Donovan Meanwhile: Kings of Sparta

by Bierley, B. L.

  In one swift motion I pull back the throttle, twist the yoke, and step on the rudder controls. It was messy and I oversteered, but the plane avoids colliding with the trees on the south side of the river bank or the gathered crowds on Belvedere Beach, and I’m heading roughly north again.

  I whoop in relief, but I’ve lost several seconds and now I’m quite a ways behind second place. My priority, obviously, is surviving the race at all, but if I don’t win it could be a set back for the mission.

  Pushing the throttle back to full, I do my best to catch up.

  “Burke!” It’s Bellamy this time in my ear.

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t know, but Cartwright is gone. His van was attacked. I’m afraid you’re on your own.”

  “No kidding.”

  “We’re gonna get someone on to talk you through an emergency landing. If you set down in the river we can have a team rescue—“

  “No way, man! I’m seeing this thing through.”

  I’m closing in on second place again and feeling confident. “I’ve got this.”

  “Donovan, are you crazy? This is suicide!”

  I grit my teeth and narrow my eyes. “Then I’ll see you on the finish line, or I’ll see you in hell. Agent Burke, out.”

  “Donovan, don’t be an idiot.”

  Turns out just saying “out” doesn’t cut the connection or anything, which is annoying after an awesome one-liner like that, so I just have to pretend like I couldn’t hear her anymore.

  But as I’m approaching the 14th street bridge and the banks of the river are narrowing, I’m starting to question my decision to keep going.

  But, I’m also moments away from passing second, almost like the pilot was slowing down.

  Swoosh!

  We both slip under the bridge in a flash, and I admit I closed my eyes for just a second. When we come out the other side, I’m actually ahead of the other pilot.

  I’m in second!

  But there’s no time to celebrate. Another bridge is coming up and I have to think fast so I didn’t end up a stain on the side of it.

  Swoosh!

  The river is significantly narrower now and I’m wing-to-wing with the plane I had just passed seconds earlier.

  This guy is tenacious.

  I steal a glance sideways, taking my eyes off the river for just a moment, and I swear what I see looking at me was the same face I saw in that SUV.

  The same face that greeted me at Chevko’s party last night.

  He’s scowling at me, and making the throat-cutting gesture with his finger.

  That’s probably not good, I think.

  Or that’s what I’m starting to think when he dips his wing into mine and I feel my plane get pushed out of the air.

  I hit the concrete side of the river, my left wing crumpled, and sparks fly. Lights and alarms are going off inside the cockpit but I only hear them for a second because after that I hit the water and black out.

  When I come-to, it must’ve only been seconds because I’m in the cockpit underwater but I can see the surface just above me.

  Thinking fast, I pull the lever and cracked open the canopy.

  Icy water comes gushing in, but I’m able to climb out and find my way to the surface again.

  There’s already a group of onlookers gathered on the bridge behind me, gawking and shouting. Some are rushing down to the water to help.

  But then I see someone else heading my way, swimming at full speed.

  “SUV,” and he has murder in his eyes. No doubt he intends to finish the job.

  More Racers streak past overhead, their engine roars deafening.

  Unfortunately, SUV is between me and the only escape on the opposite shore. I have to turn and keep swimming downriver, hoping to stay ahead of him.

  My arms are burning, and I imagine all the bones I must have broken in that crash. When this adrenaline that’s motivating me right now wears off, I’m going to be in a buttload of pain.

  Who am I kidding? I’m going to survive that long. He’s closing in. I’m done for.

  I think about kicking off my shoes, to see if I could get me more speed—and that’s when I remember which shoes, exactly, I’m wearing.

  Hopefully they work underwater.

  Up ahead along the south wall of the river there’s a low archway. I knew it was a spillway pipe. They place them at regular intervals along the river to prevent flooding.

  If I could reach it...

  I kick hard and pull myself with my arms through the water. The current is my friend for the time being, but that meant it was also helping SUV.

  When he’s ten feet behind me, I grab onto the lip of the pipe, letting my body swing into it. I’ve stories of these pipes, and the massive turbines that are hiding deep within them, pulling the water away from the river. If I don’t make it back out, I’m going to end up shredded to bits and floating into the D.C. water treatment plant.

  I reach down into the water and activate the shoes.

  A faint blue glow appears beneath me. Praise waterproof tech!

  SUV is swimming straight for me, and our eyes meet.

  He’s five feet from me.

  Four.

  I kick forward, pushing against the current, fighting my way back out of the pipe.

  There’s a familiar flash of electricity, and SUV is gone.

  The crowd along the riverside, gone.

  The roar of Rocket Racers, gone.

  I’m alone, floating in the Potomac.

  My Potomac.

  And I’m getting sucked back into the pipe.

  “Help!”

  The last bit of energy leaves my body and I’m sucked back underwater.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  A hand grabs me and pulls me to the surface and I’m gasping for air and some people are shouting and I feel like I’m barely holding on to life and everything is just a blur and nothing makes sense.

  Arms around me, people in my face, my body being dragged onto land.

  But at least it was just people, not Russians. Not bad guys.

