly does he become aware of the wider world. His mother Ann sitting next to him, sober but practically sweating alcohol. The curtains on either side of the bed—Dave is not in a room, nor is he in a ward. The noise and bustle beyond the curtains. He senses something else nearby too—it’s me—but only for a moment, then he is no longer able to experience me as I experience him.

“Mom?” Dave asks. Tears blind him.

“Oh honey,” Ann says. “I’m so sorry. Daddy is meeting with a lawyer now. We’re suing the school, we’re suing the district, the state of New Jersey—it controls the schools, after all. And we’ll find someplace for you. Someplace without riots and stabbings and nonsense. Don’t fall asleep; the doctors think you might have a concussion, and with your nose already messed up . . .”

It was the nicest thing my mother had ever said, in this timeline or any other. She was beyond “up” and “down”—she was actually a mother for once. If Erin hadn’t pulled the fire alarm, Dave never would have been spotted and punched in the face so ferociously and so publicly. If she hadn’t been there to sit him down on the curb, he would have been beaten down that much harder. Ann would have been drunk beyond kindness by the time Dave regained consciousness. Instead, she would have hissed,
What the hell did you do to bring this upon yourself
! and shriek her demand for an answer until a pair of orderlies dragged her outside.

But Dave only has a mind for Erin, who helped him to the curb and held his hand. “But . . . school,” he says, as best he is able.

“Sshh.” Ann puts her fingers to her own lips, then to those of her son. “Just rest now. Your father is on his way. He had to leave work early to come, so don’t agitate him with talk of wanting to stay in that horrible zoo.” She licks her lips and wrings her hands to hide the shakes. Then the kindness is gone, replaced by an urgent need. “Listen, Davey,” his mother says, “I’ll be right back. I have to find the restroom.” Dave is alone. He wants the restroom too, but can’t manage to get up, and he’s too embarrassed to use the bedpan, so he waits and squirms.

Ann doesn’t come back, but Jeremy finally does. His face tells Dave the story—the kid is a problem to be solved. “Where’s your mother?” he starts, but then immediately changes topics. “How are you feeling? Are you in a lot of pain? Do you need a painkiller?” And without waiting for an answer he says, “Let me get a nurse,” and then pushes his way through the curtains and bellows for a nurse. One comes soon enough, and happily hands Dave some pills, which he just as happily takes, but all he really wants is some Robitussin.
Maybe later
, he thinks,
once my parents are gone
.