Bullettime

by Nick Mamatas

  Dave knows plenty about looking down at the ground when confronted anyway, but walking to the park, which is easy enough to find, he holds his chin high and smiles. He doesn’t even wonder what this would feel like on cough medicine till he gets to the crowded park and hangs out on the fringes of several knots of NYU students who play guitars, bullshit in the shade under trees, or fall off their skateboards and gamely get up to try again.

  Dave is too shy to talk to anyone, and is for once glad of his power of near-invisibility. He loves walking lazy circles around the fountain and the larger concentric circles of the park’s paths, flowing from the rapid-fire hip-hop of someone’s freestyling (“I’ll cap yo’ ass like a motherfucker/pump the bass like a motherfucker/go to class learn a rhyme for motherfucker . . . motherfucker!”) to an old man’s violin—Dave throws seventy-five cents in quarters into the case at the man’s feet—to the strum of a guitar and the enthusiastic warbling of some minor Beatles tune. It’s sunny. Lots of girls are out, most of them casually chatting and leaning in close toward one another, the way girls do, and showing off the straps of their thongs, all for Dave. Robitussin would make that last more convincing, he thinks.

  He buys an expensive Coke and an outrageous pretzel from a cart, shuffles through a flock of pigeons, sending them flying, and is drawn to the dog run by the dusty tussles and barking. Surrounding the park like barbed wire, the properties of New York University, some of them gutted brownstones, others modern buildings of slab concrete and eight-foot-high windows. Dave wants to go to NYU; then he can come to the park and actually know the people here, have something to talk to them about, like organic chemistry or Free Mumia. (A band? Is reggae cool? He makes a mental note to download some when he gets home.) He sneaks the last chunk of his pretzel through the wire fence and watches a smiling Lab mix run to him and snag the treat whole. He wonders if he’ll see Erin in the park; maybe she really does fuck strangers. Everyone out here sure seems friendly with one another, the way they sit so close even in the heat, or cuddle in the shade of the trees. Maybe he could even find a girl who likes to fuck strangers, if he only knew how to identify them and what to say.

  Dave realizes he’s pacing after he passes the same chess game four times, and decides to find some place to eat. He cuts down Washington Square Park South and walks in the valley of row houses and tasteful little stores, heading deeper into the Village. Everything looks kind of expensive, or at least French; even little luncheonettes with room for only two tables seem to pride themselves on foreign-seeming signage and weird foods. Like pad Thai and Orangina. Dave suddenly wonders how many of the guys back in the park were gay; did they think he was looking for a pick-up or hustling or something with all his obvious walking around by himself?

  He blushes, makes a right, and comes along a more soothing street. It has a McDonald’s on it, like an oasis. He didn’t come all this way to eat a Value Meal #2 though, and even McDonald’s is a buck more across the Hudson, so he decides on the small diner three doors down. It’s not a big chrome and tin job like he’s used to from Jersey, but the Washington Place Diner And Restaurant (Two rooms? Two menus?) looks inviting enough, with booths and a counter and even a revolving display case full of fluffy cakes and almost menacing-seeming pies. The door is wide open and exhaling nicely chilled air-conditioned air as well, and Dave can almost smell the grease of the disco fries in the air. He walks up the steps and into the vestibule, and through the second glass door separating the foyer from the diner proper (or is this the restaurant section?), he sees her.

  She’s behind the counter, a white button-up shirt and black blazer over her tank top, lifting a plate smeared with ketchup and the leftover lettuce and coleslaw of a Burger Platter Deluxe with one hand and wiping down the Formica under it with her other. He stays long enough to watch her shove the plate across the stainless steel shelf under the window that separates counter from kitchen, walk back to the counter to pocket her buck and change tip, and then take up her position, bored-looking, arms crossed, with an empty frown on her face, by the cash register. Behind her, and behind the soda fountain, and the short-order cook who stands out, as he’s a black man, Dave sees the faded blue skies and crumbling pillars of a tacky mural of the Acropolis.

