Bullettime (5 page)

“Do you know what stop you’re getting off at?” A train was coming. Dave prided himself on knowing on which track a train would arrive from the merest initial vibrations. It was his train this time.

“Uhm . . . Ninth Street. I’m gonna hang out in the Village. You know, look around.” Behind Dave, the train rounds the bend to turn into the station from the yard, giving him a chance to shut up. The train slides to a halt in front of them, but the doors don’t open.

Dave looks at Erin.

“Look around, eh?” she asks.

“Yeah.”

“Exciting stuff! Do you look often?” Dave does look, at the train car nearest them, attempting to open the double doors by force of will. No go.

“So Erin, what brings you to the city?” Erin says to herself aloud.

“Oh, yeah. Uhm, what you going to do in the city?”

“Fuck some strangers,” she deadpans. “Not for money or anything. I’m just mad for the cock.”

Dave blushes furiously. Erin smiles and slowly raises her hand then points to her shirt. “You’re one of those uptight kids, aren’t you? I can tell because you’re wearing a belt instead of just letting your pants fall past your hips.”
But she’s wearing one too
, he thinks.

Finally, the doors open. Dave wonders if—and hopes that—Erin will sit next to him, and also that she’ll stop being so oddly antagonist. Instead, she sits across from him, across the narrow aisle of the train car. The train moves from the tunnel, and Erin whoops as they hit the sun-drenched elevated tracks. Dave grins as the reddish highlights in her dark mop of hair surface in the light.

“Hey, are you Irish?”

“What?” Erin asks. “What? What the hell is wrong with you!”

Dave slides down in his chair, submissive. “I was just asking.”

“I’m Greek. You know, Greek? Ever been to a diner? It’s a pleasure to serve you? Tacky murals of the Acropolis? Zorba? Opa? Can’t play cards? Big fat weddings?”

“Well your name is Erin—”

“My name’s not Erin. That’s for you white people. My name is
Irini
,” she says, rolling her
r
and elongating her
e
’s to an almost ridiculous extent, at least to Dave’s ear.

“Wait, you’re white—”

Erin ignores that. “Irini means ‘peace’; it’s a very common name, actually. After the Greek goddess.”

“I never heard of any Greek goddess named Irini.” Dave says it “Eye-reenee.”

Erin kicks up a sneakered foot, then slams it back down to the floor, coming nowhere near Dave’s face, but he flinches anyway. “She’s not the sort of goddess you’d find the stats for in your copy of
Deities and Demigods
, but she’s real. Oh yes, very real.”

Dave leans in, suddenly excited again. “Oh wow, do you RP?”
I’m in
, he thinks.

Erin lifts her hands, “Oh God, forget I mentioned it.”

“Well how do you know RPG manuals? Did you have a boyfriend that used to play or something?”

“Oh yeah, I like to fuck strangers who are in college and get good grades—lots of nerds at NYU and Columbia.”

“Is that where you’re headed now?”

Erin points out the window behind Dave’s head. “Ah, is this your stop?”

“Thanks!” Dave says as he hops out of his seat, grabs onto the pole and performs what he hopes is a cool-looking spin toward the opening set of doors, only to be greeted by the sight of a PATH station pillar with a large white letter C on blue tile. Christopher Street. Manhattan’s fancy little gay neighborhood, where rainbow flags decorate storefront windows as frequently as stickers for Zagat Guides or the
New York Times,
which is sold everywhere, of course. Flushed, he pivots on his heel and sits back down, while Erin does a little laughing jig in her seat and mouths the word “Fag-got” at him.

His stop, 9th Street, was only twenty seconds away, but they were a long and sullen twenty seconds. Erin stands up with him and loudly calls out, “Bye, David Holbrook of Jersey City who is going to the Village to look around!” as he darts, shoulders lowered and head first, out of the car, through the turnstile, and up the steps and the three-jointed winding tunnel that lets him out on the corner of West 9th and 6th Avenue.

And Dave does look around. He likes the Jefferson Library; its spire and old clock, he decides, look European. It’s closed now, though, and sitting on the steps to people-watch is no fun without company. He doesn’t like it when the little yappy dogs turn their heads to stare and bark at him while their owners, always imperious and oblivious at once, march down the street without a word of apology. There is a great barrier between Jersey City and Manhattan, despite the PATH train, despite the fact that the Hudson is easily traversable. People from there just don’t come here. That’s why Dave likes it so much.

