Bullettime

by Nick Mamatas

  “I told your father you didn’t have to come in. But I didn’t tell him that I was going to leave you alone,” he says. Officer Levine is behind him, looking like a scolded child. “We got an appointment in the principal’s office.” Dave wonders why the detective didn’t introduce himself, didn’t even give a name. He doesn’t find out till he arrives at the principal’s office, and one of the secretaries says, “Detective Giovanni, Doctor Furgeson will see you now.”

  “Of course he will,” Giovanni snorts. To Dave he nods toward the door leading to the interior office and says, “Walk.”

  “Mr. Holbrook,” Doctor Furgeson says. “Thank you for coming.” Doctor Furgeson is the principal. He’s a tiny fellow—wiry with red hair turning quickly grey, and pale freckles. Until now, Dave always imagined him sitting on Mr. Fusco’s shoulders as the big vice principal strode down the halls of the school, calling out orders and making demands.

  “The police took me here. I was late to homeroom. I don’t want today on my record as a cut,” Dave says.

  “Yes, the stabbing was a terrible thing. You’re very brave. Is that what the perpetrator said?” Furgeson asks. He attempts a comical “black” accent and says, “‘I cut yo ass!’” This voice sounds like a squeaky door. Dave looks over at Officer Levine, whose eyes are wide and trembling.

  “Shouldn’t my mom be here?” Dave asks. Giovanni laughs a single loud ha! at that.

  “We need to get to the bottom of this, Mr. Holbrook. So you told the police that the perpetrator wasn’t a student?” Dave opens his mouth to answer, but the principal just continues speaking. “I find this difficult to believe. We check IDs and have metal detectors at every entrance, you see?”

  “I was attacked with a pen!” Dave says.

  “There’s metal in pens.” The principal looks at the detective as he speaks. “So I wonder if Mr. Holbrook isn’t trying to actually protect his assailant, for fear of reprisals.”

  “The metal detector would go off constantly if pens set it off. We’re in a school.”

  “Do you have a lot of gang violence in Hamilton?”

  “I’d say gang affiliations more than violence,” Officer Levine says.

  “It’s like that show Oz in here,” Dave says. “It’s like South Africa. Everything’s so racial.” He’s saying anything that comes to mind now, just to get someone to acknowledge his existence. “I have a feeling the school encourages all this, to keep us at one another’s throats. There has to be someone gaining from all this. Follow the money! Isn’t that the rule—follow the money?”

  “Half the school is Latino,” Office Levine explains to the detective. “If there was really any gang problem, there wouldn’t be any gang problem for long. One faction would dominate.”

  “Perhaps we can make a move toward requiring school uniforms,” Doctor Furgeson says.

  “Is that even legal?” Levine says. The detective remains silent, taking it all in. Then he says, “There could be internecine struggles between different elements of the Hispanic community. Puerto Ricans versus Dominicans, for example.”

  “Why do all the black kids sit together in the cafeteria?” Furgeson wonders aloud. “Speaking of . . . are we ready, Mr. Levine?”

  Officer Levine gets on his walkie-talkie and asks someone on the other end if everything is ready to go. The detective checks his watch. Dave wants to ask what internecine means—he underestimated the detective. SAT words. They then all leave the office, Dave following like a mere victim of gravity. Oleg is waiting in the exterior office. He waves. A few other kids are waiting too. All white, and all, to be blunt, nerds. Hamilton is a big school, so Dave doesn’t know them all, but he can tell. Awkward glasses, greasy hair, elbows and knees everywhere. Underdeveloped weirdos with last year’s book bag and clothes selected by aping what Peter Parker was wearing two decades ago in the comics.

  “Have all of you been stabbed too?” Dave asks. “Oleg?”