  Dave turns and runs back the two blocks to the PATH train and stands on the mostly empty platform for nearly half an hour before the train going back to Jersey comes, smoldering in an inexplicable shame.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Ylem isn’t so much a place as it is the canvas places are painted on. Here I can live every decision and detail of an infinite number of me. Of course the shooting cuts a huge red slash through my personal Ylem, like a line in the financial pages after a stock market crash. Sometimes I was able to resist Eris for weeks, or months, before pulling the trigger. A couple of times she never got to me at all.

  There are endless realities shifting and swirling in the Ylem, and I’ve lived them all. Nothing else to do, really. I died a baby due to bronchitis, and never felt anything more than cold and a harsh thimble full of air. There was an “accident”—that’s what the principal called it—in eighth grade. I was accidentally cornered and kicked so hard in the ribs that splinters of bone tore right through my guts. I didn’t even die till seventh period, in World Literature.

  I never live past forty. No matter what, I never marry. No kids. Sex sometimes, in college, thanks to beer and a sad little aura of being the nicest guy in some ramshackle dorm at Stockton College. That me studied psychology. The school was close to Atlantic City, so I learned to count cards and I didn’t need to work, as long as I lost frequently enough to keep the Mafia from beating me up in an alley. I learned that trick from some guy I met in an alley. Later, I die in a car wreck.

  Those are the boring lives. Most of them are very boring, with nothing more to say for them than a really good meal, or a glimpse in the dark of a dazed smile on the face of a pretty girl I managed to get into bed and make come.

  Eris is like a pillar of flame, splashing heat and light all across the narrow hallways of my life’s labyrinth. And she put me here, to make me her slave.

  I’m not Dave Holbrook; I’m just the part of Dave Holbrook who wasn’t insane. She had so many ways and so many tricks; in the Ylem I see them all very clearly, and while poor lost Dave twists and writhes against a million predestinations, like a prisoner being prodded to the lip of a grave at bayonet point, at the crack of a whip, from the tug of a leash around his neck. Eris is truly a goddess. It’s scary to see free will in action. They control the rest of us. If they’re flame, we’re moths.

  She ignores Dave in the halls and in the classroom. Dave walks through his days in a soporific stupor, too blitzed to notice even when Malik holds out a big meaty arm for Dave to walk into, sending him to the floor. Malik laughs, then yawps when his laugh doesn’t compel a sufficient number of girls to turn around. Then he walks on. There’s no rhyme or reason for these attacks, and that’s what they are, Dave decides. There isn’t some group of students who are bullies or gang members or “acting out,” however people put it—attacks and assaults come in waves. It’s information, abstract, that occasionally finds a medium of expression in someone next to Dave.

  A chop to the throat, light but painful enough, then some big brown eyes in his face, demanding this or that admission of joy in taking it up the ass like a fag, or in being a white dick-eating bastard. Dave mutters some response, and the mouth under the eyes says, “Excuse me?” But it’s not arrogant, or threatening, or a simmering response to a perceived challenge, the kid—whatever his name was, James something—really just said, “Excuse me?” the way his mother must have taught him to do at age three whenever he didn’t hear something completely.

  Erin walks by, a magazine folded over in her left hand, her eyes squinting (Dave finds the hint of crow’s feet attractive, a flaw that makes her accessible) and Dave shouts in the hope that she’ll turn around. “I said fuck you! You’re the
faggot!”

  Dave’s nose crunches under a fist, Erin turns a corner, blood wells up in the undersides of Dave’s eyes. The pain feels like it’s four feet away, and to the left.

  James (his name was James) is suspended for a week and no more because Dave shouted and that means it was a fight between kids and not a random assault, and besides, as James explained, yeah he threw the fist but it was Dave’s nose that broke and he had no idea such a thing could happen because his punch was more of a tap. Dave’s week is spent with Ann discovering the injury anew every morning—“Are your eyes still red? When are the bandages coming off again?”—and Jeremy just frowns and asks whatever happened to those Tae Kwon Do lessons Dave had two summers in a row when he was eight and nine.

