Super Flat Times

by Matthew Derby

  The Hands

  What a joy, to eat. We find ourselves in the kitchen, wandering, fingering cardboard cartons stacked away in high cabinets and filled with cornstarch and water. Whatever it is we did not want to become, we have become. I meet Father one night in the hallway, his face riddled with pasty crumbs from a paper sandwich. Shamefully, we hold our places there in the cold, blue light, regarding each other. His father was a Methodist preacher — he has the same tendency to turn red. “There, there, now, off to bed with you,” he says, holding out large, paddle-like hands, the kind that might get you ready for a smack. He hooks them under my arms and lifts. I can feel how heavy I must be, slouched there over his shoulder. On my pajamas cloned cowboys rope pastel steers in unison, the way you seem to stay a certain age forever.

  The Father Helmet

  Pembroke got a box in the mail. A big box, wrapped in brown paper, about twice the size of a human head.

  “What’s that?” said Clay, rising halfway from the couch, as if a lady had entered the room.

  “Nothing.”

  “Come on.”

  Pembroke hugged the box sheepishly in the open doorway. He seemed to disappear behind it. “It’s nothing.”

  They had been sitting in front of the entertainment center before the box had come. There was a program on about how horses make love. Clay had brewed up some egg salad for Pembroke in the food-o-rator and poured some hard puffs for himself. The food lay strewn out on the coffee table, half eaten.

  Clay stood there, hesitating over the couch, looking at Pembroke’s box.

  “Come on.”

  “Dude, it’s nothing.”

  Pembroke took the box into his bedroom and shut the door.

  Clay followed a few steps behind, lingering in the empty hallway.

  There were two ways the pill could be taken — as a regular pill or as a suppository, and Pembroke did not like the taste of these things, though they made him feel as if he were a soldier in one of the great armies. He and a few of the other boys crowded into the tiny rest-room stalls of the abandoned comedy club and squatted. The pills fizzed pleasantly, like Alka-Seltzer, only bigger — an armada of Alka-Seltzer. Pembroke had brought a rubber bib to wear beneath his underwear, only because sometimes the stuff would run out of you before it got a chance to take effect, making both a stain there on the worst place to have a stain and also all of the, like, drugness leaking away into your pants.

  Pembroke’s father owned the comedy club. The club was abandoned primarily because Pembroke’s father was dead.

  They started down the steps to the basement, where there were more boys and a few girls.

  “I can’t believe this is where you were conceived,” said Thorpe, pointing to a portrait of a group of dogs playing billiards. “This place is funny as hell.”

  “I got one of those helmets,” said Pembroke.

  “What kind of helmet?” Thorpe replied, leading the way down the narrow stairs.

  “That kind where you can talk to your past.”

  “I would not want to talk to my past. No one is even doing that anymore.”

  “Well, I am,” he said, more to himself than to Thorpe, who was far ahead by now, bounding down the rickety stairwell.

  They opened the door to the men’s dressing room. Everyone was laid out on couches, barely conscious. The room was cluttered with broken stage props — a purple throne, a stuffed dog, two giant plastic asses. A group of thin, pasty girls looked up as Thorpe, Pembroke, and the rest entered. “I’m going to get in that,” said Thorpe, and Pembroke thought he was talking about Joy Pfeiss or at least Crystal Carpenter. But Thorpe started to climb into the clothes dryer instead. He was the kind of thin where you could see his bones moving around underneath the skin as if he were concealing another person, and you wondered what it would take for that person to tear right through.

  Thorpe was trying to get himself inside the machine, legs first. The suppositories had made him unsteady — his limbs banged against the corrugated steel drum of the dryer, but before anyone could dissuade him he was all the way in, curled up like one of those Russian space monkeys they shot off in the olden days.

  “Shut it,” he called from the chamber. “Shut the door to this thing and let it go.”

