The Felix Chronicles: Freshmen (8 page)

Dirk’s jaw tightened. “Let me ask you a question: Do you think I avoid the public because I don’t like people or because I can’t go anywhere without creating a scene? And if you’re having trouble with that one, let me remind you that the paparazzi recently got into a battle royale over my
garbage
and one guy nearly lost a finger. I now have to pay someone to stand guard over my trash to prevent those idiots from cutting each other up with soup can lids.”

David put his sunglasses down on the teak table, his nearly bald head bright and beading with sweat. “That was unfortunate. But isn’t that why you live like this.” He raised his drink to the glittering Mediterranean mansion to their backs, its four levels of retractable glass walls reflecting sun, surf and sand.

“I’m not complaining,” Dirk said. “I wouldn’t get much sympathy if I did. And I don’t deserve it. So I have to live behind security walls in a private guard-gated community. Woe is me.” He smiled a self-effacing smile. “That’s how most people would live if they had a choice. And some things won’t change.” He studied David’s eyes, pausing for effect. “Even after phase two.”

“Phase two?”
David’s expression was hesitant, but amused. “I’m afraid to ask. What’s phase two?”

“I’m going to put on a show tomorrow,” Dirk said evenly, his face giving no indication as to what
show
might mean.

“Were you going to run this by me?” David asked.

“Sorry.” A slightly devious smile creased Dirk’s face. “You’ll have to buy a ticket like everyone else.”

“Just give me a teaser,” David said. “Heroin?”

“Not this time.”

“Models?”

“Of course.”

“Location?”

Dirk laughed. He finished his drink and stood up, then stripped off his shirt and reached down for a large canvass duffel bag next to his chair. “You should stick around for this. I made a few calls of my own. The paparazzi helicopters should be here any minute.”

“Helicopters?”
David’s eyes bulged in his red face. He glanced down nervously at the bag. “What do you have in there?”

“Racket and balls,” Dirk said, grinning.

“For…?”

“I’m going up to the roof to hit some balls into the ocean. In my thong. Drunk on bourbon.”

David gave him a long exasperated look. “Why would you do that?”

“Exactly.” Dirk stabbed a finger into the table. “Why would a twenty-five-year-old millionaire movie star get drunk and hit tennis balls off his roof in a thong?”

David laughed reluctantly. “Let me guess. You’ve lost it? You’re spiraling out of control? You’ve hit rock bottom? You’re much, much worse than Charlie Sheen?”

“You’re catching on,” Dirk said, as he started for the house. Then he stopped and turned to face David. “By the way—I might slip and take a little tumble.” He paused, laughing. “But don’t worry. It’s all part of the plan.”

Felix set off across campus in a
lucid fog
. That’s what he called the state of mind that was neither lucid nor foggy. Too much lucidity and the reality of his life would overwhelm him, spiriting him away into a depthless depression. Too much fog and he couldn’t function. But somewhere between lucidity and fogginess was a half-numb, half-lucid state—the
lucid fog
—that allowed him to go through the motions of living without thinking about his life.

As he picked his way along The Yard’s billiard table-green grass to avoid the students clogging the path, he noticed an ivy-covered brick building up ahead. He’d been this way before, several times, but he’d never noticed the building. Felix—and everyone else on the football team—had been on campus for two weeks, since the start of ‘two-a-days’. Three hours of practice in the morning and three in the afternoon during the hottest month of the year. Six hours each day of team-building torture while his future classmates were enjoying the last few weeks of their summer vacations.

Felix looked around (really
looked
) and saw there were lots of ivy-covered buildings—at least six just on the north side of The Yard. There were also stone archways along the paths. And the buildings were either stone or brick or both.
Stones, arches, and ivy.
Everything Fallon had talked about, but that he hadn’t really noticed. He knew it was all there, he’d seen it without seeing it, a side-effect of his half-tranquilized state.

He hung a left at the building with the ivy—which he could now see had snaked its way up to the third floor, strangling large portions of the exterior and the grand entrance columns—and a quick right. Then he headed west along a cobblestone footpath with the sun in his eyes.

Cobblestone.

