Bullettime (3 page)

“Uhm, Dave.”

“Who the fuck is Dave? Your boyfriend? What’s his come taste like?”

“I’m Dave. It’s me.”

“You’re Dave!” he bellows. “Hey, Charles,” he says, flagging down another cultist, this one sporting, in addition to a shell necklace, the ridiculous white wall haircut (hair on top, dead pale bald scalp around all the sides) that mark him as a member of the warrior caste. “This kid eats his own come!”

Charles likes the sound of that, apparently, and ambles over. My arm feels a ghostly, nostalgic pain.

“I don’t,” Dave says.

“You calling me a liar, now?” Charles turns and frowns at his friend. Dave sees their sweaters pulse and shift colours with a simmering anger, like the skins of annoyed lizards.

“I think he is.”

“I’m not.”

“What are you calling him, fag?” Charles demands, with the tips of two thick fingers tapping on Dave’s chest. On the still sticky blood.

“Ew, he’s got come on him!” Charles exclaims.

“Dude, I can’t believe you touched that guy. AIDS test!”

“Dude, shut the fuck up,” Charles says. He lifts his hands and hesitates for a second, then grabs Dave by the tops of his shoulders (where there is no blood), spins him around, and twists his arm into a chicken wing.

“You are out, loud, and proud, faggot! Say it!”

“Say what?” Dave says through gritted teeth.

“Say you’re a come-eating fag who likes to eat his own come!” suggests the first cultist, almost helpfully.

Dave feels the pain, but it’s far off, like his wrist and elbow are twenty, thirty feet away. “I’m a come-eating fag and I like to eat my own come . . . just like you guys do.” He gets a book bag to the gut for that, the sharp corner of some overstuffed history text finding rib.

Charles tosses him to the ground, and as if on ritual cue, the first cultist gurgles and sucks loudly, and spits a gob of phlegm and spittle in Dave’s hair. They laugh and the pair march off, their arms heterosexually swung over one another’s shoulders.

“Eats his own come, that’s fucking gross.”

“Nobody’s eatin’ my come but Marni!” says Charles, to ward off evil.

“Aw, she’s gotta love that shit.”

As they turn the corner, leaving Dave behind in the emptying hallway, Charles recommends to his friend eating pineapple some hours before a date to make one’s ejaculate taste sweeter. When they’re out of sight, Dave rolls over onto his back and decides that he has lost his taste for Chemistry class. He folds his arms behind his head, crosses his legs and stares up at the ceiling. I’d say something like “time passes” but here in the Ylem it doesn’t.

Officer Levine’s head comes into view like an unexpected eclipse.

“What are you doing down there?”

“Don’t spit on me, please,” Dave says, “if you don’t like my answer. I’m resting. There was a brutal assault. Can’t you see that I’m covered in blood?”

“Get up, you’re going down to the office.” And he did, and they both did, and there Dave passed Eris, who was leaving as he entered, and she said that he always seems to find himself covered in so many interesting bodily fluids.

Dave sat through the interminable head-shaking lecture by the vice principal, and the filling out of the referral card to the school psychologist, in his tussin haze, but also with an erection.

I
never shot anyone, I never did any time, and really I never did much of anything except go to Rutgers, pretend to want to be an architect for two years before dropping out, and end up working for the company that installs New Jersey State Lottery machines in bodegas and liquor stores.

Today I was even back in Jersey City, on the corner of Marin Boulevard and Fourth Street, in a little store in the gentrified area. I never think about high school. I was glad not to be in that part of town. My name, as far as the Filipina woman behind the counter was concerned, was “Broken Yes?” She saved her smiles for the customers, despite the fact that likely half her income was made from the machine I was fixing. Yes, the lottery machine was broken, and I bent over the machine for over an hour, running the usual diagnostic program three or four times, checking the wiring, testing the outside line. In the narrow aisles of the store, near the Chef Boyardee products, a few customers buzzed to themselves and frowned, waiting for me to actually figure out the problem.

