by T. C. Boyle
Christine’s voice was barely audible. “I don’t like this any better than you do.”
“Then why do it?”
A long pause. Too long. “Stop,” I said.
I couldn’t do this. My heart was hammering. My eyes felt as if they were being squeezed in a vise. I could barely swallow. I reached down for a bottle of water and a power bar, unscrewed the cap, tore open the wrapper, drank, chewed. She was going to say, “This isn’t working,” and I was going to say, “Working? What the fuck are you talking about? What does work have to do with it? I thought this was about love. I thought it was about commitment.” I knew I wasn’t going to get violent, though I should have, should have chased her out to the cab that was even then waiting at the curb and slammed my way in and flown all the way to Hong Kong to confront Winston Chen, the martial arts genius who could have crippled me with his bare feet.
“Reset,” I said. “August 1975, any day, any time.”
There was a hum from the box. “Incomplete command. Please select date and time.”
I was twelve years old, the summer we went to Vermont, to a lake there where the mist came up off the water like the fumes of a dream and the deer mice lived under the refrigerator, and I didn’t have a date or time fixed in my mind—I just needed to get away from Christine, that was all. I picked the first thing that came into my head.
“August 19,” I said, “11:30 a.m. Play.”
A blacktop road. Sun like a nuclear blast. A kid, running. I recognized myself—I’d been to this summer before, one I remembered as idyllic, messing around in boats, fishing, swimming, wandering the woods with one of the local kids, Billy Scharf, everything neutral, copacetic, life lived in the moment. But why was I running? And why did I have that look on my face, a look that fused determination and helplessness both? Up the drive now, up the steps to the house, shouting for my parents, “Mom! Dad!”
I began to get a bad feeling.
I saw my father get up off the wicker sofa on the porch, my vigorous young father who was dressed in a T-shirt and jeans and didn’t have even a trace of gray in his hair, my father who always made everything right. But not this time. “What’s the matter?” he said. “What is it?”
And my mother coming through the screen door to the porch, a towel in one hand and her hair snarled wet from the lake. And me. I was fighting back tears, my legs and arms like sticks, striped polo shirt, faded shorts. “It’s,” I said, “it’s—”
“Stop,” I said. “Reset.” It was my dog, Queenie, that was what it was, dead on the road that morning, and who’d left the gate ajar so she could get out in the first place? Even though he’d been warned about it a hundred times?
I was in a dark room. There was a pot between my legs and it was giving off a fierce odor. I needed to go deeper, needed out of this. I spouted random dates, saw myself driving to work, stuck in traffic with ten thousand other fools who could only wish they had a fast-forward app, saw myself in my thirties, post-Lisa, pre-Christine, obsessing over Halo, and I stayed there through all the toppling hours, reliving myself in the game, boxes within boxes, until finally I thought of God, or what passes for God in my life, the mystery beyond words, beyond lasers and silicon chips. I gave a date nine months before I was born, “December 30, 1962, 6:00 a.m.,” when I was, what—a zygote?—but the box gave me nothing, neither visual nor audio. And that was wrong, deeply wrong. There should have been a heartbeat. My mother’s heartbeat, the first thing we hear—or feel, feel before we even have ears.
“Stop,” I said. “Reset.” A wave of rising exhilaration swept over me even as the words came to my lips, “September 30, 1963, 2:35 a.m.,” and the drumbeat started up, ba-boom, ba-boom, but no visual, not yet, the minutes ticking by, ba-boom, ba-boom, and then I was there, in the light of this world, and my mother in her stained hospital gown and the man with the monobrow and flashing glasses, the stranger, the doctor, saying what he was going to say by way of congratulations and relief. A boy. It’s a boy.
Then it all went dead and there was somebody standing there in front of me, and I didn’t recognize her, not at first, how could I? “Dad,” she was saying, “Dad, are you there?”
I blinked. Tried to focus.
“No,” I said finally, shaking my head in slow emphasis, the word itself, the denial, heavy as a stone in my mouth. “I’m not here. I’m not. I’m not.”
SHE’S THE BOMB
Ru ok?
QQ
Srsly? ur crying?
I want to kill myself
Dont say that
I’m saying it
If we had a helicopter, or better yet, a drone, we could hover over Hailey Phegler’s shoulder at this juncture and watch her text, but we don’t, so we won’t. Instead, since fiction allows us to do this, we’ll go directly inside her head and attempt to assess the grinding awfulness of this moment, which has stranded her, in cap and gown, among the 332 prospective graduates of the College of Arts and Sciences at Hibernia College in Hibernia, New York, where the trees are just beginning to unfold their leaves after the long winnowing blast of an upstate winter. She is beyond distraught—she is panicking. Breathing in such short gasps her thumbs actually tremble over the keypad.
When she glances up from her phone in a tic of annoyance, the first person she locks eyes with is Stephanie Joiner, who was in her Introduction to Poetry class last spring and who has zero style and a brain the size of a Snickers bar, but who’s here nonetheless, in cap and gown and with her hair combed out and sprayed with shellac, all set to graduate.