  Some of the boys and girls in the room had stopped petting each other in order to get a better look at Thorpe, but no one made a move toward the machine. “Shut it,” Thorpe called again, banging on the walls of the drum with his fists for emphasis. “Start me up. I’m going to leave this place. Is somebody going to help me here?” The room grew quiet.

  Bluth mumbled, “Thing takes quarters, man.”

  “Quarters? Jesus, I’ll give you all quarters.” Thorpe, because of the way he had stuffed himself inside the dryer, could not look directly at any of them. He could just sort of shout at his own chest. This pinched off his vocal cords in such a way that what came out was more of a high-pitched whisper than anything else, as if he’d inhaled a canister of helium. “Maybe you don’t understand. I am flying out of here, and whoever puts a quarter in this machine will not get their ass kicked on my way out. How’s that for a motherfucking bargain?”

  Pembroke inched backward to the trophy cabinet, where all his father’s awards were kept. He had gotten Thorpe hurt a couple times before — once when they were teasing these little kids who turned around and, like, beat the living shit out of Thorpe with a barbecue grill, and another time when he made Thorpe fall on some bamboo. The first one was pure luck, he knew, but the second one he’d meant, and he did not like the feeling. Thorpe, it seemed, was about to get hurt again in a big way, and Pembroke did not know how to stop him.

  “Is there no one here who would like to put a quarter in the machine so that I can get myself out of here? Pembroke, where are you, my boy?”

  Pembroke froze by an oversize foam sledgehammer. “Pembroke, help a friend out, Pembroke. Pembroke?” “What?”

  “Do you suck motherly dick?”

  “No.”

  “Well.”

  “What?”

  “Get over here and drop the quarter in the slot. I will pay you back.”

  “You’re going to get all —”

  “What?”

  “What.”

  “I’m going to get what? I’m going to get bigger, is what. I’m going to get bigger than this whole building, is what you’re afraid of. My arm is going to be like a big log from Superman’s planet, and I’m going to make it go through the wall like it was dough. I’m going to have nice big falcon wings, and I’m going to soar over all of you.”

  Thorpe banged his elbows against the walls of the machine as he narrated his flight from the comedy club, his face pinched and sweaty. Pembroke retreated to the stage, where a door let in from the dressing rooms. The space was big and empty, with mirrors on all sides. Pembroke had in his hands a long mic stand, and he watched himself swing it around the way a ninja would. In the corner there was a man-shaped doll that his father would often beat upon in his performances. Its name was Kevin. That had been his specialty, his trademark — beating the shit out of cloth dummies. He would jump up high and kick the thing in the head so hard that the cloth actually made a snapping sound, like a board breaking. When Kevin fell to the stage floor he would wrestle with it, shouting, “Why are you so big? Why are you bigger than me?” It was the last thing Pembroke remembered seeing his father do.

  At the end of the night, Bruce and the Obelisk dragged Thorpe out of the dryer and put him in a wagon because he couldn’t feel his legs. Everyone else walked home, because flight pods were for pussies.

  Pembroke went upstairs, put on his pajamas, and sat on his bed, holding the unopened box between his knees. Clay was not going to like it, no matter how the issue was presented.

  After school, Pembroke designed roller coasters. He had gotten the job by falling in with some amusement park enthusiasts at the cafeteria. They were tired of the same rides again and again. They were not interested in being t
ossed aloft by these crass, over-wrought machines in the same way that their fathers had, and their fathers before them. They felt that fear was an outmoded response, not worth their time. They wanted a vehicle that would shake them up inside, get them to feel something new. Together they designed a unit called the Diaspora, which took its passengers slowly up a steep incline for twelve hundred feet. At the peak, the coaster stopped and everyone had to get out and climb down a narrow stairwell to the ground. Some steps were deliberately brittle, so that if one person broke through, she could bring the whole group down with her. No one had any idea how popular it would become. Crowds flocked to the ride right from the start, but especially after the first three deaths. Passengers who made it all the way through were fatigued, confused, and disoriented. Some lost the power of speech, or became wildly incontinent. The park management quickly erected an exit tent to handle the serious casualties caused by the ride.

