New Title 1 (7 page)

“
That fat fuck?”

“
Ah, it seemed like a good idea. I thought we could generate some positive reports of a war we weren’t really fighting. Boost troop morale. Maybe he would stumble upon what the President was trying to find.”

“
Yeah. Can you imagine that shit? Hey, hold up.”

I heard his boots crunching toward me. I heard him bending over and hoped he wouldn’t roll me onto my back. Would I even be recognizable if he did? He put a couple of fingers to my neck, pressing down on my carotid artery.

“
Is he still alive?” Fetch bellowed.

“
Can’t really tell.”

“
Jesus fuck. We don’t want any of this shit getting out. Put a bullet in his head to make sure.”

Before I could protest, I heard a loud sound, the bullet’s force shoving my head back into the ground. I felt my skull crack and my brain close around the bullet.

Fucking Fetch.

Part Two

The War at Home

Twenty-seven

I thought I should probably be dead. Or at least dying. But I wasn’t. I wasn’t even in a lot of pain. I could feel the bullet in my head. It felt like it was somewhere in the center of my brain, and it was uncomfortable, but I wouldn’t say painful. I reached my charred hand up to my forehead and felt the hole. Surprisingly, there wasn’t even any blood. I stood up, slightly woozy, and nearly fell back down.

The smoke had cleared. There were charred bodies everywhere. Some of them rose out of the ground as though they had been frozen in place while others were piled up in mounds like it was something the living soldiers did until they got too tired and then quit. I still wasn’t sure what happened.

My thoughts were weird. They had been ever since wandering through the desert so it was tough to try and make any sense out of them. There was Bob. There was Sergeant Sam Fetch. The only things Fetch really made clear were my instructions to declare war and find out what Bob used to write the words. I made the army’s intentions clear to Bob. Bob had strangled me in my sleep and then threw me into some kind of well or hole. There was the water in the hole. I had drunk the water. Could that possibly be the reason I was alive? Could that possibly be the reason for my fake war? Is that what my country wanted? This water? It seemed preposterous but things had been relatively preposterous for a pretty long time. Was the water capable of this rampant destruction?

I felt a wave of dizziness and held my arms out to steady myself.

One of my fingers fell off and hit the blasted ground with a dry thump. I reached down to pick it up, the rest of my blackened fingers scraping along the ground. They left three trails like charcoal on a brick wall. The lines looked familiar.

I wandered around in a daze, trying to make sure I couldn’t hear any more soldiers or a low-flying airplane or helicopter. I imagined they would have to come back for the bodies some time or the other. Unable to help myself, I gently nudged a couple of the bodies until they fell over, disintegrating when they hit the ground. I wished I had a camera. I wished I had a lot of things.

Suddenly, I remembered what those lines reminded me of. I thought about the words in Bob’s house. WINDO, KITSCHEN, SEENK…

They had been written in something that resembled the lines my fingers had made.

Holding the detached finger in my hand, I kneeled down to the ground and wrote:

CAMRA

This was stupid. Why did I even do that? Probably because I didn’t have anything better to do.

I continued to look down at the word. Something didn’t seem right about it. Was that how to spell camera? It seemed like I should know. Before being forced to become a soldier, I had worked in the library. I had read a lot of books. I did, however, have a bullet in the center of my brain so I couldn’t necessarily expect to be thinking straight.

I quickly scanned the horizon and, not seeing anything, I looked down at my stupid word. I might as well have written “hope” there and watched it blow away in the wind.

My word wasn’t there. Instead, there was a camera, lying on the ground. I picked it up. It was an old camera. Exactly the image I associated with the word “camera.” It was bulky and black with a moderate lens. I picked it up and looked through the viewfinder. I began taking pictures and it made a satisfying click and whir. Film. I hadn’t used a camera with film in it for years. It even smelled like what I imagined a camera would smell like. Again, it was something that wasn’t associated with modern cameras.

I continued snapping photos of the devastation until the film ran out. I ejected it and put it into what was left of my pocket. Then I bent down and wrote FILM. I stared hard at the word. Nothing happened. Maybe it was some kind of fluke. Selective magic. Then I remembered that I had looked away before the camera appeared and I did it again, quickly scanning the horizon and the sky. When I looked down, there was a little roll of film, still in the canister. I was definitely onto something here.

I continued to scrawl words to meet my momentary desires: pastrami sandwich, water, beer, clothes. And, after looking away, each item appeared. It wasn’t until I wrote SKIN that I was refused. I don’t know what I expected. Something in the sand to leap out and cover me in fresh new skin, maybe. I tried a few other things: LARGER PENIS, HAIR, TALONS. None of them worked. So it seemed I could only create things that had nothing to do with my body. Objects. I wrote: CLIMAX AND ANTI-CLIMAX and the book appeared. It looked just like I thought it would—dull gray cover with the title and author’s name in black letters. I realized I had never actually seen the book. I had never held it or, technically, read it. But I had, in a sense. Just to appease Bob, I had pretended to take it and, at that exact moment, I realized I
had
formed an image of it in my head. Lying on my “bed” and pretending to read it, I had also formed some sense of what it was about. Scanning through it now was like
déjà vu
. I had never read it but every passage sounded vaguely familiar.

I took a deep breath and continued to walk around.

I needed to get out of here. I probably needed to get out quickly. But I had to think about it. I could have just crouched down and scrawled AIRPLANE but I didn’t think that would work. I was pretty sure an airplane would appear but I had no idea how to fly an airplane. I had no idea how to navigate my way back home. I needed to get away but I needed something that would do most of the work. I could have probably asked for a car but I thought that would only get me so far. And what if these gifts were like wishes? What if I only had so many of them?