  “What? No,” Oleg says. Nobody else answers. They’ve likely never been to the principal’s office before, and are just as confused as Dave. They’re marched out of the office as a group, with the principal leading the way and Levine behind. Detective Giovanni hangs off to the side, like he’s worried about germs. They’re led through the halls, to the annex and the cafeteria. It’s surprisingly full and quiet, for 9:30 in the morning, but Dave and the nerds figure it out quickly. Everyone seated is black, and a boy, and burning with a sullen resentment. Several other police officers are in the cafeteria as well, stationed in pairs by the exits. Dave and the others are herded through the space, threading through the aisles. The kids are mostly quiet, but Lee smiles and waves at Dave and says, “Yo!” All the boys at the table glare, and Malik, who is sitting right next to him, rolls his eyes and snorts.

  “No talking,” Officer Levine tells Dave. Everyone knows he meant Dave. Then the small troupe marches back out the far entrance of the cafeteria and is brought into the nearby boy’s locker room, adjacent to the gymnasium.

  “Thank you, fellows,” Doctor Furgeson says. “You may all go.”

  “But . . .” one of the smaller kids whines, “we need hall passes. We’ll get in trouble.”

  “Just go,” the detective says. There’s a burst of collective yawps and talking, but the detective puts his fingers to his lips. The boys shut up and leave, except for Dave, and Oleg, who takes a few steps away, but loiters nearby.

  “Mr. Broukian?” Doctor Furgeson says.

  “I want to know what’s going on,” Oleg says. “Dave’ll tell me afterwards anyway, so I may as well stay and hear now.”

  “Tigger, it’s okay—”

  “Tigger?” Furgeson interrupts. “Is that some kind of nickname?”

  “What else would it be?” Oleg says.

  “Mr. Fusco told me it had some special significance. Is it a gang nickname?”

  “Yeah,” Oleg says, “it’s a gang nickname. Pooh Corner, represent.” Dave laughs at that, and so does Officer Levine. The principal tells the police officer to escort Oleg back to class. “Call me, Davey!” Oleg says as he marches out, raising his feet high in a hint of a goosestep.

  “So,” Giovanni says. “You recognize your assailant in there?”

  “In the cafeteria? No. Did you bring all the black guys into the cafeteria for me to check out, like a line-up?”

  “I didn’t do a thing,” the detective says.

  “Mr. Holbrook, David,” Doctor Furgeson says. “It’s just not possible that you were stabbed by a non-student. Do you understand? It had to have been a student. Our security is too tight.”

  “Is it even legal, what you did?” Dave asks. He looks at the detective, who pretends not to hear the question. “You know, if we all keep asking if things are legal, that probably means illegal things are happening.”

  “Does your mother drink a lot, son?” Giovanni asks. “Do you? Speaking of legal.”

  “Now, you said it was an African-American male, your assailant—” Furgeson says.

  “Well, I don’t see what that has to do with anything.”

  “Maybe you drink a little too,” the detective says.

  “Please don’t try to make this a racial issue. We took care to make sure you couldn’t be easily identified. That’s why we had you walk through the cafeteria with those other boys. Now, stop trying to protect a criminal and—”

  “I’ve got a theory,” the detective says. “You stabbed yourself. Maybe it was an accident. Maybe you were embarrassed.”

  “Mr. Fusco says that Oleg Broukian was with you. Did he do it?” Furgeson says. “Is that why he was so eager to stick around?”

  Dave takes a seat on the long bench between lockers. “This is all insane. I want to talk to my parents.”

  “Problems at home? I talked to your father before. He was—”

  “Mr. Holbrook, I’ll be pleased to call your parents,” says Furgeson. “We can all go
together back into the cafeteria and you can identify your assailant with their help, perhaps.”

  Call them. Call them right now. And they’ll call the news, and you can explain why you brought all those black kids into the cafeteria. That’s what I wanted to say. What I willed Dave to say over and over, through countless iterations of this morning. Instead, all he said was a weak little, “Don’t.”

  “Don’t interrupt me again,” the detective tells Furgeson. “Your father thinks he’s a little tough guy,” he says to Dave. “If he’s so tough, why is his kid such a mess, and his wife, oh man . . .” He shakes his head.