  On television, Pembroke took full responsibility for the deaths and other pain caused by the roller coaster. “Look,” he said, “I am not an entertainer. But people are clamoring to get on my roller coaster even though they might die. Does this mean people are not afraid to die? I don’t know, but it means something. It means that I have built a really effective amusement ride.”

  “Even though not all of your passengers will make it through alive,” observed the host, leaning toward Pembroke.

  “I hope more people die on this ride. I hope everyone dies. That is why I built this coaster.”

  “To kill?”

  “Absolutely. Then at least they’d know they really felt something. If you don’t want to die, don’t come to my roller coaster. But if you have thought about being killed real high up with no one to help you or lift your dead corpse up out of the ride, you will have a great time.”

  “You have a dead father, right?”

  “What does that have to do with the fact that you’re queer?” The host was urged to wrap things up. “What’s next?”

  “A coaster that’s just slightly faster than the swarm of pissed-off bees that will be following its pollen trail.”

  “I know what you’ve got in there,” Clay said from the hallway.

  “I don’t see how you could.”

  Pembroke knelt on the floor of his bedroom and gently lifted the helmet from the molded foam packaging. It had more fur on it than he had expected and was cut in a different style than he’d ordered, not to mention the color, which was beige, though he’d ordered black.

  “Pembroke? Come on, man. This is way unfair.” Pembroke adjusted the chin strap and fitted the mouthpiece by biting down hard on the malleable plastic.

  Pembroke had received Clay after his real father accidentally set fire to his own face at the Dogwood Days parade. Up until a few years ago, when a real dad died or went away, kids got a robot to take care of them. Clay was kind and patient to Pembroke but did not like him to remember his real father or have any connection to that life. He tried out different names for the boy, hoping, in some way, to erase even this fragile mark of the past. None of them ever took. Pembroke was Pembroke, and that was that.

  “Pembroke?” Clay called out again. “Shut up, you. I’m talking to my dad.”

  The casts came off, and Thorpe was back to his old ways, except that he had to wear one kidney on the outside, in a little gauze bag. The two of them were out messing around in the streets early in the morning, the sky crowded and gray, flecked with tiny flashing lights.

  “I’m getting on that,” Thorpe said, jogging toward a fast-food restaurant built in the shape of a chicken.

  “Hey, remember that helmet?” Pembroke called out after him. “What helmet?” Thorpe was balancing on a broken turn-pike divider, trying to grab hold of one of the bird’s wings.

  “The one that lets you talk to your past?”

  “Hey, man, keep it quiet. I told you those things were way uncool.” Thorpe’s kidney quivered as he struggled to mount the building. Pembroke was sure he could see it throb violently like a water balloon inside the bag.

  “Anyway, I’m doing it. I can talk to my dad.”

  “Can’t you talk to your dad right now? Without that thing?” “That’s a robot, dumb-ass.”

  Thorpe paused, dangling from the bird’s crimson wattles. “Shit, dude, you lucked out. That is a cool robot.”

  The manual said to proceed slowly and carefully when contacting members of the past. “Do not expect immediate results,” it said. “Instead, think of your initial three weeks as a ‘getting to know you’ period. Remember, most of the people you will be contacting will have no idea that such an event is possible. They will not be prepared for their son, daughter, or great-granddaughter to talk to them inside their own head.” Most important, the manual said, the user should not attempt to tamper with the past. “Altering the course of history in even the most fleeting or casual manner could instantaneously end your life or the lives of your family.”

  Pembroke started by talking to his father late at night, just as he was drifting off to sleep. The boy would guess when his father might be on his way to bed and dial in a connection. Sometimes he arrived in the head early, observing in silence as the father brushed, flossed, and examined himself in the bathroom mirror. He was unimpressed with his father’s hygiene, noting that, more often than not, in flossing he skipped the back teeth entirely.