Fallon had said something about cobblestones too. He glanced down at the pale weathered stones beneath his feet. He’d never really noticed these either—at least he hadn’t thought of them as cobblestones. That seemed so George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. If he’d thought about them at all (which he hadn’t) they would have been bricks.

What else had he been missing?

And with that simple question to himself, his mind began clicking and coughing and whirring into gear like the engine of an old farm truck taken out of storage after a long winter. This was the problem with being alone. With no one to distract him, his mind, unfettered and allowed to roam, was free to travel down the dark corridors of his consciousness, and in an instant, there was no more fog. Lucidity had returned with a vengeance, cutting through the mental sludge, latching on to the thing at the forefront of his mind: the memories of the fire, the memories that didn’t exist.

The doctors couldn’t explain the memory loss. They attributed it to head trauma—although they couldn’t find anything on the CT scan or X rays to support that theory—smoke inhalation, fortuitous sleep walking, or simply shock. One nurse had whispered in his ear that it was
God’s will
—divine intervention.
They didn’t know.
And he didn’t really care. His parents were gone. That’s all that mattered.

A cold blanketing malaise was falling over him. He had to find an escape route, an alternate track for his mind to follow. Looking for a distraction, he twisted his head around, searching the path, but couldn’t find anyone that he knew. He wasn’t interested in conversation, just someone to hover around. He’d become quite accomplished at hovering. It was amazing how much time you could pass with head nods and a few well-timed monosyllabic responses. It was pathetic, he realized, but it allowed him to avoid the misery of being alone with his troubled thoughts.

But even nods and grunts weren’t without their own hazards; if he actually got pulled into the conversation he ran the risk of having a good time. And on the infrequent occasions that had happened, a startlingly realistic image had popped into his head of his parents observing him from above with looks of abject disapproval. It was like he could actually see the disappointed faces of his mom and dad, the hurt and scorn in their tear-filled eyes a painful reminder that having fun (or just not being miserable) was a dishonor to their memories. He was a better son than that. He owed them more than that.

With the late afternoon sun still high in the sky, Felix, despondent but functioning, took the practice field with the rest of the team. About sixty kids in all. Whistles blew and the players lined up quickly for warm-ups, led by Jimmy Clay. Jimmy was the team captain—despite the fact that he was the most violent kid Felix had ever met. Just an average-sized linebacker the year before, Jimmy had somehow packed on forty-five pounds of solid muscle over the summer. He was clearly shooting himself up with steroids—or something else far more potent than protein powder—but the coaches ignored his miraculous weight gain because he was the first pro prospect to put on a Sturgeon uniform since the 1950’s.

Two hours into practice, freshman orientation and the walk from Rhodes Hall felt like it had never really happened. The anxiety, the sadness and the pain had all slowly receded, replaced by the smell of freshly-cut grass and the warmth of the early evening sun on his bare arms.
This was nirvana.
Felix wished it would never end. This was the only time he was able to forget about his life, even if for only a few short hours.

More whistles blew and the coaches organized the team in a non-contact scrimmage. They were playing the first game of the season in two days and the coaches seemed optimistic about their chances. But victories were hard to come by, especially in season openers: fourteen straight losses to be exact. The Sturgeons, as it turned out, had always been awful, the runt of the Pacific Northwest Football League—PNFL for short—and the only team to have never won the Rain Cup, the trophy awarded to the league champion.

The coaches conducted the scrimmage at three-quarter speed. The offense executed plays to make sure everyone knew their assignments, and the defense ran to the guy with the ball and put a hand on his chest or back, a tap. Tackling was not permitted. Fifteen plays into this choreographed dress rehearsal, the center snapped the ball to the quarterback, Brant Fisher. Felix cut inside the defensive back lined up across from him and loped unhurriedly toward the middle of the field. Then he raised his hand, signaling Brant to throw him the ball. Brant threw it. But he threw it too high.

Felix took a long stride and jumped off one foot, reaching high into the air. The ball lightly grazed the fingertips of his left hand; he tried to reel it in, to somehow make it stick to his fingers.