“I need to play my numbers,” one of them said. An older guy, hard to say whether he was just naturally small or if he’d shrivelled over the years. Drugs. Too much canned spaghetti and forty-dollar dreams. A former Golden Gloves bantamweight boxer who got knocked out in the second round of his first pro fight and was quickly retired by his handlers; with no skills and without the size to be a good bouncer or even a garbage man, he made his way with odd jobs. . . . I do this, making up life stories for the people I encounter. It’s a hobby, or a mental problem.

“Well, why don’t you go play them at the bodega down the block?”

“No, here. This is my lucky machine.”

“Oh?” I said. “Have you won here before?”

“No, but I came very close once. Two numbers on the weekly.”

We stared at one another; I was dubious, he was hopeful.

“For three weeks in a row. The past three weeks, I’ve guessed two numbers right. This week, if I get three numbers, just one more number, bam! Five hundred dollars. This is my week. I’m lucky, I can feel it.”

“Well, I’ll do my best to finish soon.” I looked back down at the guts of the machine and realized that I had entirely forgotten what I was going to try next.

“Smack it on the side, that always works!” Charles said over the sound of the bells tied to the door as he walked in, covered the length of the store in three strides, and opened the refrigerator to retrieve two bottles of Snapple, the fingers of one wide hand wrapping around their necks. He walked up to me and planted himself in front of the lottery machine like it was the cash register on the other hand of the counter.

“C’mon, guy,” he said, “give it a good ol’ whack.” He pantomimed the action with his free hand and smiled. I looked into his eyes; they were blue. I’d remembered them as a deadly sort of brown. He didn’t recognize me. God, I felt small just then. Is this how the cashier felt when I looked at her and saw just a tiny birdlike woman with a frown?

Charles laughed at his own joke, because it was even funnier the second time around. Playing along, I slapped the casing on the side of the machine. The sleepy hum of the power source bloomed to activity, and half a dozen receipts worth of paper tongue shot forth from the slit. The dour mood of the place lifted like fog off my glasses; we were all smiles.

“Well, thanks.”

“No sweat,” Charles said as he shifted over to the cash register and handed over his bottles and a five-dollar bill, expertly slid from a money roll with his thumb. My smile was frozen; however my jaw and cheeks connect to my neck, the tendons had decided to seize up.

“Put the cover on, quick. I need to play my numbers,” said the shrivelled man. It wasn’t a demand, but the sort of deliriously happy request one might hear from someone who wants to show you the knot of wood that looks just like the Virgin Mary. It was an excuse to turn away from Charles—who was telling me, or everyone else, that he was just here to help—so I replaced the top plate of the casing and snapped it shut.

“We are good to go!” The bells jingled again. Charles was gone.

I spent almost forty-five minutes in my car, in the parking lot behind the apartment complex next to the store, crumpling, flattening out, then crumpling again the cellophane wrapping my cupcakes had come in. “God, God, I hate myself, I hate everybody, hate myself,” I muttered through clenched teeth. My facial muscles still weren’t cooperating. I smiled at myself in the rear view mirror. Side view too. “People need to die.”

He hadn’t even recognized me. I had dreams of that man, dreams where I’d held his lungs in my hands, for years. I wanted to laugh at him because, apparently, he was still stuck in Jersey City while I’d made it out at least to Bergen County. But he was all smiles and good luck, and the lowlifes who hang around mini-marts all day waiting to drop fifty bucks at a time on the Lotto loved him, and I was the fat nerd with black crumbs on his involuntarily gleeful lips who was sitting in his car and looking across the Hudson at the glorious grey skyline of Manhattan where I hadn’t even been in three months, not since the little strip mall with the Starbucks and the well-stocked video store had opened across the street from my condo complex.

Maybe he had a shitty job. Hell, maybe he had a great job and owned one of the brownstones they were sandblasting and rehabbing all over downtown. I always wanted to live in a brownstone. Charles was still broad-shouldered. Maybe he was one of those rich contractors working all over the city on spidery scaffolding, shouting at his Latino workers, and then driving home to his McMansion where he has three fat kids with crew cuts or carefully gelled hair who want to go out for junior lacrosse this year, and his wife is happy about that because that means she can shave her pussy again and get some mid-afternoon sex on their white couch under the skylights in their living room bigger than my whole apartment—I was doing it again.