  One of them saw me pop out of the pipe—probably his attention was drawn to the flash of electricity that signaled my jump from the Meanwhile back to the real world—and he said when he saw me he knew something was wrong immediately and dove right in to help. A friend who was with him got some rope and threw it out. They got to me before I made it very far down the pipe, but they had to do CPR on me to clear out the water out of my lungs.

  I find all this out after the fact, while I’m recovering in a hospital emergency room.

  I keep getting told I’m so lucky it wasn’t worse. Lucky doesn’t even begin to cover it, guys. I was just in a plane crash going 300 miles an hour under a bridge over the Potomac River, after which I was chased by a mad man bent on killing me for.

  But they all think I’m just some kid who almost drowned.

  Little do they know I’m Donovan Meanwhile, Interdimensional Man of Mystery.

  They keep asking what I was doing down there. The people who saved me asked. The nurses asked. The cops even asked.

  Yes, the cops.

  No matter how I try I can’t seem to keep them out of my life.

  I tell them and everyone the same story: I was walking along the side of the river and thought I saw someone fall in, so I leaned over and fell in, myself. Didn’t explain the flash of lightning, but I found out I didn’t have to do that. The guy who saw it claimed it was a sign from God to get his attention.

  Flash forward a few hours later, and I’m taking a car ride home with my mom and dad. Dad’s driving, silent and stoic.

  Mom’s sitting in the backseat with me, her arm around me but her face looking out the window. She’s crying.

  Neither of them say a word until we’re almost home, them my dad looks at me in the rearview mirror and says, “It’s been three days, you know. Three effing days.” Only he doesn’t say ‘effing,’ he says the word.

  When my dad swea
rs I know he’s pissed, and it chills me to my bone. I wondered if Donovan Two’s dad swore at him.

  When we got home I have a bag of wet clothes, including my special Meanwhile Shoes. It goes into the laundry room. Not my choice, my mom takes it from me and tosses it down there.

  I don’t know when I’m gong to get access to those shoes again, but I know it has to be soon. I may have been missing over here for three days, but over there, where I was, there’s a mission I left unfinished.

  The night is pretty quiet around the house except for the phone ringing from time to time. My mom answers and says a lot of the same stuff to every caller.

  “Yep, it’s true.”

  “Just shaken up, I think. They didn’t keep him overnight.”

  “I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

  It always ended on a sad note.

  My dad watched the evening news, like he always does. This time when the story came on about me being found, he turned up the volume as a passive aggressive way of telling me he wanted me to pay attention.

  The reporter is standing next to the river where I was found. She talks about the rescuers who found me, the flash of light. Shakes her head as she talks about the near-tragedy. Suggests that this is a story that is far from over and that she’ll keep me updated on how it develops back to you in the studio.

  My dad clicks the TV off.

  “What in the hell were you thinking, boy?” he says as he spins around to glare at me. “We were worried sick!”

  From the kitchen, my mom says, “Herb...” like she doesn’t want him to get violent. I mean, he’s never hit me once in my entire life, but every time he gets upset she acts like he’s about to reel back and knock me across the room so even though it’s never happened it always, always feels like it’s about to.

  There are no answers forthcoming. I can’t tell them the truth, honestly, and I haven’t had time to craft a good lie. I figure if I just remain quiet and aloof they’ll come to their own conclusions and eventually stop asking me, and in the meantime I can figure out how to make my shift back into the Meanwhile and hopefully make sure everything is ok.

  Except that night before bed I hear my dad moving furniture, and I go upstairs and find him setting up a bed in my room. A second bed, I mean, across from mine.

  “What’s this?” I ask softly. He doesn’t respond. He’s dripping sweat. Wipes it off his brow.

  He looks at me.

  “You need supervision.”

  I try to parse what he means.

  “You’re sleeping in here?”

  “Yeah,” he says sarcastically. “You got a problem with that? Too bad.”

  I can feel my stomach turning a bit. This is not going well at all. I don’t want to be here but I can’t leave now. I certainly can’t just walk out the door, because what good would that do? And if I try to go down to the laundry room and get the sneakers, he’s going to...well, who knows what?

  Chase me?

  Yell at me?

  Look at me?

  All of the above are equally terrifying options to me.

  I just stay quiet and wait for bedtime. He doesn’t rush me. Doesn’t tell me when to go to bed or anything. He just sits there and watches TV for the rest of the night, and he and my mom don’t talk. She doesn’t talk to me, he doesn’t talk to her, I don’t talk to either of them. It’s fun. (Eye roll.)

  When it’s late and I’m tired, I’m watching TV with my dad and I say “Ok, I’m going to bed.” I’m figuring I’ll go into the room and maybe have at least a few minutes of alone time to sort out my thoughts while he finishes whatever show he’s watching and then comes to bed, too.

  But no. The second I stand up, he shuts the TV off.

  Follows me in, gets ready for bed right next to me.

  This is the youngest I’ve felt since I was young. Does that make sense? I feel like an infant.

  He snores.

  I barely sleep.

  I stare at the ceiling and review my life.

  In the morning, when the light is coming in between the blinds, I quietly get up and creep toward the door.