  There’s a reason I loved Erin, despite everything. There’s no need for suspense—there can be no such thing in the Ylem anyway—she hired the man who stabbed Dave. He went to the community college near her apartment, ate at the luncheonette on the ground floor. Sometimes he worked at her father’s diner. Dave was easy enough to describe, and she wouldn’t have cared had he stabbed a few other geeky guys with a pen and then ran. She even helped him sneak into the school, and paid him off with her mouth. But now, as Dave squirmed on that little bench, she did something wonderful. She pulled a fire alarm.

  “That’s not a drill,” Furgeson says as it echoes throughout the locker room.

  “It’s a false alarm,” the detective says.

  “Doesn’t matter, we have to get outside. I need to be out front in forty-five seconds. There are no false alarms.” Furgeson grins wide. The power dynamic has shifted a little bit, even if his advantage is based on state regulations instead of native intelligence, fists the size of gallon milk jugs, and a gun.

  “That Tigger kid pulled the alarm to help his little buddy out,” the detective says, but Furgeson is gone, and Dave sees his chance too and runs out after the principal.

  The halls are already full of once-mousy teachers all barking as they march backward with obedient students swarming after them. Furgeson charges ahead, so Dave just attaches himself to the end of some class of seniors. The alarm drowns out most of the conversations, but Dave can’t help but hear his nickname once or twice as he is led outside. White fag. There’s that white faggot. Fucking punk-ass faggot.

  News travels fast. Plenty of people had heard that he was the particular white fucking faggot who got stabbed. How’s he still walkin’? someone asks. When I stab a motherfucker, they stay stabbed, someone else—a girl, that time—declares. Furgeson’s bizarre show in the cafeteria was a flop. Everyone knew why they’d been dragged down there: the black kids so that one of them could be identified by the white faggot, and the other white faggots as decoys. Dave was tempted to run home, to forget school entirely and forever. Do a GED in a couple of years, maybe get some homeschooling online, forge his mother’s signature. Whatever it takes to get out of here. He wouldn’t even need to run, he could just take a pen from his bag, work it under the suture, tear open the thread, and bleed till they send him home, or to the emergency room again.

  The police from the cafeteria cordon off the street, and the student body floods into it. Furgeson gets his hands on a megaphone and announces that if the alarm was a false one, whoever pulled it was going to be “Suspended, expelled, arrested, tried, and convicted. And also fined,” he adds as an afterthought. Then, somewhere on the far side of Newark Avenue, a fight breaks out. Dave didn’t care to see it, but is pushed forward as the crowd runs to check out the ruckus. It’s everyone’s favourite: a girl-fight. Dave doesn’t know either of the girls—both Latinas, one chunky, the other wire-thin and tall and dark, going at it, shrieking in two languages, thrashing in the grips of their boyfriends, and then the cops, aiming for the eyes. The tall one is pulled right off the asphalt, and just kicks the chubby girl in the head. Her head snaps back, but she’s not done. She bursts the hold the cop has on her and plows into the tall girl and the two police holding her. Then the rest of the cops pile atop them, grabbing ankles and wrists.

  Time to go, Mr. Holbrook, Dave thinks, and he takes the opportunity to squeeze into the dead spaces between clumps of students to get onto Pavonia Avenue. He has the idea to just head into the city. The PATH train is only a buck, one way. He could make a day of it. Every decision is a universe unto itself, and in a dynamic group there were many decisions—turn left or right, duck down or rise up to the balls of one’s feet, stay still or run for it—that every kid filling the street outside the school could make. And here comes a fire truck, despite the absence of fire, or even smoke. There’s a world where I stayed put, paralyzed by anxiety and curiosity, and then just shuffled back into the school building like everyone else. One where I ran for it, made it to Manhattan, and stayed there for four cold nights before going home; and one where I made it to Manhattan and stayed there for three years, living in a squat till my blood grew poisoned and I died. One where I just went home and stayed truant for three days till my father threatened to call the police.