There was a loud crunching noise, Felix’s head snapped back like his car had been rear-ended on the highway, and the ball sailed away out of sight. For a moment he was flying—backward and facing up—and then his flight through space ended abruptly as he crashed to earth. Felix was stunned. Through his facemask, he could see that the sky was still burning blue.
But why am I looking at the sky?
he thought, disoriented.

“What the hell are you doing, Clay?” a voice hollered above the din of whistles and panicked shouts. Felix knew the voice. It was pure gravel, unmistakable. Coach Bowman—the head coach.

“Huh?” A different voice. This one deeper. Less gravel. Jimmy’s.

Someone knelt beside Felix and leaned over him. The orange glow of the sun disappeared behind the man’s head. “Don’t move!” It was Coach JJ, the trainer. He sounded worried.

“Hey, JJ.” Felix wondered if he should be worrying too. He didn’t feel any pain. Nothing felt wrong. So why was everybody scrambling around like he was dying?

“Don’t move, August!” JJ said anxiously. “Let me get your helmet off.”

Felix kept his head still, his peripheral vision picking up the skitterish movements of his teammates gathering around him. They’d taken off their helmets and were whispering in funereal tones.

“That’s my starting receiver, you idiot!” Coach Bowman shouted (presumably at Jimmy).

“I thought it was… uh… full contact,” Jimmy muttered. He sounded further away than Bowman.

“I think I’m okay,” Felix said to JJ.

“Don’t move,” JJ repeated and unbuckled Felix’s chin strap, then gingerly lifted the helmet over his head.

“Holy shit!” someone in the crowd shouted. “Look at the face mask!” Felix saw it. It was pulverized.

“Are you kidding me, Clay!” Coach Bowman reached over and took the damaged helmet from JJ. “You goddamn knew it was no contact. And that was a goddamn helmet-to-helmet hit.” He raised it up to eye level, took a few steps in Jimmy’s direction, and gave it a disgusted shake. The plastic grill had broken off from the helmet on one side and was swaying limply in the air. “What the hell’s a matter with you, son?”

“Sorry coach,” Jimmy mumbled. “I was a… playin’ the ball. It was an accident. I didn’t even see him.”

“Try to move your fingers,” JJ said to Felix.

Felix did. They moved just fine. Then he tried to sit up, but the trainer put a firm hand on his chest and pushed him back down to the turf. Some of his teammates clapped, apparently relieved that he wasn’t paralyzed.

“I’m fine.” Felix sat up quickly before JJ could stop him. His ears were ringing a little, but he felt all right.

“You sure?” JJ asked him skeptically, taking out a penlight. He shone it into his left eye, blinding it for a second, and then the right. “Well, your pupils look fine. When were you born?”

“The day I became a Sturgeon,” Felix announced, knowing the coaches would like that.

“Good answer, August!” Coach Bowman bellowed, striding up beside him, his large belly straining the fabric of his shirt to its outermost limits. “You sure you’re okay, son?”

“Never better,” Felix answered confidently.

Coach Bowman smiled down at Felix for a moment, then his eyes found Jimmy (Felix could now see he was standing at the back of the crowd some twenty yards away) and his face set in an angry scowl. “Clay! Get your dumb ass to the track and give me four laps! Do it in under eight or you won’t see the field Saturday.” Bowman paused and added: “That’s enough for today, boys.” He blew his whistle in three short blasts. “Hit the showers!”

Brant stepped over to Felix and reached down with his hand as the crowd began to disperse. Felix took it and Brant heaved him up to his feet. “Damn, you’re a helluva lot tougher than me,” Brant said in a twang. He was from a small town in Texas Felix had never heard of and could never seem to remember.

Felix shrugged and stared down at his hands accusingly. “Sorry. I should’ve caught it.”

Brant laughed. “Seriously? That was a shitty ass throw. I totally hung you out to dry for that roided-up asshole. But don’t you worry—his punishment for trying to kill you is four whole laps. You think he’s gonna do it in under eight?” He pointed across the field. “Check it out.”

Jimmy was on the track. One of his buddies had joined him. Jimmy was laughing. They were both walking.

“What a dick,” Felix grumbled, amazed that the coaches were letting him off so easy.

“Yeah, no shit,” Brant agreed. “That guy’s trouble. And I think he’s got it in for you. You better watch your back.”