Dave decides to walk down to Washington Square Park. He loves the few blocks he traverses; autumn leaves have a smell subtle but pervasive enough to scrub the exhaust out of the air. Brownstones with huge bay windows line the streets, and Dave loves the glimpses of walls painted in tasteful reds, the endless shelves of books, and occasionally on stoops or walking past the windows, the people who can actually, through seniority or million-dollar incomes, afford to live here.

The city, Dave decides, is much different than the picture painted by his mother’s hissing and spitting: “Scum, trash, and spics. The city is a cesspool, a pit. I hate that your father even has to work there,” she told him this morning, agitated as she was before her morning tea and palmful of medicine. “Were it up to me, I’d blow up the Holland Tunnel and the PATH train, just to keep the city people from seeping over the river. I don’t even know why you want to go there. Just be careful—don’t look any black people in the eye. That’s how they challenge people on the streets; they’ll kill you if you stand up for yourself.” He laughed at that, but she was serious, almost frantic, and explained that she had read it in the newspaper once, or maybe it was the TV news, plus she had grown up in Gramercy Park back when New York was at least “half-sane,” so she knows what she’s talking about. “And don’t buy any food from a cart!”

Dave knows plenty about looking down at the ground when confronted anyway, but walking to the park, which is easy enough to find, he holds his chin high and smiles. He doesn’t even wonder what this would feel like on cough medicine till he gets to the crowded park and hangs out on the fringes of several knots of NYU students who play guitars, bullshit in the shade under trees, or fall off their skateboards and gamely get up to try again.

Dave is too shy to talk to anyone, and is for once glad of his power of near-invisibility. He loves walking lazy circles around the fountain and the larger concentric circles of the park’s paths, flowing from the rapid-fire hip-hop of someone’s freestyling (“I’ll cap yo’ ass like a motherfucker/pump the bass like a motherfucker/go to class learn a rhyme for motherfucker . . . motherfucker!”) to an old man’s violin—Dave throws seventy-five cents in quarters into the case at the man’s feet—to the strum of a guitar and the enthusiastic warbling of some minor Beatles tune. It’s sunny. Lots of girls are out, most of them casually chatting and leaning in close toward one another, the way girls do, and showing off the straps of their thongs, all for Dave. Robitussin would make that last more convincing, he thinks.

He buys an expensive Coke and an outrageous pretzel from a cart, shuffles through a flock of pigeons, sending them flying, and is drawn to the dog run by the dusty tussles and barking. Surrounding the park like barbed wire, the properties of New York University, some of them gutted brownstones, others modern buildings of slab concrete and eight-foot-high windows. Dave wants to go to NYU; then he can come to the park and actually know the people here, have something to talk to them about, like organic chemistry or Free Mumia. (A band? Is reggae cool? He makes a mental note to download some when he gets home.) He sneaks the last chunk of his pretzel through the wire fence and watches a smiling Lab mix run to him and snag the treat whole. He wonders if he’ll see Erin in the park; maybe she really does fuck strangers. Everyone out here sure seems friendly with one another, the way they sit so close even in the heat, or cuddle in the shade of the trees. Maybe he could even find a girl who likes to fuck strangers, if he only knew how to identify them and what to say.

Dave realizes he’s pacing after he passes the same chess game four times, and decides to find some place to eat. He cuts down Washington Square Park South and walks in the valley of row houses and tasteful little stores, heading deeper into the Village. Everything looks kind of expensive, or at least French; even little luncheonettes with room for only two tables seem to pride themselves on foreign-seeming signage and weird foods. Like pad Thai and Orangina. Dave suddenly wonders how many of the guys back in the park were gay; did they think he was looking for a pick-up or hustling or something with all his obvious walking around by himself?

He blushes, makes a right, and comes along a more soothing street. It has a McDonald’s on it, like an oasis. He didn’t come all this way to eat a Value Meal #2 though, and even McDonald’s is a buck more across the Hudson, so he decides on the small diner three doors down. It’s not a big chrome and tin job like he’s used to from Jersey, but the Washington Place Diner And Restaurant (Two rooms? Two menus?) looks inviting enough, with booths and a counter and even a revolving display case full of fluffy cakes and almost menacing-seeming pies. The door is wide open and exhaling nicely chilled air-conditioned air as well, and Dave can almost smell the grease of the disco fries in the air. He walks up the steps and into the vestibule, and through the second glass door separating the foyer from the diner proper (or is this the restaurant section?), he sees her.

