Sunspot Jungle

by Bill Campbell

  “That’s all you’re gonna do with your life?” asked Constance.

  “For now,” I said.

  “Well, then when I go away, you should come with me.” She put her arm behind my head and drew me gently to her. We just sat, holding each other for a long time while the snow came down outside.

  A few days after Christmas, I sat with my parents watching the evening news after dinner. Senator Meets was on talking about what he hoped to accomplish in the coming year. He was telling about how happy he was to work for minimum wage when he was eleven.

  “This guy’s got it down,” said my father.

  I shouldn’t have opened my mouth, but I said, “Constance says he’s a loser.”

  “Loser?” my father said. “Are you kidding? Who’s this Constance? I don’t want you hanging out with any socialists. Don’t tell me she’s one of those kids who refuses to carry a gun. Meets passed the gun laws, mandatory church on Sunday for all citizens, killed abortion, and got us to stand up to the Mexicans … He’s definitely gonna be the next president.”

  “She’s probably the best shot in the class,” I said, realizing I’d already said too much.

  My father was suspicious, and he stirred in his easy chair, leaning forward.

  “I met her,” said my mother. “She’s a nice girl.”

  I gave things a few seconds to settle down and then announced I was going to take the dog for a walk. As I passed my mother unnoticed by my dad, she grabbed my hand and gave it a quick squeeze.

  Back at school in January, there was a lot to do. I went to the senior class meetings but didn’t say anything. They decided for our “Act of Humanity” (required of every senior class), we would have a blood drive. For the senior trip we decided to keep it cheap as pretty much everyone’s parents were broke. A day trip to Bash Lake. “Sounds stale,” said Bryce, “but if we bring enough alcohol and weed, it’ll be okay.” Mrs. Cloder, our faculty advisor, aimed at him, said, “Arrivederci, Baby,” and gave him two Saturday detentions. The other event that overshadowed all the others, though, was the upcoming prom. My mother helped me make my dress. She was awesome on the sewing machine. It was turquoise satin, short sleeve, mid-length. I told my parents I had no date but was just going solo. Constance and I had made plans. We knew from all the weeks of mandatory Sunday mass, the pastor actually spitting he was so worked up over what he called “unnatural love,” that we couldn’t go as a couple. She cared more than I did. I just tried to forget about it.

  When the good weather of spring hit, people got giddy and tense. There were accidents. In homeroom one bright morning, Darcy dropped her bag on her desk, and the derringer inside went off and took out Ralph Babb’s right eye. He lived; but when he came back to school, his head was kind of caved in, and he had a bad fake eye that looked like a kid drew it. It only stared straight ahead. Another was when Mr. Hallibet got angry because everybody’d gotten into the habit of challenging his current events lectures after seeing Constance in action. He yelled for us all to shut up and accidentally squeezed off a round. Luckily for us, the gun was pointed at the ceiling. Mr. Gosh, though, who was sitting in the room a floor above, directly over Hallibet, had to have buckshot taken out of his ass. When he returned to school from a week off, he sweated more than ever.

  Mixed in with the usual spring fever, there was all kinds of drama over who was going to the prom with who. Fist fights, girl fights, plenty of drawn guns but not for comedy. I noticed that the King of Vermont was getting wackier the more people refused to notice him. When I left my sixth period class to use the bathroom, I saw him out on the soccer field from the upstairs hallway window. He turned the stun gun on himself and shot the two darts with wires into his own chest. It knocked him down fast, and he was twitching on the ground. I went and took a piss. When I passed the window again, he was gone. He’d started bringing alcohol to school, and at lunch, where again we were back by the woods hanging out, he’d drink a Red Bull and a half pint of vodka.

  Right around that time, I met Constance at the town library one night. I had nothing to do, but she had to write a paper. When I arrived, she’d put the paper away and was reading. I asked her what the book was. She told me, “Plato.”

  “Good story?” I asked.

  She explained it wasn’t a novel but a book about ideas. “You see,” she said, “there’s a cave, and this guy gets chained up inside so that he can’t turn around or move but only stare at the back wall. There’s a fire in the cave behind him, and it casts his shadow on the wall he faces. That play of light and shadow is the sum total of his reality.”

