Bullettime (12 page)

I ran the machine through its testing procedures, had the owner retest it, and then had him sign off. As I was leaving, I heard that voice again: “Mr. Holbrook!” It was McCann, older and wilted.

“That’s me,” I said. McCann was holding a small bottle of Slivovitz, and a handful of beef jerky strips. The classic signs of a human wreck. He didn’t even think to grab something classier to show off in front of me, or to wait till after I left to do his morning groceries.

But I was wrong again. “It’s good to see you,” he said. “You seem . . . all right, eh? I was worried about you. So worried . . .”

“Well yes, everything’s fine,” I said. I could have apologized to him, but I just didn’t want to. My father always made me apologize for the endless imagined slights my mother complained about, and the words always stuck in my throat. I liked this encounter after all. I shouldn’t have waited outside on the curb. “Should I have been worried about you?” The rhetorical knife felt good in my hand.

“Yes, of course you should have,” McCann said. His teacherly timbre returned to his voice for a moment. “And you also should have been concerned about yourself. You were very lucky that the police didn’t shoot you, that you weren’t arrested and sent to an adult prison. Do you have any idea what they would have done to the likes of you?” His hands shook and the plastic wrap of his beef jerky crinkled loudly in his grip. Then he said it,
sotto voce
. “Faggot.” McCann kept whispering, an edge in his voice. “Just because you’re a faggot you think you can get away with ruining people’s lives, their careers? Fucking fags like you ruin it for the rest of us!”

“The rest of us!” I laughed. “Are you coming out of the closet to me?”

“Oh yeah, you’d like that,” McCann says. “You can suck my cock right here, just like a little tenth grader who wants a better grade.” He lifted his right arm, making to throw his booze at me.

I put up my hands. “Take it easy, old man.” He didn’t throw the bottle, but he took another step toward me, so I went to the car and opened the trunk. I was fast, he was slow. I pulled out the state-regulation tire iron and slapped it against my palm. “I’m not a kid anymore. I don’t have to eat a bowl of shit whenever someone offers it up to me. If you want to go, you’ll be going . . . to the hospital.” It wasn’t a great threat, but I hadn’t been in a situation like this since high school. I never had to try to intimidate someone who was actually smaller and weaker than me. But I still needed the weapon. Then we both heard the thick
ka-chunk
of a shotgun being readied. The liquor store cashier was staring at us from the doorway with his arms crossed over his chest. Behind him, a giant stockboy fresh from the pages of a Steinbeck novel had a shotgun in his hands.

“Take it elsewhere . . . boys,” the cashier said.

“You’re not going to shoot us in broad daylight,” McCann said, still angry.

“No, but if you’re not out of here in three seconds, I’m banning you from the store for life,” the cashier said. And then he looked at me. “And I’ll call my alderman, and the
Star-Ledger
, and some guy I know down in Trenton and I’ll guarantee you won’t be able to get work catching rats in Camden.” That took the wind out of McCann, and there was no percentage in me waiting around anymore. With my luck, some do-gooder with a cellphone camera would be along to snap a picture of me and my state-issued tire iron. Without a word, I walked around the car to the driver’s side, got in, put the tire iron on my lap, and left.

In the Ylem, I realized something—that poor schmuck hadn’t had a pleasant conversation involving more than one other person in years. Fast-food restaurant servers, our mother Ann, one co-worker or supervisor at a time, the occasional odd phone call to a Match.com woman—that was Dave Holbrook’s life. Group interactions necessarily meant animosity, ridicule, and occasionally the threat of violence. I whispered this in his ear, playing the role of introspection, but I was deaf to myself, as I knew he would be. I saw his life all the way to the end already, after all. An accident with a belt in a closet. My awareness extends only until the moment of death, and there’s no alternative where I try that sort of erotic stunt and survive, so I have no idea what happens next. Does Ann find the body immediately, or does it take a few days for it to get ripe, like strange fruit, and finally rouse her from the couch? Does she shriek in fear and pain, or lash out angrily at the corpse, berating and belittling it, though of course even I can’t hear her, and nobody can answer her. I wouldn’t put it past my old mother to yell at her son’s dead body. She always took everything so personally. In the Ylem I rarely laugh, as laughter requires surprise and surprise requires a limitation of information and awareness. But I imagine my mother looking at my dead body, limbs puffy and blue, and shouting at me, “You did this on purpose to ruin my Thursday! You do this all the time!” and my guffaw echoes across the endless plane of my existence.

