Bullettime (6 page)

Dave’s nose crunches under a fist, Erin turns a corner, blood wells up in the undersides of Dave’s eyes. The pain feels like it’s four feet away, and to the left.

James (his name was James) is suspended for a week and no more because Dave shouted and that means it was a fight between kids and not a random assault, and besides, as James explained, yeah he threw the fist but it was Dave’s nose that broke and he had no idea such a thing could happen because his punch was more of a tap. Dave’s week is spent with Ann discovering the injury anew every morning—“Are your eyes
still
red? When are the bandages coming off again?”—and Jeremy just frowns and asks whatever happened to those Tae Kwon Do lessons Dave had two summers in a row when he was eight and nine.

And Erin walks by. Erin hops the turnstile at the PATH station and flips off the shouting janitor, while Dave stands at the top of the escalators, staring till he gets an elbow to his back. Erin walks by while Dave eats a Philly cheese steak in the food court at the mall (he’s waiting for his movie to start; he goes in the afternoon because it’s cheaper and he can go alone with a minimum of hassles), and she’s the only female he sees that isn’t clutching at least two heavy-looking bags of boring mall store clothing. Erin walks by in dreams and in dreams Dave has some witty line to share but the floor warps and collapses into the Ylem and I flail into the darkness—but how it really happened involved the one time Erin didn’t just walk by.

Erin walks into Dave’s room while he sits playing some flash game on the computer and she says, “Hi!” like a friendly eight-year-old making a new friend on the playground. Dave yelps and jerks around, his chair teetering. They hadn’t said a word to one another since the day he saw her working at the diner. Dave hadn’t even been to the city since then.

“Your mother let me in. I told her that we’re studying together.” Erin smiles. “I even told her that it was for the Health class unit on Human Sexuality, and I brought a visual aid.” She shrugs her backpack off her shoulder, reaches into it and withdraws a diapered five-pound bag of flour. Hefting it in her palm, her lips pursed from the tiny strain, she says, “Catch,” and lobs it underhanded to Dave, who grunts and nearly fumbles as the flour thumps hard against his chest and hiccups a puff of white powder.

“You’re the worst father ever!” Erin shrieks, her hands clawing her hair. Dave twitches and more flour spills as Erin slides back into her smirk, and with a hand cupped to her ear pantomimes listening closely for footsteps or a motherly holler from downstairs, but nothing is forthcoming. “She must be sleeping it off, the poor dear,” Erin says. Then she shuffles across the room, dragging dirty clothes along her ankles, and plops onto the bed. Dave holds the bag of flour in his lap and looks at her, glances at his monitor, then looks at her again.

“Whatcha up to?” she asks. “Cybersex?”

He blushes. “Homework.” Then the computer sings a downbeat song of defeat.

“Ah, your
Battle Station Mars
homework. You are a scholar and a gentleman, even if you are an abusive father.”

“Uhm.” A steady stream of flour puddles by his feet. “Erin? Why are you here? We’re not even in Health this semester, and I’ve only ever seen this flour thing on TV.”

“Yeah, that’s where I got the idea from too. Why do you think the school district doesn’t want us to have flour? Do you think people would sneak cocaine into the schools?”

“Erin—”

“Or guns! Handguns in the flour. Do you think there are a lot of guns in school, Dave? I’m very nervous. I hate my parents for moving out here.”

“Where are you from, anyway?”

“Will you protect me from the gangs, Davey?” Erin pleads. Then she laughs at him, not even bothering to pretend to laugh with him. Dave briefly considers the immense psychosocial, linguistic, intersubjective, and formal determinants of whether one is laughing with or at someone and whether he can actually know what Erin’s doing since she is so obviously crazy and probably on drugs herself, but he puts all that aside and just says, “Maybe you should protect me from them. I don’t even think anyone’s in a gang, really. I mean, gang members are busy during the day and stuff; they have no time to learn about the American Revolution.”

Erin is serious, like the face on a nickel. “Could you really use some protection?” She smiles and leans back, shifting subtly to make the bottom of her shirt rise, showing off a bit of tummy.

“Well, not from you—”

“Oh, you already have some protection, I see.” She’s not smiling. “Can I see it?”