“Hi,” Stephanie says, coming right up to her so Hailey has to hide her screen, which produces an awkward moment. Somebody, wasted already, shouts “Free at last!” and a low undercurrent of giggly laughter washes through the crowd. “Oh my god,” Stephanie chirps, and is she actually going to take her hand, or what, hug her? “I mean, it’s been like ice ages, right?” Her contacts have a weird tint, too blue by half, but her eyes are like lasers. “I didn’t even know you were still—” she starts, but she doesn’t want to go there and cuts herself off. There’s a moment of self-congratulatory beaming, the lasers slicing right into her, before Stephanie says, “Congrats, you!” And then, after a quick shuffle of her clunky white platforms that only show off how thick her ankles are, she adds the refrain “We made it! Can you believe it?”
Every word is a nail, and this girl, this nobody with her pasted-on smile, is a human nailgun, and this place, the First Niagara Bank Center quad, with its rearing white tent erected by underpaid illegal immigrants, is the worst place Hailey has ever been in her life. She wants to lash out. Wants to swing her purse like a whatever you call it—a mace—and just obliterate the smile from Stephanie Joiner’s face, but she hasn’t got time for that, so she holds up her phone by way of excuse, turns her back on her and shoots off another text to her best friend, Janelle Esposito, in Annandale-on-Hudson, whose graduation at Bard isn’t till the following weekend.
Pls get me out of here!
Wish i could
I’m desprt
Chill it will work out
No, no, no b/c my mothers here
I thought she wasnt coming?
I have 2 do something
Like what? like tell her?
I’d rather die
Ur dressed the part ur walking whos going to know?
My mom didnt see my name on the list
So? they make mistakes.
I’m going 2 like off myself
Stop it
Srsly i never thought i’d wish for a school shooting . . .
???
Srsly
Her mother, since as long as she could remember, was always harping on her. And what was her main theme? You’re a procrastinator, that’s what she said. Elementary school, junior high, high school and now college. You’re a procrastinator. All right, guilty as charged, but then who isn’t? The problem wasn’t her, really, it was Nathaniel Hawthorne. Back in September, when she couldn’t put off her Americ
an Lit requirement anymore, she’d signed up for Professor Dugan’s course and the first book was The Scarlet Letter, which might as well have been written in Mandarin Chinese for all she could make sense of it. But there is a fatality, a feeling so irresistible and inevitable that it has the force of doom, which almost invariably compels human beings to linger around and haunt, ghostlike, the spot where some great and marked event has given the color to their lifetime; and still the more irresistibly, the darker the tinge that saddens it.
No joke, it was just plain boring and so she procrastinated as far as actually reading it went and then, even with the help of Write My Paper Here and Best Term-Paper Service, trying to do the paper on it, and then one thing led to another and she stopped going to Professor Dugan’s class because of the embarrassment factor, and once she’d stopped she had to pull the plug on her other courses too, even her poetry workshop, because the classes were all in Fenster Hall and she couldn’t risk running across Professor Dugan, who would stink-eye her through his Coke-bottle lenses and wonder why she hadn’t been to class and when he could expect her Hawthorne paper, if, like, ever? Plus, it was around then that she met Connor Hayes and fell hard and just wanted to be with him through those warm drifting endless Indian summer afternoons when the sun threw the shadows of the trees across the quad in a thousand rippling variations and the two main student bars—Elsie’s and The Study Hall—were offering Happy Hour all day every day until further notice. And there were the other bars in the outlying towns Connor loved to take her to on the back of his turquoise Triumph motorcycle so they could watch their beers sizzle on the bartop and eat peanuts in the shell and snuggle and laugh and feel as if life actually opened out instead of boxing you in with Nathaniel Hawthorne and who, Jonathan Edwards? Jesus. School was bad enough as it was, but Professor Dugan’s class just broke her spirit, crushed her, really—it was all so useless, so stupid—and then Connor came along and that was that.
What did she tell her mother? Nothing. School was fine, everything was fine, and if she sounded a little down it was just because she was working so hard. “That’s fine, honey,” her mother told her over the phone, “just don’t put too much pressure on yourself—remember, no matter how dark it may seem now, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. Think of May. May’ll be here before you know it.”
“Hi, Hail.” She’s standing there in the crowd of students, frowning at her phone, and there’s somebody else squeezing in on her now, somebody calling her name, tall, a guy, and she looks up into the face of Toll Hauser, who used to be Connor’s best bud before Connor dumped her and he dumped Connor so he could ask her out without too many complications, and that was okay, because she liked him even if she wasn’t all that attracted to him, but really, over the last month she’d been in such a mounting panic she could barely get out of bed, eating nothing but shrimp ramen and sleeping fourteen hours a day, and so she kept putting him off. Six-five, skinny, the gown hanging on him like a shroud, like something Hawthorne would wear in his day, Toll has the mortarboard raked down over one eye, which gives him a kind of comical look that might have cheered her up under any other circumstances, but just leaves her speechless now. “Cool to see you made it,” he says, flapping the arms of the gown as if he’s going to lift off and soar around the tent. “You must’ve worked your butt off on those incompletes . . .”