  When he felt his father drifting off, he would begin to whisper softly, “Daddy, this is your son calling from the future.” The voice that answered was deep and powerful, fearful of interlopers. But little by little Pembroke, who had access to all his father’s memories, gained the man’s trust by predicting specific events that would occur in his future. “You’re going to take a drunken swing at your wife tonight and miss, knocking over a ceramic clown bust hanging on the wall,” Pembroke would tell him, and the next day his father would answer in dazed and frightened tones, “Son, how did you —”

  “Is there anything else you want to know about the future?” “Will I get married again?”

  “Dad.”

  “Sorry. Will people really fly, and eat a pill that tastes like steak, and wear silver boots?”

  “Sort of, but it’s so lame.”

  “I’m going to die, son, aren’t I?” “Everybody dies, Dad.”

  “But I’m not — I don’t want to talk about it.”

  Pembroke could tell that Clay was pissed. He stopped doing the normal things, like watching the Youth Wrestling semifinals, opting instead to hang out on the miniscule back porch with a fake cigarette.

  Pembroke slid back the glass door and joined Clay in leaning over the railing, which let out onto the convenience-store parking lot.

  “Clay, what’s going on? What are you doing out here?” “Nothing,” the robot answered, squinting as a boy jumped up and down on a wrecked, disemboweled car seat at the other end of the lot.

  “Are you sure there’s nothing you want to tell me?” Pembroke asked.

  “Aw, man.”

  “Clay, he’s my dad.”

  “So?”

  “You don’t think that’s important? You don’t think it would be good for me to talk to him?”

  “Dude, he’s gone. He burned off his face. Meanwhile, I’ve been here every day, taking care of you —”

  “I’m done having this conversation,” said Pembroke, and went inside.

  Despite the repeated warnings in the instruction manual, Pembroke began, in conversation with his father, to persuade him to do things that would actually change the outcome of his life. First, he stopped his father from participating in the Pepsi-Cola Presents The Mystery of Mount Saint Helens float at the Dogwood Days parade. He convinced him that it was better to stay home and watch the event on public access. During a commercial break, though, Pembroke’s father saw an advertisement for a three-wheeled all-terrain vehicle, which killed him a year later when he flew off of one and never got up. Frustrated, Pembroke returned to the fateful day of the parade and persuaded his fat
her to avoid the event altogether, perhaps by visiting the free library. He became engrossed, however, in an account of the aboriginal cliff divers of New Zealand, ruining the boy’s plans again.

  Pembroke worked relentlessly for days, fine-tuning his father’s life from the day of the parade until he lived long enough to catch up to Pembroke’s own present. It came one morning with little fanfare, no flashing lights or blurry, hallucinogenic images. Suddenly he was just there, really there, living in the house. Pembroke heard him rustling the pages of the TV Guide in the living room. He came crashing out of his bedroom and down the hallway to see the old man, whom he only previously remembered as a dim ghost.

  “Easy there, Jesse Owens,” his father said from the couch, where he was spread out in a pale blue bathrobe, watching a wrestling match.

  Pembroke remembered from the instruction book that as far as his father was concerned, life had simply happened to him as naturally as it would to anyone. He had no knowledge of his son’s device, only a vague recollection of the distant, late-night conversations. In his father’s mind, all of this was completely normal.

  “Hey,” said Pembroke.

  “Hey.”

  “So. What are you going to do today?” Pembroke did not want to create any disturbance that might, like a sudden wind, make his father vanish.

  “I don’t know yet. I might go down to the club. Practice my routine.”

  Pembroke was unsure what to say next. “So you have a job?”

  “What? What kind of a thing is that to say to a man in my condition?”

  There was a long pause, during which Pembroke’s father returned his attention to the match. One of the wrestlers shouted, “Who gave you the nerve to get killed here?”

  “Hey, let’s go to the midway,” Pembroke said.

  His father regarded him wearily. “That sounds nice, son. I would like that. Let me get my trunks.”