She’s behind the counter, a white button-up shirt and black blazer over her tank top, lifting a plate smeared with ketchup and the leftover lettuce and coleslaw of a Burger Platter Deluxe with one hand and wiping down the Formica under it with her other. He stays long enough to watch her shove the plate across the stainless steel shelf under the window that separates counter from kitchen, walk back to the counter to pocket her buck and change tip, and then take up her position, bored-looking, arms crossed, with an empty frown on her face, by the cash register. Behind her, and behind the soda fountain, and the short-order cook who stands out, as he’s a black man, Dave sees the faded blue skies and crumbling pillars of a tacky mural of the Acropolis.

Dave turns and runs back the two blocks to the PATH train and stands on the mostly empty platform for nearly half an hour before the train going back to Jersey comes, smoldering in an inexplicable shame.

T
he Ylem isn’t so much a place as it is the canvas places are painted on. Here I can live every decision and detail of an infinite number of me. Of course the shooting cuts a huge red slash through my personal Ylem, like a line in the financial pages after a stock market crash. Sometimes I was able to resist Eris for weeks, or months, before pulling the trigger. A couple of times she never got to me at all.

There are endless realities shifting and swirling in the Ylem, and I’ve lived them all. Nothing else to do, really. I died a baby due to bronchitis, and never felt anything more than cold and a harsh thimble full of air. There was an “accident”—that’s what the principal called it—in eighth grade. I was accidentally cornered and kicked so hard in the ribs that splinters of bone tore right through my guts. I didn’t even die till seventh period, in World Literature.

I never live past forty. No matter what, I never marry. No kids. Sex sometimes, in college, thanks to beer and a sad little aura of being the nicest guy in some ramshackle dorm at Stockton College. That me studied psychology. The school was close to Atlantic City, so I learned to count cards and I didn’t need to work, as long as I lost frequently enough to keep the Mafia from beating me up in an alley. I learned that trick from some guy I met in an alley. Later, I die in a car wreck.

Those are the boring lives. Most of them are very boring, with nothing more to say for them than a really good meal, or a glimpse in the dark of a dazed smile on the face of a pretty girl I managed to get into bed and make come.

Eris is like a pillar of flame, splashing heat and light all across the narrow hallways of my life’s labyrinth. And she put me here, to make me her slave.

I’m not Dave Holbrook; I’m just the part of Dave Holbrook who wasn’t insane. She had so many ways and so many tricks; in the Ylem I see them all very clearly, and while poor lost Dave twists and writhes against a million predestinations, like a prisoner being prodded to the lip of a grave at bayonet point, at the crack of a whip, from the tug of a leash around his neck. Eris is truly a goddess. It’s scary to see free will in action. They control the rest of us. If they’re flame, we’re moths.

She ignores Dave in the halls and in the classroom. Dave walks through his days in a soporific stupor, too blitzed to notice even when Malik holds out a big meaty arm for Dave to walk into, sending him to the floor. Malik laughs, then yawps when his laugh doesn’t compel a sufficient number of girls to turn around. Then he walks on. There’s no rhyme or reason for these attacks, and that’s what they are, Dave decides. There isn’t some group of students who are bullies or gang members or “acting out,” however people put it—attacks and assaults come in waves. It’s information, abstract, that occasionally finds a medium of expression in someone next to Dave.

A chop to the throat, light but painful enough, then some big brown eyes in his face, demanding this or that admission of joy in taking it up the ass like a fag, or in being a white dick-eating bastard. Dave mutters some response, and the mouth under the eyes says, “Excuse me?” But it’s not arrogant, or threatening, or a simmering response to a perceived challenge, the kid—whatever his name was, James something—really just said, “Excuse me?” the way his mother must have taught him to do at age three whenever he didn’t hear something completely.

Erin walks by, a magazine folded over in her left hand, her eyes squinting (Dave finds the hint of crow’s feet attractive, a flaw that makes her accessible) and Dave shouts in the hope that she’ll turn around. “I said fuck you! You’re the faggot!”