“Yeah,” she says, and the word—the single syllable—is like the pit of some sour fruit she’s tried to swallow whole.
“You all right?” He’s bending over now, his face almost level with hers, his arms dangling and his shoulders tentpoling in back. “I mean, you look . . . you start the party already?”
“I’m okay,” she says, each word like a finger locking into place around her throat. “It’s just—my mother, you know?”
“Tell me about it.” He flashes that smile of his, his best feature, really, but he isn’t Connor and never will be and he’s just making her tenser, delaying her, because it’s now or never and she really can’t see any other way out. Both his parents are here too, he tells her, nattering on, and three of his grandparents, plus his kid sister and his aunt and uncle and like half a dozen cousins, and he’s not complaining but all he really wants to do is go down to Elsie’s with everybody else and get shit-faced. He says something more, a whole lot more, but she’s not listening because she’s too keyed up, the words she can’t say, the words she’s going to say into her phone in the next sixty seconds going off like alarm bells in her head. After a minute, people swarming all around them and some dean or somebody trying to get their attention so they can take their seats before the doors open to the general public, she realizes he’s still staring at her and she can’t help herself because she just wants this over with and when she snaps What? at him he actually steps back a foot.
“I was just saying, will I see you there? At Elsie’s? Or have you got some family thing?”
She doesn’t answer because she’s not there anymore, moving now, the scholarly folds of her robe snatching and billowing, pushing through the crowd of people she mostly recognizes, heading for the exit where they set up the Porta-Pottys so she can have a little privacy, the words she can’t say looping over and over like a short-circuit in her brain: There’s a bomb in the Bank Center quad. A bomb, you hear me?
So i did it
Did what?
Called in a bomb
???
U there?
Ur joking
OMG my heart is like 10000 beats a second
What ru saying?
I’m saying i did it
Are you serious? i’m like, stunned
Real life
Real life? hail, what are you thinking?
I told you i was desprt
That’s when things really accelerate, the dean or whoever he is, the president maybe, going to the microphone on the dais and thumping it with one thick finger so the blast of static makes everybody look up, and then he’s saying, “Attention, please—seniors, everyone!” The chatter of the crowd falls off, and at the same time, as if all that noise has somehow been suppressing it, the smell of perfume rises up like some fog that’s choking her all of a sudden, Vera Wang, Dolce & Gabbana, Juicy Couture, and her stomach clenches so fast and hard and tight she thinks she’s going to be sick right there in the middle of the temporary flooring the immigrants magically laid down overnight. “There’s a situation here that’s just come to our attention,” the dean hisses through the speakers, his face a pinched white sack straining at the knot of his bow tie, “and believe me, we’re going to get to the bottom of this, and I do not find this amusing, people, not at all—”
And what is she feeling? A complete revolution, three hundred sixty degrees, suddenly as high as she’s ever been in her life, her whole body throbbing with the endorphins rushing through her, and she can already see it, dinner with her mom and Aunt Ceecie, who’s come all the way up from North Carolina for the occasion. What a crime somebody had to spoil the day, she’ll say over her first margarita, rocks, no salt, some prankster, some idiot, but so they send my degree in the mail, what matters is we’re all here together, right? Right, Mom? Right?
“The fact is,” the dean says, “somebody called in a bomb threat—” An instant of stunned amazement, and then the tumult breaks out, people gasping, shouting, cursing, as if the whole quad’s one big pit filled right to the top with bilge water and everybody’s drowning together. The faces around her are worse than ugly, pathetic really, people just chewing at the air, flailing their arms, digging out their cell phones to mindlessly record whatever this is or might be. “So what we’re going to have to do,” the dean goes on, “and I’m sorry, but we have no choice in the matter, is—”
Cancel the ceremony, she shouts inside the reverberant walls of her own skull, cancel it and go back to your dorm rooms and your parents and loved ones or whoever—
“—change the venue to the Threlkeld Arena.” The dean has to raise his voice now, because ev
en with the microphone the noise under that tent is too much for him to cope with no matter how much he’s fighting to project an aura of calm for the sake of everybody present. “Which means we will convene there in exactly”—she watches in disbelief as he throws back the billowing sleeve of his robe to check his watch—“one hour and fifteen minutes from now. So, everybody”—more shouts, groans, tumult—“the new time will be seven p.m. sharp. Is that clear?”
Ru kidding me?
Beyond belief
What ru going 2 do now?
I dont know my moms berserk
Tell her?
U cant be serious!? like tell her i lied & then what, called in a bomb?
Not the bomb u cant tell anybody ever they’ll put u in jail
Shit dont tell me that, shit, shit, shit!!!
U have 2 tell your mom sooner or later so u need 2 tell her now
No way
Way
Sorry got 2 go
There are five thousand people out there waiting to get into the tent, which is something like fifteen friends and relatives for every graduate, and they are definitely not happy about having to traipse all the way across campus to Threlkeld, which, unbeknownst to her, the college always reserves as a backup venue in case of a tornado or lightning storm or any other unforeseen event. Like a bomb threat. Or what, nuclear holocaust. Which, to her mind, would be better than this—anything would be better than this.