“What are you talking about?” Dave is flushed, sweating, actually trying to make himself annoyed and humiliated enough to gain some sort of upper hand. The bag of flour in his lap is a small blessing. “Small blessing.”
Christ, I thought like my mother, and that was without any cough syrup—but she won’t even let him have that.
“Drop the bag, come over here and sit next to me on your bed,” she says and he does, so eager for something.

She turns to him and says, “I have a proposition for you. And no, that doesn’t mean I’m propositioning you.” This he laughs at half-authentically; it sounds like the sort of wordplay a sophisticated person would appreciate, so he tries to. She touches his wrist like in the movies, but he should be doing it, he knows, and the knowledge burns in his cheeks.

“Let’s you and I,” Erin says, her tongue an eel, “form a secret society. Just the two of us. Tell nobody.”

Dave asks, “Who would I even tell?” and imagines trying to explain all of this to Oleg—that guy who wears a fedora every day—and Erin says, “Aren’t you friends with that fedora guy?” and Dave says, “Not really,” and Erin says, “Good.”

“We’ll communicate in code. Meet secretly. Make plans. Learn to read one another’s thoughts. Chart the course of world events, eventually, with the school as a test of concept.” Erin reaches out and Dave waits for a kiss, paralyzed, but she stretches past him to take hold of a blanket piled up at the corner of the bed. She gives it a dramatic magician yank and smiles as it fills the space before the bed and gently eases to the floor.

“The initiation is simple. I will entirely remake your personality to better serve the needs of the collective, and through a lifetime of praxis you shall achieve
theosis
, or knowledge of God.” Erin holds up two corners of the blanket she had spread out.

Dave giggles and says, “Sure, lay it on me!”

Erin rolls her eyes and sighs. “You are a fucking idiot, you know that.” Then she swings the blanket over Dave’s head and covers him with it, then whips it off with a practiced movement and I go screaming into the Ylem, trapped for what seems like eternity, but what is really just an endless moment. What’s left of me in that dumpy bedroom in the unfolding universe is the Dave who cannot help but obey.

E
rin tackles him and gives his lips a lick with the very tip of her tongue, then rolls off him and out the door. Erin rises up like a snake and shifts out of her shirt, then grabs Dave by the sides of his head to drag his mouth up to her body; she stays and they fuck clumsily on Dave’s sagging twin bed. Erin stays on her corner of the bed, folding the blanket in her lap and mumbling about her parents—their ridiculous demands, Old World expectations (no dating, work work work, Christmas in January), and her father’s regular thundering at the TV, over tax bills, at the Puerto Rican busboys down at the diner. Erin teaches Dave several lines from
The Iliad
, or says that they’re from the poem—and an important part of his initiation—but they were really just a string of modern Greek curses:
Gamo ton shisto bou s’eshese
, she says, and he proudly repeats in an ancient sing-song, “I fuck the pussy that vomited you out.” It doesn’t matter which choices she made, Dave was hers regardless. I love to live through his eyes as her belly and shoulders roll over him; over and over I replay her solemn little talk, wondering if this time she’ll cry, or admit that it’s all lies. Never happens.

I can be anywhere Dave ever was, in any of the streams of his life, of
my
life. It’s hard to remember, especially as I stand over his body, tucked and curved into itself like a fetus in his own blood and urine, his last rattling breath still hanging in the air amidst the whimpers and the moans of the wounded. Once, a kid, a sensitive little guy named Ray who liked trip-hop and weed, caught a glimpse of me—me, standing over my own stained corpse—through the chicken wire and papier-mâché of the world. He shrieked and ran.

“I saw that guy. You know, that dude! He was standing over another guy who looked just like him,” Ray explained to his crew of friends who had already grown bored with Hacky Sack.

They were a smear of baggy black clothing, clownish makeup, and whiteboy dreads, and they didn’t believe him, despite their steady diet of Wiccan paperbacks from the New Age section of the B. Dalton at the mall. “Bullshit,” they said. The ones with a bit of a rep for being tough or especially magically powerful among their cohort—they bought their books from the real pagan shops in the city—made their pronouncement like it was two words. “Bull. Shit.”

But they all went to go stare at the corner between their classes, and a couple of them were even sure they saw me, though I was actually standing behind them. Ray’s story sounded much better when Ray wasn’t the one telling it. “Oh man, I
totally
saw that guy. It was like he was crying over his own body—like a guardian angel who failed.”