  But this world—the one I’m watching now—is the one where Dave turns and runs, and walks right into a waiting fist. Dave doesn’t know who the guy is, but he had been in the cafeteria, and had sussed Dave out as the catalyst for his ruined morning. The bone that makes up his eye socket crunches hard, and his face and eyes fill with blood. The crowd hoots and ooohs. He doesn’t even fall to the ground before his assailant grabs a fistful of windbreaker, picks him back up and punches him again on the side of the head. That first blow was a miracle of brutality, but the next few don’t do much. Dave already has a broken nose, after all. He’s unconscious and hard to actually hold up with one hand. It’s like smacking around a rag doll, except that this one is built to bruise. Dave’s eyes flicker open and he thinks he sees something. Huge black wings. Oleg and his trench coat, on the back of the attacker, trying some goofy wrestling hold. Oleg gets shrugged off. He throws two ineffectual punches at the big kid’s back. There’s laughter everywhere. Someone else—Erin obviously, though Dave can’t tell Erin from a telephone pole at the moment—grabs Dave by the shoulders and leads him away to sit on the curb. Oleg hits the asphalt hard, and then the cops swoop in, truncheons in hand. More sirens—police this time, not fire trucks.

  “Not bad, eh?” Erin says to Dave.

  Dave opens his mouth to talk but Erin holds up a hand. “Don’t talk. Keep working on your breathing. And don’t blow the blood out of your nose; your eyes will swell shut. With a fire truck comes an ambulance, always, so just hang on, okay?”

  Dave nods.

  “You know, they say high school is the best time of our lives, and that we should do all we can to enjoy these carefree days before entering the real world. I have to agree. What a sunny day. It’s great to be outside instead of trapped in those stuffy old classrooms,” she says. “It’s like I can smell the asbestos. Good thing there was a real fire, eh?”

  Dave says, “Whus goin’ on? Why?” He raises his arms, trying to encompass the whole scene before them. A dozen cop cars have arrived. The businesses along the street are closing early, pulling metal gratings down over their display windows. A helicopter hovers right over the school. The soap operas and morning news programs have been pre-empted for the live media feed. Somehow, Dave and Erin are invisible in the midst of the discord.

  “You know, you’re totally going to wake up in the hospital,” Erin says. “I wonder how your folks will deal with it. Think they’ll finally pull you out of this shithole school?”

  Dave shakes his head. “Mah duh wond . . .”

  “Don’t speak, don’t speak,” Erin says, a finger on his lips. “You sound like a retard.” She takes his hand and puts it on her chest. “There. This is a first for you, isn’t it?” Dave swoons, and falls to the curb.

  CHAPTER 12

  Prison is a lot like high school. By that I mean that every motherfucker here deserves a fucking bullet in their head, with their mamas watching on TV as it happens. I’m famous enough that I have a cell to myself; it’s full of books and presents, and I even have my own computer. I’m lik
e Mumia Abu-Jamal in here. French fucking novelists visit me, and their interviews with me appear in prestigious Communist literary journals. This is the life. Shooting up Hamilton really did solve all my problems.

  Like I was telling one of those French fags the other day on Skype, “It’s all about carving out a little bit of free will. Aren’t all of you people supposed to be beret-wearing existentialists? You should know that you’re free all the time, but afraid of it. Well, something happened to me and then I wasn’t afraid anymore.” Sadly for the world, the art of the follow-up question has been lost, so he didn’t ask me what happened. What turned me from Dave into I, into the Kallis Episkopos! What made it so easy for me to pick up a machine gun and, with no experience in shooting at all, paint the hallways red.

  I credit my existential cosmic freedom to cough syrup. I feel sorry for the youth of today. When I was in high school, you could walk into any drugstore and buy the stuff with little grief. Now they want to see ID, they keep records, take photos. I’m not even talking about the sizzurp—the prescription stuff—I mean plain old over-the-counter meds sufficient for a little robotrippin’.

  I used to use a lot. It changes your perceptions. I understood things other people couldn’t. I knew that the goddess of discord, Eris herself, was a student at Hamilton, and she was attempting to manipulate events to create a bloodbath. Why New Jersey? Why the twenty-first century? Let’s just say that there’s always a bloodbath going on somewhere, and it’s hardly beyond the ability of a goddess to be in more than one place at a time.