  “Where ya going?”

  Jesus, I didn’t even know he was awake.

  “To the bathroom,” I say.

  There’s a pause. “Leave the door open,” he says. “The bedroom door.”

  The bathroom is right across the hall from my room. With the bedroom door open he can see it, and it’s his way of telling me he’s watching.

  I go into the bathroom, shut the door, and sit down. This can’t be happening. How long will my life be like this? What is my mom thinking? Does she want things to be this way, or is she just going along with him for the time being because she doesn’t have any ideas of her own? Or because she’s scared of him? Or because she’s angry with me too?

  I wish I could talk to her, just the two of us. But then I remember that she’s dead in the other dimension and if I tried to talk to her I would just start crying, and she’d wonder why.

  I wash my hands, my face. Look at myself in the mirror.

  Who am I?

  There are two of me, but which one am I?

  If I’m me, then who is he? And if he is me, then who am I?

  There’s a gentle knock at the door, a tap tap tap.

  I open it, and my mom is standing there.

  “You ok?”

  I realize there are already tears in my eyes, and that just makes me start crying more.

  She hugs me, and shushes, and I just cry into her shoulder for the first time in forever. I tell her I’m sorry.

  I tell her I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry.

  She says nothing, and that’s what I needed in that moment. She’s good like that.

  She wipes away my tears, tells me she’s just glad I’m safe, and then tells me to get ready for school.

  She gets ready for work, but my dad has taken the next several days off so he just sits in the living room and waits to take me in his work truck.

  At least he gives me some privacy while I’m getting dressed.

  In my room, I flop back down on my bed just to feel like I’m doing something that I want to do, no matter what anyone else needs or wants of me in that moment.

  Outside it’s turning orange and white as the sun comes up and burns off all the dew.

  My window is bolted shut.

  That’s new.

  I mean, I wasn’t trying to sneak out, but obviously he thought I was going to try.

  I look at my bookshelf, and I’m surprised to see the silver spine of my laptop sitting underneath a pile of textbooks.

  He either didn’t see it, or didn’t think it was worth taking.

  I fire it up and got online.

  Ah, Facebook. My news feed.

  My life, just as I had left it, more or less.

  No messages on my wall saying that anyone missed me, or noticed I was gone.

  Nobody cared.

  I hit the search bar, and typed in the name that has been on my mind for the last three days: Gavin Hanson.

  I can’t believe it when he actually comes up. I know it’s not him him, but at the same time it is.

  The same face, same smile, same everything. He looks so happy. I don’t know if I had ever seen him look happy in the Meanwhile.

  I wonder what his life is like over here. Can’t tell much from his profile, because of his privacy settings. Flipping through the few pictures I had access to, it looks like he has a girlfriend, and a job that required him to wear a tie.

  What would happen if I called him up? Asked him to meet me somewhere for lunch? Told him about his other self?

  Oh. He lives in Tennessee. So much for that.

  And then for some reason I send a message to my brother, Real Matt.

  The one in Japan.

  We haven’t spoken in months—years, maybe. But I’m feeling very alone and he’s the only family I can reach out to right now.

  I type one word.

  Hey

&n
bsp; And hit send.

  “Thought you were getting dressed,” my dad says from behind me. I don’t even look at him. I just shut off my laptop and close it.

  He leaves me alone again.

  So much for that, too.

  I just learned how big the universe really is, and now my world is smaller than ever.

  I finish getting ready faster than usual, just so my dad doesn’t have anything to complain about. While they’re talking over coffee in the kitchen, I slip downstairs to the laundry room to grab the Meanwhile shoes.

  But they’re gone.

  I look everywhere down there. My wet clothes are there, sitting in a hamper on top of the dryer, clean and folded.

  But no shoes.

  I race upstairs, and try to act casual.

  “Hey, mom. Where’d the shoes go I was wearing yesterday? I wanted to wear them today.”

  “Oh, I’m taking them to the cleaners today. They’re so gross.”

  My dad sneers at me. “Wear your Converse.”

  I give a little laugh. “Well, I don’t mind, really. I really like those shoes.”

  “They need to be cleaned, Donnie. They’re still filled with nasty river water. You’ll have them back in a couple of days.”

  “But—“

  “Don’t argue with your mother.” My dad slams his coffee cup on the counter so hard it splashes coffee on his wrist but he pretends not to notice.

  I back off. “Ok. Sorry.”

  I only have one pair of shoes left, since my Chucks are presumably still on the floor of a thrift shop in Baltimore. It’s a pair of leather loafers I would usually wear for special occasions.

  I guess this counts as special.

  My dad notices on the drive to school, but he doesn’t make a comment, just sighs.

  At school it’s the same deal as before, teachers watching me like a hawk. This time they seem more concerned about me disappearing suddenly than getting beaten up.

  They’re actually not wrong to feel that way.

  The other students are scared to even talk to me.

  At lunch Raphael comes over to the table where I’m eating alone, and sits down across from me.

  “Aren’t you afraid of being seen sitting so close to me?” I say. “We could be playing footsie under the table.”

  He groans. “I’m sorry.”