D
ave is out of the hospital the next morning. That is to say, he is discharged. As a dependent minor he’s not allowed to leave without the company of a parent or guardian, but neither Jeremy nor Ann has made an appearance. I know that Jeremy made Ann swear that she would pick up their son, and she promptly forgot, having grown distracted with white wine and some home makeover TV show. Jeremy knew she might; he was mostly interested in extracting the promise and adding it to his store of grievances. First he has to work on the weekend, second he can’t trust his wife to pick up her own son from the hospital. So Dave sits in the lobby, without even seventy-five cents to spend on a candy bar at the gift shop. Calls are made to the house, messages left, nurses tsk-tsk and sigh and then finally a St. Mary’s nun asks if Dave might have any other relatives he could call.

“Uhm, I’ll need the phone book,” Dave says, and when a northern New Jersey one is proffered, he says, “Uh, no. Manhattan.” It’s Saturday. He calls the Washington Place Diner and Restaurant. A woman answers. She has an American accent, but a cigarette-stained voice. A grown-up.

“I need to speak to Erin,” Dave says. “Is she working today? And her father too?”

There’s no answer of any sort for a long time. Dave titters nervously and shrugs at the impatient nun. Finally, a younger voice asks, “Hello?”

“Erin, it’s me, Dave. I need a ride from the hospital. My parents are, uh, indisposed. I’m being signed out, or I can be signed out, I mean, but I need, uhm, uncle Bill to come get me, okay?”

Erin knows exactly what has happened. It’s a perk of her social position as the goddess of discord. She quickly agrees to find and drive out to Hoboken. Then she hangs up without saying goodbye, like in a movie. Dave says “Goodbye” to the dial tone, and tells the nun it will be a while.

It takes hours, but Erin does finally appear, with a grown-up man, a black man. He looks like a newly active volcano, but Erin is entirely carefree, all smiles and twinkling eyes. “Dave!” she shouts, and rushes toward Dave, arms wide for a hug. She strokes his face and fusses over the bandage on his nose, the bloody bruises under his eyes, and the big lump on the left side of his face.

“Hi, Erin . . .” Dave says. And to the man, “Uncle Bill.” The nun and a social worker and a nurse appear, happy to sign Dave out to anyone who happens to want him. The social worker nearly asks how exactly haddock-white Dave and swarthy Erin and African-American “Uncle Bill” are related—I can see the word
How
forming on her lips—but she swallows the question. Erin wraps her arm around Dave again and turns him to go, and then she looks over at me. Me, floating in the spaces between quarks, in the froth of the Ylem, and she winks at me.

Moments later they’re outside, and without another word the man storms off, muttering about having to get back to work before “the Puerto Ricans rob the store.” Dave thinks the man looks familiar—it’s the guy who stabbed him with the pen, but before Dave can say anything about it, Erin kisses him on the cheek and whispers in his ear, “I knew you’d come crawling back to me. Don’t reject me anymore. I hate it.”

Wasn’t that the secret theme of
The Iliad
, after all? Jealous Eris creates an apple emblazoned with the legend
Kallisti
. Hapless Paris is then told to choose between Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite, and from his choice comes the Trojan War and the end of the Trojan civilization. But all Paris really had to do was open his eyes, glance over in the direction from whence the apple came, and choose Eris as the fairest. Give her the apple back. Pay her some attention. Is that so much to ask for? In the early twenty-first century, young Erin wasn’t even fishing for compliments; she just wanted some company, another member in her secret society. She was looking for Dave, but got me, trapped in the Ylem and visible only to her, forever.

Erin leads Dave down the streets of Hoboken, and it’s a small city so there aren’t many, and brings him to a Barnes & Noble near the PATH station. They find a loveseat tucked away by the Science Fiction/Fantasy section, and Dave makes a joke about sci-fi fans being the last to need a loveseat and Erin pretends not to get it.

“What do you think your father will do when he gets to the hospital and finds that you’ve been released into the custody of a non-existent uncle?” she asks.

“I don’t want to think about it,” Dave says. “Why don’t we just go home? If I’m home when he gets home, it won’t matter. I’ll tell him Mom picked me up.”

She ignores that and takes his hand and puts it in her lap. “I want you,” she whispers, “to make me come.”

