Bullettime

by Nick Mamatas

  The corner has a chill attached to it. Can’t you feel it?

  It smells like blood and steel here. It smells like the streets did on the afternoon of 9/11, when the wind shifted and carried the dust of the ruins over the river. I can taste it on my tongue, like I could when the shooting began.

  In an hour the school was united in gleeful horror over the idea of the dead white guy haunting the place. The district even sprang for an extra counselor for a week or two. The vice principal got online and sold the story anonymously to one of the tabloids for five grand, then bragged about it to everyone in the faculty lounge, then realized that the money barely covered the outstanding debt on one of his credit cards and shut up about it. The school had a closet built into the corner where Dave died. It’s a little eerie, even to me, to stand in the middle of the leaning mops and the sparkling jeers of various cleaning product logos and mascots, waiting for the door to open at the crack of dawn.

  Experiencing Dave’s body—the one crumpled on the third floor of Hamilton High School, that is—feels like crawling into the slice left by cleaning and gutting a fish: cold, slimy, and ridiculous. When Dave wins, on the other hand, when those years of Dungeons and Dragons mapmaking pay off, when love and rage fill his heart like battery acid, and when he walks down the steps of his school all giddy and his arms heavy and hot from the shootings, that’s like stepping into an orgasm and riding it like a cab down a glorious spring day street. The day The Resistance is born.

  Then there are the endless Daves who don’t do it at all—the ones who stand outside the school, lips torn and bleeding, who turn around and go back home. Then ones whose plans melt like dirty slush the closer it gets to E-Day; a dozen Daves just live the fantasy of murder over and over as they shoulder and squeeze their way down Newark Avenue during lunch period—if only there was a way to clear the streets in a moment; point the gun and let the bodies bloom like instant red roses.

  Their bodies are all like dead fish too, if not in high school then by college. Communications major, Business Admin minor, nine credits of Japanese—maybe we’ll get into anime translation/localization or something, but we drop out or shuffle into Dad’s office or end up pushing around overhead projectors in the DoubleTree Hotel by the mall. We buy used Hondas because they’re sensible and worlds away from the awesome crime-fighting vehicles we used to design with crayon and construction paper. Our girlfriends have high Jersey hair and dull blue eyes and generally find us on the rebound from some five-year relationship with a barrel of a man named Ted or Bryant. They leave quickly enough too, after a summer of somedays about trips to Paris or marriage or moving out to some place where the houses have nice lawns and the Puerto Ricans are all cleaning ladies.

  Then there is the Kallis Episkopos. He lives in exile in another world, say his followers, despite the claims of the media and law enforcement and no, they don’t mean me. This is the Dave who walked out of Hamilton with raw trigger fingers and an eagerness to eat JCPD bullets from the cordon around the entrance, the one locked up variously in prison or mental hospitals, and his leaflets, zines, and broadcast email broadsides. The kid who got his nose sliced open with a shiv twenty minutes into his sentence and returned the favour that night by gouging out the eyes of his attacker—and replacing them with a pair of blue robin’s eggs he had somehow smuggled into prison. He dreamed of murders and got those dreams into the hands of fat girls from Ohio. You know, the ones with the long hair to cover their faces and the black blogs with purple lettering, and the box cutters to the throats of their ridiculous high school enemies. (“She called me a slut, once.” “I’m half-Jewish and he told me that God didn’t love me. And he was right, but Kallis Episkopos does.”) The man who after his death had an entire issue’s worth of The Journal of Police and Criminal Psychology dedicated to articles about him and the movement he sparked.

  Sliding into him is like living in an alcoholic who can taste the Jack Daniels on her tongue in every glass of juice or soda, right before she finally says, “Fuck it,” and marches out to get laid, get drunk, and get royally fucked by the world she’s determined to toss herself out in front of. Kallis Episkopos is Dave Holbrook, with free will reclaimed.

  And me? I’m Dave Holbrook too—where Kallis Episkopos has free will, I have no will at all, no way to affect the world or my own life. But I get to see it all; every moron mistake and anguished inevitability. Somewhere along the infinite planes of the Ylem, there must be a way out, a way to live and a choice to make that frees us from the grip of Eris, that frees me from this waiting room of raw experiences. I just need to find it.