  I nodded and listened as long as I could. Constance was so wrapped up in explaining, she looked beautiful, but I didn’t want to listen anymore. I checked over my shoulder to see if anyone was around. When I saw we were alone, I quickly leaned forward and kissed her on the lips. She smiled and said, “Let’s get out of here.”

  On a warm day in mid-May, we had the blood drive. I got there early and gave blood. The nurses, who were really nice, told me to sit for a while, and they gave me orange juice and cookies. I thought about becoming a nurse for maybe like five whole minutes. Other kids showed up and gave blood, and I stuck around to help sign them up. Cody came and watched but wouldn’t give. “Fuck the dying,” I heard him say. “Nobody gets my blood but me.” After that a few other boys decided not to give either. Whatever. Then at lunch, the King of Vermont was drinking his Red Bulls and vodka, and I think because he’d given blood, he was really blasted. He went around threatening to stun people in their private parts.

  After lunch, in Mrs. Cloder’s class, where we sat at long tables in a rectangle that formed in front of her desk, Wisner took the seat straight across from her. I was two seats down from him toward the windows. Class started, and the first thing Mrs. Cloder said, before she even got out of her seat, was to the King. “Get that foolish jar off the table.” We all looked over. Wisner stared, the mist swirled inside the glass. He pushed his seat back and stood up, cradling the jar in one arm and drawing his stun gun. “Sit down, Scotty,” she said, and leveled her riot gun at him. I could see her finger tightening on the trigger. A few seconds passed, and then one by one, all the kids drew their weapons; but nobody was sure whether to aim at Mrs. Cloder or the King, so about half did one and half the other. I never even opened my lunch box, afraid to make a sudden move.

  “Put down your gun and back slowly away from the table,” said Mrs. Cloder.

  “When you meet the Devil, give him my regards,” said Wisner, but as he pulled the trigger, Mrs. Cloder fired. The breaching slug blew a hole in the King of Vermont’s chest, slamming him against the back wall in a cloud of blood. The jar shattered, and glass flew. McKenzie, who had been sitting next to Wisner, screamed as the shards dug into her face. I don’t know if she shot or if the gun just went off, but her bullet hit Mrs. Cloder in the shoulder and spun her out of her chair onto the ground. She groaned and rolled back and forth. Meanwhile, Wisner’s stun gun darts had gone wild, struck Chucky Durr in the forehead, one over each eye, and in his electrified shaking, his gun went off and put a round right into Melanie Storte’s Adam’s apple. Blood poured out as she dropped her own gun and brought her hands to her gurgling neck. Melanie was Cody St. John’s “current ho,” as he called her, and he didn’t think twice but fanned the hammer of his pistol, putting three shots into Chucky, who went over on the floor like a bag of potatoes. Chucky’s cousin, Meleeba, shot Cody in the side of the head, and he went down, screaming, as smoke poured from the hole above his left ear. One of Cody’s crew shot Meleeba, and then I couldn’t keep track anymore. Bullets whizzed by my head, blood was spurting everywhere. Kids were going down like pins at the bowling alley. Mrs. Cloder clawed her way back into her seat, lifted the gun, and aimed it. Whoever was left fired on her, and then she fired another shotgun blast like an explosion. When the ringing in my ears went away, the room was perfectly quiet but for the drip of blood, and the ticking of the wall clock. Smoke hung in the ai
r, and I thought of the King of Vermont’s escaped souls. During the entire thing, I’d not moved a single finger.

  The cops were there before I could get myself out of the chair. They wrapped a blanket around me and led me down to the principal’s office. I was in daze for a while but could feel them their moving around me and could hear them talking. Then my mother was there, and the cop was handing me a cup of orange juice. They asked if they could talk to me, and my mother left it up to me. I told them everything, exactly how it went down. I started with the blood drive. They tested me for gunpowder to see if there was any on my hands. I told them my gun was back in the classroom in the lunchbox under the table, and it hadn’t been fired since the summer, the last time I went to the range with my dad. It was all over the news. I was all over the news. A full one-third of Bascombe High’s senior class was killed in the shootout.

  Senator Meets showed up at the school three days later and got his picture taken handing me an award. I never really knew what it was for. Constance said of it, “They give you a fucking award if you live through it,” and laughed. In Meets’s speech that day to the assembled community, he blamed the blood drive for the incident. He proclaimed Mrs. Cloder a hero and ended reminding everyone, “If these kids were working, they’d have no time for this.”