  And Erin walks by. Erin hops the turnstile at the PATH station and flips off the shouting janitor, while Dave stands at the top of the escalators, staring till he gets an elbow to his back. Erin walks by while Dave eats a Philly cheese steak in the food court at the mall (he’s waiting for his movie to start; he goes in the afternoon because it’s cheaper and he can go alone with a minimum of hassles), and she’s the only female he sees that isn’t clutching at least two heavy-looking bags of boring mall store clothing. Erin walks by in dreams and in dreams Dave has some witty line to share but the floor warps and collapses into the Ylem and I flail into the darkness—but how it really happened involved the one time Erin didn’t just walk by.

  Erin walks into Dave’s room while he sits playing some flash game on the computer and she says, “Hi!” like a friendly eight-year-old making a new friend on the playground. Dave yelps and jerks around, his chair teetering. They hadn’t said a word to one another since the day he saw her working at the diner. Dave hadn’t even been to the city since then.

  “Your mother let me in. I told her that we’re studying together.” Erin smiles. “I even told her that it was for the Health class unit on Human Sexuality, and I brought a visual aid.” She shrugs her backpack off her shoulder, reaches into it and withdraws a diapered five-pound bag of flour. Hefting it in her palm, her lips pursed from the tiny strain, she says, “Catch,” and lobs it underhanded to Dave, who grunts and nearly fumbles as the flour thumps hard against his chest and hiccups a puff of white powder.

  “You’re the worst father ever!” Erin shrieks, her hands clawing her hair. Dave twitches and more flour spills as Erin slides back into her smirk, and with a hand cupped to her ear pantomimes listening closely for footsteps or a motherly holler from downstairs, but nothing is forthcoming. “She must be sleeping it off, the poor dear,” Erin says. Then she shuffles across the room, dragging dirty clothes along her ankles, and plops onto the bed. Dave holds the bag of flour in his lap and looks at her, glances at his monitor, then looks at her again.

  “Whatcha up to?” she asks. “Cybersex?”

  He blushes. “Homework.” Then the computer sings a downbeat song of defeat.

  “Ah, your Battle Station Mars homework. You are a scholar and a gentleman, even if you are an abusive father.”

  “Uhm.” A steady stream of flour puddles by his feet. “Erin? Why are you here? We’re not even in Health this semester, and I’ve only ever seen this flour thing on TV.”

  “Yeah, that’s where I got the idea from too. Why do you think the school district doesn’t want us to have flour? Do you think people would sneak cocaine into the schools?”

  “Erin—”

  “Or guns! Handguns in the flour. Do you think there are a lot of guns in school, Dave? I’m very nervous. I hate my parents for moving out here.”

  “Where are you from, anyway?”

  “Will you protect me from the gangs, Davey?” Erin pleads. Then she laughs at him, not even bothering to pretend to laugh with him. Dave briefly considers the immense psychosocial, linguistic, intersubjective, and formal determinants of whether one is laughing with or at someone and whether he can actually know what Erin’s doing since she is so obviously crazy and probably on drugs herself, but he puts all that aside and just says, “Maybe you should protect me from them. I don’t even think anyone’s in a gang, really. I mean, gang members are busy during the day and stuff; they have no time to learn about the American Revolution.”

  Erin is serious, like the face on a nickel. “Could you really use some protection?” She smiles and leans back, shifting subtly to make the bottom of her shirt rise, showing off a bit of tummy.

  “Well, not from you—”

  “Oh, you already have some protection, I see.” She’s not smiling. “Can I see it?”

  “What are you talking about?” Dave is flushed, sweating, actually trying to make himself annoyed and humiliated enough to gain some sort of upper hand. The bag of flour in his lap is a small blessing. “Small blessing.” Christ, I thought like my mother, and that was without any cough syrup—but she won’t even let him have that. “Drop the bag, come over here and sit next to me on your bed,” she says and he does, so eager for something.