  CHAPTER 9

  Dave isn’t surprised to find himself bleeding again. He is prepared even, and seals shut the pen-made wound in his belly with his handy tube of Krazy Glue. Dave had never even seen the kid in school before, but he had heard that he was somebody’s cousin or something, from Newark, where the shit that happened was always a lot fucking heavier than in Jersey City.

  “Shit shit shit shit shit,” he seethes through cable-tight teeth. He pinches the flab—Dave was a skinny kid with a paunch, the worst of both worlds—with his blood-smeared left hand and applied the glue with the right, then held the wound shut. He doesn’t need stitches—he wouldn’t get stitches anyway. Half a roll of toilet paper is just enough blotter for his injury, his hands, the streaks and drips around the bowl, and the walls of the far stall in the second floor boy’s room, all of which he’d managed to get pretty sticky when he ran in here, book bag and windbreaker flying. The toilet is jammed tight with crumpled red and purple toilet tissue; they float like a mass of abstract origami flowers.

  Dave sits still as he can, breathing through his mouth—the floor smells like piss and Ajax—and waits for the glue to set. A comically oversized cock and balls, fireworks shooting forth from the tip, decorates the stall door. “Well,” Dave says to himself, “fuck.”

  Outside the stall, a pair of boots, black with thick and useless buckles on the side, march up to and stop before the door. The dusty leather of a trench coat drags behind them. Dave cringes.

  “Hail!” says a voice, half-strangled between adolescence and the deep baritone of adult blowhards, on the other side of the door.

  “Occupado, Tigger,” Dave says.

  “I know that,” Oleg says. “Why would I greet an empty bathroom stall?”

  “Because you’re crazy? I dunno. Look, I don’t want to talk right now.”

  “I couldn’t help but notice a suspicious-looking trail of blood leading right to the door here—”

  “Yeah yeah, I know, listen, I’m fine—”

  Oleg wasn’t the sort to allow himself to be interrupted; in fact Dave knew he was just the sort of asshole who’d simply start over again even if his question had already been answered, and he did: “I couldn’t help but notice a suspicious-looking trail of blood leading right to the door here—” Dave sighs, but lets him finish, “and I was wondering if you might be in need of any assistance.”

  “I said I was fine, didn’t I?” Dave says.

  “Indeed you did, but I have evidence that you’re not actually fine.”

  The glue sets. Dave reaches up, shifts the bolt of the little lock, and gingerly pushes open the door. Oleg grins widely, like he had just turned to the centrefold in some porno mag. Dave wishes he could kick high enough to knock the fedora off Oleg’s mop of frazzled hair.

  “So, you think you can help?” Dave says, nasty like his mother. That edge in the voice.

  “Actually,” Oleg says, punching each syllable—ack chew ah lee—like the word was new to him, “I believe that I can.” He snaps the rim of his trench coat and squats to meet Dave’s glassy eyes. “I think it’s past time we taught some of the dirtbags in this school a lesson.”

  Dave laughs and laughs. “Oh gawd. What are you going to do? Teach me to kill people with mind bullets?”

  Oleg folds his arms over his chest and scowls, trying to l
ook intimidating in his long coat, but he barely manages rumpled. “I’m not the one bleeding,” he says. “Maybe I have resources you lack.”

  Dave brings the glue stick to his nose and inhales deeply, then mocks: “Maybe I have resources you lack,” he says, his chin against his collarbone, his voice an octave deeper than usual. Dave props himself up with his elbow and the rim of the toilet, winces, and falls again. Oleg reaches down to help Dave to his feet.

  “Thank you, Tigger,” Oleg says.

  “Thank you, Tigger,” Dave repeats.

  The door to the boy’s room bangs open and the whooping and howling begins. “Hey, they’re in the stall together!” Lee announces to nobody, his smile wide like a horse’s. “Suckin’ cock, no doubt.” Dave steps out of the stall and stands next to Oleg, his mouth a scribbled line. “Damn, you’re bleeding again, guy,” Lee tells him.