The corner has a chill attached to it. Can’t you feel it?

It smells like blood and steel here. It smells like the streets did on the afternoon of 9/11, when the wind shifted and carried the dust of the ruins over the river. I can taste it on my tongue, like I could when the shooting began.

In an hour the school was united in gleeful horror over the idea of the dead white guy haunting the place. The district even sprang for an extra counselor for a week or two. The vice principal got online and sold the story anonymously to one of the tabloids for five grand, then bragged about it to everyone in the faculty lounge, then realized that the money barely covered the outstanding debt on one of his credit cards and shut up about it. The school had a closet built into the corner where Dave died. It’s a little eerie, even to me, to stand in the middle of the leaning mops and the sparkling jeers of various cleaning product logos and mascots, waiting for the door to open at the crack of dawn.

Experiencing Dave’s body—the one crumpled on the third floor of Hamilton High School, that is—feels like crawling into the slice left by cleaning and gutting a fish: cold, slimy, and ridiculous. When Dave wins, on the other hand, when those years of
Dungeons and Dragons
mapmaking pay off, when love and rage fill his heart like battery acid, and when he walks down the steps of his school all giddy and his arms heavy and hot from the shootings, that’s like stepping into an orgasm and riding it like a cab down a glorious spring day street. The day The Resistance is born.

Then there are the endless Daves who don’t do it at all—the ones who stand outside the school, lips torn and bleeding, who turn around and go back home. Then ones whose plans melt like dirty slush the closer it gets to E-Day; a dozen Daves just live the fantasy of murder over and over as they shoulder and squeeze their way down Newark Avenue during lunch period—if only there was a way to clear the streets in a moment; point the gun and let the bodies bloom like instant red roses.

Their bodies are all like dead fish too, if not in high school then by college. Communications major, Business Admin minor, nine credits of Japanese—maybe we’ll get into anime translation/localization or something, but we drop out or shuffle into Dad’s office or end up pushing around overhead projectors in the DoubleTree Hotel by the mall. We buy used Hondas because they’re sensible and worlds away from the awesome crime-fighting vehicles we used to design with crayon and construction paper. Our girlfriends have high Jersey hair and dull blue eyes and generally find us on the rebound from some five-year relationship with a barrel of a man named Ted or Bryant. They leave quickly enough too, after a summer of somedays about trips to Paris or marriage or moving out to some place where the houses have nice lawns and the Puerto Ricans are all cleaning ladies.

Then there is the Kallis Episkopos. He lives in exile in another world, say his followers, despite the claims of the media and law enforcement and no, they don’t mean me. This is the Dave who walked out of Hamilton with raw trigger fingers and an eagerness to eat JCPD bullets from the cordon around the entrance, the one locked up variously in prison or mental hospitals, and his leaflets, zines, and broadcast email broadsides. The kid who got his nose sliced open with a shiv twenty minutes into his sentence and returned the favour that night by gouging out the eyes of his attacker—and replacing them with a pair of blue robin’s eggs he had somehow smuggled into prison. He dreamed of murders and got those dreams into the hands of fat girls from Ohio. You know, the ones with the long hair to cover their faces and the black blogs with purple lettering, and the box cutters to the throats of their ridiculous high school enemies. (“She called me a slut, once.” “I’m half-Jewish and he told me that God didn’t love me. And he was right, but Kallis Episkopos does.”) The man who after his death had an entire issue’s worth of
The Journal of Police and Criminal Psychology
dedicated to articles about him and the movement he sparked.

Sliding into him is like living in an alcoholic who can taste the Jack Daniels on her tongue in every glass of juice or soda, right before she finally says, “Fuck it,” and marches out to get laid, get drunk, and get royally fucked by the world she’s determined to toss herself out in front of. Kallis Episkopos is Dave Holbrook, with free will reclaimed.

And me? I’m Dave Holbrook too—where Kallis Episkopos has free will, I have no will at all, no way to affect the world or my own life. But I get to see it all; every moron mistake and anguished inevitability. Somewhere along the infinite planes of the Ylem, there must be a way out, a way to live and a choice to make that frees us from the grip of Eris, that frees me from this waiting room of raw experiences. I just need to find it.