Dave squirms away and reaches randomly for a book on the nearest shelf, from the Games section right next to the sci-fi. “Hey, what’s this?” he asks himself unconvincingly. The cover’s black, with a golden apple on it. “The
Principia Discordia
,” he reads, “or
How I Found the Goddess and What I Did To Her When I Found Her
. That’s a strange name for a game.”

“I think it’s fitting,” Erin says, and she grabs his wrist and with surprising strength pulls him back down onto the couch. “What would you do to her, Davey? Let’s find out. And this will be quick and easy. I told you not to make me mad anymore, not to reject me. Just do it,” she says. Her jeans are unbuttoned, the fly halfway pulled down. She takes his hand and flattens his palm against her stomach, then leads it down into her jeans, under her panties, and then lower. “Just rub gently, and you can go home,” she says. “I come quick. It’s easy. It’ll just take . . .” she gasps a bit in his ear, “two minutes.” Dave’s fingers find coarse pubic hair, and heat, and wet. The blood is swimming behind his eyes again. If only I had hands with which to pull a fire alarm this time. If only this wasn’t the best moment of young Dave’s life. The book falls to the floor. Erin nuzzles Dave’s face, his cheek, whimpers into his ear and he massages and prods, sometimes clumsily, sometimes too tentatively. She grunts once, and squirms away from his touch for a moment, but presses his hand back against her sex and grinds against his fingertips. Dave feels for all the world like an innocent bystander in this. His nose still hurts, and it stings when one of Erin’s dark curls brushes against his face. But this is his first time really touching a girl. He loves it. He pushes a fingertip into her and is rewarded by a set of slick teeth nibbling on his ear, then a big wet tongue, and a gasp, and a shudder, and a strong hug. Her arms feel like rebar around his ribcage. She wraps her fingers around his wrist, withdraws his hand from her jeans and gently suckles his two wet fingers.

Dave’s eyes are wide, like a truck is bearing down on him. He hasn’t exhaled in nearly a minute. “Good boy,” Erin tells him. “Thank you, I liked that. Did you like that?”

Dave nods.

“Maybe next time you’ll let me do you.”

“Maybe,” Dave says.

“Why don’t you go home now? I want to take the ferry back to the city.”

“Uhm, okay,” Dave says.

“Good, you do that. I’ll see you at school on Monday,” Erin says as she slips off the couch. She turns a corner around one set of bookshelves and is gone. Dave picks up the book he was looking at, flips through it, and reshelves it before going to the bathroom to deal with his erection. He doesn’t make it home in time to get his story straight with Ann, or fool Jeremy. He can hear the howling from the street. Not just his father, but his mother too. Adrenaline and stress must have sobered her up enough to fight back. Dave waits outside till the cops come. It’s Detective Giovanni, and a uniform. The detective smiles as he gets out of his car and looks at Dave. “Hey, look! Another missing person case solved.” Then his focus shifts to Dave’s face. “Blocking punches with your head, eh, Rocky? You need a more active combative strategy.”

Dave giggles, but he knows he should be angry.

D
ave solves the problem by taking the blame. It was his idea to skip out early, to make up “Uncle Bill,” he says. He left Erin out of the story, and inserted Oleg—who probably has a million crazy uncles anyway—in her place. The detective calms his parents. Kids do bad things sometimes, even smart kids, even good kids, if the parents are busy with other things. He studiously examines the wine glasses on the coffee table, even holding them up to the light and sniffing them, though they were all empty except for sticky traces, as he speaks of parental distractions and precarious teenage years. Dave doesn’t ask to be excused. He just locks himself in his room and spends the evening sniffing his fingers and dosing himself with Mexican cough syrup, while his computer grinds away in its Napster mp3 downloads.

He wakes up Sunday to the tinkling of a thousand glasses. In the alley between houses, his father is outside, recycling two large Hefty bags full of wine and liquor bottles. Dave sniffs the air. Nothing is cooking, nothing is burning. Not even coffee. Mom must be gone. She is, for a little while. To visit her sister, or some other similar excuse. It’s a very quiet Sunday. Jeremy likes to watch golf on TV. They get a pizza and eat half of it for lunch and half of it for dinner. Dave floats the idea of going to the mall and maybe seeing a movie or getting some Dippin’ Dots ice cream, but Jeremy thinks a kid who just spent a night in the hospital—“Even if only for observation, and who is sporting a big ol’ broken nose”—should relax at home. Get to bed early. School’s on tomorrow, no matter what happened last week.