  The class trip was called off out of respect for the dead. Two weeks later, I went to the prom. It was to be held in the high school gymnasium. My dad drove me. When we pulled into the parking lot, it was empty.

  “You must be early,” he said, and handed me the corsage I’d asked him to get—a white orchid.

  “Thanks,” I said and gave him a kiss on the cheek. As I opened the door to get out, he put his hand on my elbow. I turned, and he was holding the gun.

  “You’ll need this,” he said.

  I shook my head, and told him, “It’s okay.” He was momentarily taken aback. Then he tried to smile. I shut the door, and he drove away.

  Constance was already there. In fact, she was the only one there. The gym was done up with glittery stars on the ceiling, a painted moon and clouds. There were streamers. Our voices echoed as we exchanged corsages, which had been our plan. The white orchid looked good on her black, plunging neckline. She’d gotten me a corsage made of red roses, and they really stood out against the turquoise. In her purse, instead of the Beretta, she had a half pint of Captain Morgan. We sat on one of the bleachers and passed the bottle, talking about the incidents of the past two weeks.

  “I guess no one’s coming,” she said. No sooner were the words out of her mouth than the outside door creaked open and in walked Bryce carrying a case in one hand and dressed in a jacket and tie. We got up and went to see him. Constance passed him the Captain Morgan. He took a swig.

  “I was afraid of this,” he said.

  “No one’s coming?” I said.

  “I guess some of the parents were scared there’d be another shootout. Probably the teachers, too. Mrs. Cloder’s family insisted on an open casket. A third of them are dead, let’s not forget, and the rest, after hearing Meets talk, are working the late shift at Wal-Mart for minimum wage.”

  “Jeez,” said Constance.

  “Just us,” said Bryce. He went up on the stage, set his case down, and got behind the podium at the back. “Watch this,” he said, and a second later the lights went out. We all laughed. A dozen blue searchlights appeared, their beams moving randomly around the gym, washing over us and then rushing away to some dark corner. A small white spotlight came on above the mic that stood at the front of the stage. Bryce stepped up into the glow. He opened the case at his feet and took out a saxophone.

  “I was looking forward to playing tonight,” he said. We walked up to the edge of the stage, and I handed him the bottle. He took a swig, the sax now on a chain around his neck. Putting the bottle down at his feet, he said, “Would you ladies care to dance?”

  “Play us something,” we told him.

  He thought for a second and said, “‘Strangers in the Night.’”

  He played, we danced, and the blue lights in the dark were the sum total of our reality.

  Six Things We Found During the Autopsy

  Kuzhali Manickavel

  1. PLAYBOY

  A Playboy was hidden behind her jaw, rolled and bent like she had stashed it there in a hurry. Black and white alarm clocks were pasted over the women’s breasts and the words !wUt aLarming bOobeez! were scrawled across the stomach. It was hard to tell if she had done this herself or if someone else had done it for her.

  We could not find any incisions, so we decided she must have rammed the Playboy into her ear and hoped for the best. We thought this made her stoic, medically marvelous, and gay. We wondered if she had a secret crush on one of us, and while we unanimously agreed that this was possible, we knew in our hearts that it was not.

  2. BLACK ANTS

  The ants were an ongoing observation, like watching fish. They floated up gently through her skin, broke the surface, and lay there like the journey had made them tired and they just needed to lie down for a while. We discovered that there were no ants near her elbows but could not come to a consensus as to how this was significant. We thought we saw something that resembled an abnormally thick spiderweb under her pancreas and decided not to pursue that line of inquiry because it obviously had nothing to do with the ants.

  We wondered if she had let the ants in or if they had smashed their way through her, vandalizing her body with starred and spangled railroads, towers, and pornography. Now that she was dead, the ants probably had no reason to stay. We thought this was heartbreaking but also the best option for everyone involved.

  3. ANGELS

  The angels were clustered and nested behind her heart and lungs. They had to be pulled out with tweezers, which was not easy because they kept hanging onto her esophagus with their angry fingers and teeth. They had no nipples, belly buttons, or genitalia, which made them like dolls, but we did not feel like combing their hair. Their feet looked like hands, and they dug their heels into our faces as a sign of protest. They caterwauled. They sounded like prehistoric birds that were heartbroken because they were going to die in the evening.