Maybe I could start small.

I wrote PILOT.

Nothing appeared.

I wrote WOMAN.

Nothing appeared.

Maybe it needed to be specific. I wrote the woman I was thinking about.

CARRIE GODOWN

Nothing.

So maybe it couldn’t be a person.

I wrote THEENKING BEEST

If something could get me out of this godforsaken land, I thought a thinking beast would be able to do it. Those words didn’t look right either. The image of a thinking beast that formed in my head was slightly terrifying. I was relieved when nothing appeared.

Then I wrote: THEENKING FLYING ROBOT

I looked away. I looked at the sun blazing in the sky. I looked at the wreckage of war. I thought about going home, back to my house, until the government found out I was alive and came to drag me away to some sort of detainment center. It suddenly dawned on me what the army was looking for. And I realized what could have caused all the destruction around me. It wasn’t the water, although the water was part of it. It was what I held in my hand. The same thing must have happened to Bob. I imagined him hunkered down in the dirt as the army approached and writing the word BOMB. The fact that it could be that easy made me shudder. I didn’t want to think about it anymore. I didn’t want to think about the Everything army with this type of capability. I thought about destroying the finger stub right there, but I wanted to go home and thought I might need it. This was power. It was something I’d never had.

I looked where I had last scrawled and thought, “Robot!”

Twenty-eight

I wish I had imagined a better robot. This one looked junky. Roughly twice my size, it was shaped like a very boxy human. It stood motionless, covered in rust and moss. Leafy branches sprouted from a couple of places. Large wings that looked like they had been made from parchment paper and sticks jutted out from its back. On its head was a shiny metal helmet with an antenna on it. At the top of the antenna, a small light flashed red. Perhaps this was the thinking part of my robot. I moved closer to it. I wanted to poke it or something but I didn’t want another one of my fingers to fall off. I realized I still had my original severed finger and slid that into my pocket.

How was this thing supposed to take me home?

This thing didn’t look like it could take itself anywhere. I moved in front of it to survey that side of it, hoping things would look a little better. They didn’t. It had two eyes that flashed the same red as the antenna and a great big hinged jaw. I wondered if it could talk.

“
Can you talk?”

Its head began moving up and down and the jaw squeaked open. “I am a thinking flying robot.” It sounded just like a robot, monotone and mechanical.

“
Are you able to take me home?”

“
I am a thinking flying robot.”

Then it began crouching down with horrible screeching sounds. Now resting on its knees, it hunched its back over.

“
What do you want me to do?”

“
Hop on,” it said.

I crossed around to its back and cautiously climbed on top. It was like a robot piggyback ride. Normally, this could have been exciting but I didn’t really want to think about being thousands of feet in the air flying over a long distance. Maybe it wasn’t so precarious. People did things like this in movies all the time. They rode dragons and unicorns and flying bicycles and a whole myriad of other flying beasts.

Its back was surprisingly more comfortable than I thought it would be. Two handholds were positioned just above where the wings joined.

“
All right. Do you know where you’re going?”

“
I am a thinking flying robot.”

I didn’t exactly know what this had to do with directions but I thought I would have to take my chances. The pain in my head was already lessening and it felt like I was thinking about things with a little more clarity. I had been bombed and shot in the brain so chances were good that a really long fall wouldn’t kill me either. Unless I exploded like a watermelon or something. It occurred to me that I really didn’t know what happened to the human body when it fell from thousands of feet.

“
I think I’m ready,” I said.

The giant wings began to flap slowly. Then another sound came from behind me. It sounded explosive. I almost expected to see soldiers shooting at me. But the sound came from the robot’s ass. It was a jet of fire. Maybe this primitive robot came with a rocket engine or something.

Then we were up in the air.

It was terrifying to look down but I wanted to see if I could gather some sense of place. The only thing I saw was brown for miles and miles. Brown dotted with black. The dead soldiers.

The ground was lost to clouds before I could see any remotely distinguishing landmark.

The air was cold and brisk. The force was enough for it to blow some of the blackening off my skin. At first, I thought maybe I would be a pile of dust by the time I returned home. Beneath the charred black, my original skin was coming back. By the time we were soaring above my neighborhood, I looked almost normal.

Twenty-nine

The robot began its rapid descent by retracting its wings and divebombing toward the ground. My stomach lurched upward until it felt like it was somewhere immediately below my brain. I was confident I wouldn’t die if we crash landed but I didn’t want to think about how painful the impact would be. It would probably linger for a while also. As we descended to just above the houses, the robot again spread its wings. We leveled out and floated gently to the ground.

My neighbor, Willie Something, was out watering his lawn. He looked at me and shook his head disapprovingly. Could he see my robot? I didn’t think he could. I couldn’t see any of the crazy things Bob had created. I wondered what I looked like to him. Did he think I just fell from the sky? I waved. He ignored me and went back to watering his lawn. Looking at my house, I could see why he had seemed so standoffish. The grass nearly reached the bottom of the windows, litter sprinkled liberally throughout. Crushed beer cans and cigarette butts littered the front porch. The mailbox was overflowing, pieces of mail, waterlogged and mildewed, scattered on the porch below it.

I looked back at the robot. It stood there in the middle of the road. I thought about getting rid of it. I didn’t know how I would do that. I didn’t know if I wanted to do that. I might need it again. I didn’t have a car. I didn’t have any money for a bus or anything. Hopefully, I wouldn’t have to go anywhere. I had probably lost my job at the library and figured I would probably be wanted by the government if they found out I was alive.