“God, I want to kill,” I said again, loud enough to scare myself. I tasted the bitterness in my throat, then smelled it. That weird lemony-herb shampoo Erin’s hair always seemed to smell like. Cloves and spittle, I tasted them on my lips like her kiss—everything except pressure and the brush of the tip of her nose against my cheek. The way she would blink.

If the universe worked the way I had thought it did at that moment, it would have started to rain big fat drops, but there was nothing fallacious about this particular pathetic scene, so I just sat there in the fog until the parking lot started filling up as people came home from work in the city. I started my car and drove home with the snack wrappers in my lap the entire way. When I merged onto the freeway, I thought I saw myself sitting in the back seat, a foggy ghost, staring at me with a practiced sneer, but that was only for a second.

D
inner was Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, a flavour I used to miss, but now can taste all the time whenever I like, which is never because I can taste any flavour I like whenever I wish it. I have to say that there is a lot out there most people have never tried. For Dave, the taste of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese is the best part of dinner, which otherwise reminds him of a game of Risk where his forces are being shoved down the cone of South America, isolated in Madagascar, and otherwise utterly destroyed.

His mother, Ann, is “up” as Dave thinks of it, and drinking white wine from a plastic cup; she draws her own pours from the large box sitting on the credenza behind her chair. When Ann is up, she likes to be debriefed by Dave and his father Jeremy, who is a scoop of mayonnaise over a pair of khakis. The dining room—more of a nook formed by the short stem of the L-shaped living room (the kitchen being the space between stems)—smelled vaguely of eucalyptus and burnt chicken, which wasn’t helping Dave with his game.

“So, David,” Ann says, “I could not help but notice the very large stain on your shirt. Did you not feel the need to change your shirt for dinner?”

Jeremy snorts.

“All my other clothes are dirty—you haven’t done laundry in more than a week.”

“There’s nothing stopping you from doing your own laundry, son,” Jeremy says. “I spent a lot of money on that washer/dryer. It’s not there to gather dust and hold dirty dishes,” he says, swinging an arm toward the kitchen where indeed the top of the washing machine is stacked with dirty dishes, “and I’m sure you can do some dishes once in a while too.” Dave opens his mouth to counter that Jeremy can do all those chores just as easily, when Ann outflanks Dave from his left: “And all those dirty shirts are actually still significantly cleaner than the one you’re wearing now, aren’t they?”

“Yeah—” Dave mumbles, calling time-out by shoving a heaping forkful of macaroni in his mouth.

“You should really do your mother the favour of picking up some of the slack around here,” Jeremy says. “Everything is everywhere.”

Dave can’t argue with that. “Everything
is
everywhere,” he repeats.

“Well then, where is my clean house?” Ann asks. She turns to Jeremy. “You can do something once in a while.”

“We can all do something; I still think making a spreadsheet with all the chores and our names in three columns, and putting it on the refriger—”

“Bo-ring,” Ann says, waving her glass around. Dave sits back in his chair and enjoys scraping some of the crumbly cheese residue from the side of his plate with an artfully forked green bean. He knows he only has a few seconds, as Dad always reacts to Mom’s little episodes with the sort of oblivious silence only a man sculpted from mayonnaise can manage.

“This isn’t a workplace, Jer,” Ann says, then she gulps some wine and holds it in her cheeks while she pivots on her chair to reach her box for a refill. She swallows and continues: “This is a family. We shouldn’t need some corporate framework to get our own chores done. We should all be looking to one another”—she looks at Jeremy, then pointedly at Dave—“and thinking, ‘What can I do to make my father, or my wife, or my son, more comfortable’ because that is what families do. They do things out of love.” She stares into space, or at least into the door that leads into the kitchen, for a long moment, then asks without turning back to Dave, “Did you like your dinner?”