  Dave walks up to Lee, beelining for the door, almost hoping for a standoff, but Lee steps out of the way and raises his hands. “Uh oh, AIDS blood comin’ through,” he says as Dave strides tall into the hallway. The door closes, Dave’s knees buckle, his hands move to his wound, and around the corner comes Vice Principal Fusco. In the muffled distance, Oleg squeals, “Hey quit it!” and Lee laughs. The fedora rolls on its sharp edge out of the bathroom and into the hall. For a moment, all is a blur.

  “. . . and this time, I was just,” Dave says, “poked.”

  “Poked?” Fusco is a small mountain behind his overburdened desk. Dave doesn’t know many men with beards, he realizes. Fusco’s white whiskers suggest Santa Claus and the precision of some laser-guided razor available only via late-night TV infomercials at the same time. “With what?”

  “A shiv.”

  “What do you mean, ‘a shiv’?” Fusco’s hands are up, his fingers twitching around the word.

  “A pen.”

  Fusco takes a note: “A penknife.”

  “No, just a pen.”

  “Just a pen. First you bit your tongue, then you were stabbed—”

  “Poked.”

  “—with a pen.”

  “Yes.”

  Fusco says, “It’s not been a very good year for you so far, Mr. Holbrook, has it?”

  Dave shrugs.

  “Who is—” Fusco glances down at some notes, “‘Tigger’?” The hands shoot up again. Dave swallows a chuckle and winces from the glued stitch in his side.

  “Oleg Broukian.”

  “Is Tigger some sort of gang name?”

  Dave can’t help but laugh at that, but shudders from the pain. “Heh, no. He calls himself Tigger because the wonderful thing about tiggers is that he’s the only one.”

  “What on Earth is that supposed to mean, Mr. Holbrook?” Fusco asks, a volcano rumbling.

  “Honestly, I have no idea. But I’ve met, like, three Tiggers online, and they all say that they’re the only one.”

  “So,” Fusco says, “you spend a lot of time ‘surfing the web,’ do you?” His fingers go up and the conversation descends into hell. Parents are called, and in my old home Ann sleeps through fifty-seven rings. She always hated answering machines. Oleg’s folks actually show up, looking like fire plugs that had eaten other fire plugs, and hustle their son away. His hair waved in strands on the breeze as he was pushed by meaty shoulders and clasping hands into a grey beater Volvo. Nurse Alvarez comes and frowns at the Krazy Glue holding together the slice of skin on Dave’s stomach, while Fusco in the other room harrumphs at the district attorney over the phone.

  “He should go to the hospital,” the nurse tells Fusco.

  “I’m not going,” Dave says.

  “Yes you are.”

  “No he’s not,” Fusco calls out from the interior of his office. “We can’t send him anywhere without parental permission.” He walks out and looks at Alvarez. “Except home. Which we will—” he turns as if he had been practicing with a mirror in the other room “—for one week. You’re suspended, Mr. Holbrook.”

  Dave starts, then winces again. Alvarez puts a hand on his shoulder. Tamed, Dave asks as calmly as he can (though his hands are clenched into fists; he hopes the stance will pass as pain and not rage). “Why am I being suspended? What did I do? What about the guy who stabbed me?”

  Fusco raises an eyebrow. “I thought you said you were poked.”

  “Either way, I’m the victim,” Dave says, teeth clenched.

  “You’re a victim in one sense,” Fusco says, “but not in every sense. We have rules, insurance liability, standards of behaviour. Plus, we don’t know who attacked you. ‘Italian-looking African-American’ . . . I don’t even know what that’s supposed to mean—” here went the fingers again, “—‘someone’s cousin,’ doesn’t really cut it. We do know, however, that you brought contraband, the Krazy Glue, which might be an inhalant, into the school, and then used it inappropriately.”

  Alvarez rises from her crooked posture and says, “Damnit, just take the week off. It’s a vacation. I can use a week’s vacation too.”

  “I left a message with your parents. Three, in fact. When do they come home?”

  Dave stands. “My mother’s probably already home. Do I get a police escort or an ambulance ride too?”

  “If you can’t walk, I’ll drive you home, Holbrook.”