  She turns to him and says, “I have a proposition for you. And no, that doesn’t mean I’m propositioning you.” This he laughs at half-authentically; it sounds like the sort of wordplay a sophisticated person would appreciate, so he tries to. She touches his wrist like in the movies, but he should be doing it, he knows, and the knowledge burns in his cheeks.

  “Let’s you and I,” Erin says, her tongue an eel, “form a secret society. Just the two of us. Tell nobody.”

  Dave asks, “Who would I even tell?” and imagines trying to explain all of this to Oleg—that guy who wears a fedora every day—and Erin says, “Aren’t you friends with that fedora guy?” and Dave says, “Not really,” and Erin says, “Good.”

  “We’ll communicate in code. Meet secretly. Make plans. Learn to read one another’s thoughts. Chart the course of world events, eventually, with the school as a test of concept.” Erin reaches out and Dave waits for a kiss, paralyzed, but she stretches past him to take hold of a blanket piled up at the corner of the bed. She gives it a dramatic magician yank and smiles as it fills the space before the bed and gently eases to the floor.

  “The initiation is simple. I will entirely remake your personality to better serve the needs of the collective, and through a lifetime of praxis you shall achieve theosis, or knowledge of God.” Erin holds up two corners of the blanket she had spread out.

  Dave giggles and says, “Sure, lay it on me!”

  Erin rolls her eyes and sighs. “You are a fucking idiot, you know that.” Then she swings the blanket over Dave’s head and covers him with it, then whips it off with a practiced movement and I go screaming into the Ylem, trapped for what seems like eternity, but what is really just an endless moment. What’s left of me in that dumpy bedroom in the unfolding universe is the Dave who cannot help but obey.

  CHAPTER 8

  Erin tackles him and gives his lips a lick with the very tip of her tongue, then rolls off him and out the door. Erin rises up like a snake and shifts out of her shirt, then grabs Dave by the sides of his head to drag his mouth up to her body; she stays and they fuck clumsily on Dave’s sagging twin bed. Erin stays on her corner of the bed, folding the blanket in her lap and mumbling about her parents—their ridiculous demands, Old World expectations (no dating, work work work, Christmas in January), and her father’s regular thundering at the TV, over tax bills, at the Puerto Rican busboys down at the diner. Erin teaches Dave several lines from The Iliad, or says that they’re from the poem—and an important part of his initiation—but they were really just a string of modern Greek curses: Gamo ton shisto bou s’eshese, she says, and he proudly repeats in an ancient sing-song, “I fuck the pussy that vomited you out.” It doesn’t matter which choices she made, Dave was hers regardless. I love to live through his eyes as her belly and shoulders roll over him; over and over I replay her solemn little talk, wondering if this time she’ll cry, or admit that it’s all lies. Never happens.

  I can be anywhere Dave ever was,
in any of the streams of his life, of my life. It’s hard to remember, especially as I stand over his body, tucked and curved into itself like a fetus in his own blood and urine, his last rattling breath still hanging in the air amidst the whimpers and the moans of the wounded. Once, a kid, a sensitive little guy named Ray who liked trip-hop and weed, caught a glimpse of me—me, standing over my own stained corpse—through the chicken wire and papier-mâché of the world. He shrieked and ran.

  “I saw that guy. You know, that dude! He was standing over another guy who looked just like him,” Ray explained to his crew of friends who had already grown bored with Hacky Sack.

  They were a smear of baggy black clothing, clownish makeup, and whiteboy dreads, and they didn’t believe him, despite their steady diet of Wiccan paperbacks from the New Age section of the B. Dalton at the mall. “Bullshit,” they said. The ones with a bit of a rep for being tough or especially magically powerful among their cohort—they bought their books from the real pagan shops in the city—made their pronouncement like it was two words. “Bull. Shit.”

  But they all went to go stare at the corner between their classes, and a couple of them were even sure they saw me, though I was actually standing behind them. Ray’s story sounded much better when Ray wasn’t the one telling it. “Oh man, I totally saw that guy. It was like he was crying over his own body—like a guardian angel who failed.”