  We thought she must have been a closeted Catholic. We thought she had probably been more into the angels than she was into Jesus, which is why she had allowed them to stay in such a communally sensitive area. We thought it was racist to assume that only Catholics had an affinity for angels.

  4. ST. SEBASTIAN

  St. Sebastian was tied to her spinal column, eyes looking heavenward, an arrow running into his chin and out of his forehead. His body was peppered with arrows, but it was the one through his forehead that made us untie him. We thought that untying him would make him feel better. We didn’t touch the arrow because we thought it would make his head fall off.

  We thought the angels and St. Sebastian were probably good friends. We imagined them hanging out in the late afternoon, folding discarded angel wings into boats and sailing them on her bloodstream, hoping they would return filled with things that were sweet and useful.

  5. TYPHOID

  It was only later, when we were delirious, sour-mouthed, and tired, that we realized we all had typhoid. While we waited for it to go away, we cleverly and calculatingly deduced where we got it from. The typhoid was a shiny black slab that was stuck to the back of her liver. It came apart in layers but could not be removed completely.

  We thought she was a typhoid carrier. We thought she had probably infected all of us and the typhoid was sticking to our livers, too. We decided that we were angry at the world and this was what people with cancer felt like. We thought it must be a neat thing to be a typhoid carrier.

  6. PLAYGIRL

  The Playgirl was spread across her rib cage like a placemat. Hairless, half-aroused men stared sexingly into our faces, and we looked at their half-arousal and sighed. We pasted the heads of Siberian huskies onto their faces and decided this made them more regal and less attainable. We also
decided that if we ever created a pantheon of Gods, there would be a set of twins who would be bare-chested and Siberian husky-headed.

  We knew she was the only one who could have made it with a hairless, half-aroused Playgirl man with a Siberian husky head. We imagined it happening in a series of well-lit photographs where she and the Playgirl man were naked and open-mouthed but not sweating. We contrasted the open Playgirl with the rolled and bent Playboy and decided that she had been conflicted about her sexuality. We thought we could have been the awesome friends who held her hand while we dragged her out of the closet. We thought we could have convinced her it was okay to like girls even if she didn’t like any of us.

  Please Feed Motion

  Irenosen Okojie

  On the third Thursday of each month, Nesrine Malik, prisoner 2212, pulled skin from the thing living in her throat before writing to Eros. She performed this ritual without fail and had done for four years since landing at Woodowns prison on drug charges as an accessory with intent to supply. Nesrine had arrived with these items: an afro comb, a brown leather wallet, two first class stamps, items which in time repeatedly trapped themselves in the dysfunctional sounds of the prison. It was love that threw Nesrine in jail, blind, dangerous, destructive love for a man who’d groomed her to be his soldier on the streets. Who’d told her there was wonder in her infectious, hypnotic smile and liked to rub his thumb on her palm anti-clockwise. He had only ever visited once to inform her he wouldn’t be coming again. This is how it is he’d said, watching her coldly, dispassionately. The gold chaps on his wrist knocking against the wooden desk, his fade neat, his boyishly attractive face distant, the proud flare of his nostrils rousing the memory of pressing her lips there. Nesrine had slumped in her uncomfortable chair in shock, shoving her hand into her braids, heart-shaped face hollow, crumpling, looking through the glass partition, wanting to press her mouth against the smattering of holes there to get air. A different kind of air he’d brought with him. She was vaguely aware of his chair scraping back, of the ceiling fan spinning, slicing her tongue loaded with protests, of the other prisoners’ heads bent towards their visitors, deep in conversation. And the sound of the guards’ keys jangling, dipping, and falling into the darkness of her throat. Then everything changed. Nesrine wasn’t sure whether it was the sticky heat of the room, the worn edges of the cheap brown linoleum floor that had begun to come unstuck or the sound of the glass door sliding open slowly, mechanically, or her silence as that man left her to rot. Something changed in the air. The prisoners’ faces began to stretch, distorting into caricatures in the afternoon light, leaving their bodies to float in the dusty windows, crying at personal items they recognized spinning in the distance. Visitors’ hands rummaged through their pockets, searching for things that had fallen through an anti-clockwise gap. Guards scrambled on the floor, sniffer dog collars around their necks, dodging batons flying at their faces.