  Dave can walk. Dave walks out of the main office, down two flights of wide marbled steps and into the early autumn afternoon. The street is bare of the usual bustle of classmates that accompany lunch or dismissal. Dave almost feels like a real live human being for a moment, the sort of person who can go into a store and buy something, or look at a tree and appreciate it as he strolls by. Then like a breeze Erin appears beside him, takes the crook of his arm in hand, and without saying a thing leads him away from school, away from home, and down Newark Ave. Under their feet a Conrail train pulling a dozen tanker cars rumbles past and sends pigeons flying by the swarm.

  CHAPTER 10

  Even back in the days of swilling cough medicine, I’d tell myself that at least I wasn’t going to end up being one of those guys who peaked in high school. That’s probably why the version of Dave I found most interesting was the one who did just that. His life was like watching a glacier melt. He was also one of the only ones who kept in contact with Ann instead of running, screaming, away from her. Actually, he still lived with her, in Bergen County. Jeremy died of an early heart attack, thanks to a congenital condition. Nothing so melodramatic as an insane alcoholic wife and a failure of a son took him down.

  I never got used to my mother. She changed. When I was a kid, she was a dreamy drunk. A murmurer and forgetter. But something had turned, even before Dad’s death. The wine in her had fermented into a sour vinegar. And she couldn’t take care of herself, so I had to take her in. I’d stay out late after work, and she’d shriek at me till the neighbours called the police. Or I could come right home after work, but that would just mean a slower boil and an earlier climax. I tended to split the difference, rolling in around eight.

  I liked the video store near my home. It had parking in the back—I always imagined it was for porno fans who didn’t know how to use the Internet—and the employees were always happy to see me. They were contractually obligated to smile and make conversation. Not like those Starbucks bitches, who marched us customers through the line like we were prisoners being deloused.

  I wasn’t the sort of person so desperate for human attention that I flirted with every female retail employee I encounter. Hey, Mindy! Heh heh, yeah, you have a nametag. I guess we’re on a first-name basis. . . . Mindy really was very into movies. She kept good ones in reserve for me. Netflix can’t do that. Not nearly as well, anyway. She was a mousy girl. Mid-20s. No college for her because her folks were poor and she was unenthusiastic in school. Small boobs, like someone who used to be an athlete. Good smile, okay teeth. Doable, but . . .

  I was sure she had a similar summary of me—chubby guy with glasses.
Jewish nose. Works for the state. Doesn’t know how to make a machine spit out a winning lottery ticket. Lives with his mother, but only because she’s crazy, or so he says. Not doable.

  Thus my but.

  “Dave!” Mindy was excited to see me. I always tense when people call my name in public. After all these years, I still worry that someone will overhear my name, then follow me around and shout it at me. But the store was empty save for Mindy and a pair of teens looking over the videogames, and me. She reached under the counter and produced a DVD. “This is the one. Wong kar-wai’s 2046.”

  “Sci-fi?”

  “Uhm . . . kinda.” Mindy got quiet. She didn’t want to be known as the type of girl who watches sci-fi films. “I mean, there are different timelines and stuff. There’s a sci-fi story wrapped up in the other stuff. And it’s non-chronological.”

  “Hmm, sounds good.” I picked up the DVD case and made a show of considering it. I really just wanted to ask Mindy to come home with me and watch it on my couch. But my mother would be on the couch, silently stewing. “Is this subtitled?” Subtitles put my mother to sleep, which is half the reason why I became a cinephile.

  “Yeah, of course,” Mindy said.

  “So,” I said, “not a good movie to have on while making out on the couch, right?”

  Mindy blushed. “Well . . .” Then her face changed. “Don’t you live with your mother? Ha ha, you’d better not be making out on the couch, right?”

  “Yeah, right.” If only the whole world and everyone in it would die, right now. A gigantic solar flare would be sufficient. My own spine was already boiling. “Can’t have that. Uhm, I’ll take it. But I want to look around first too.”

  “Sure, okay,” Mindy said. “I’ll be here.”

  I’ll be here. What did that mean? It was flirty, certainly. Now I had to find another DVD, and one that would impress Mindy. Not another foreign film though—that would be too obvious. Indie, but not too recent. Anything with Parker Posey in it was disqualified. Then I found it—Ghost Dog. Masculine, yet thoughtful. Everyone with half a brain loves Jarmusch. And it was filmed in Jersey City, so I had another conversational gambit in hand when I got back to checkout.