by Tim Floreen
I’d stayed up late the night before helping Pete prep the presentation over Skype. Or, to be more accurate, I’d pretty much put together the PowerPoint myself and just made sure he knew how to pronounce all the big words. I never mentioned that to anyone. I didn’t like to think of people knowing one of Pete’s last acts on earth had been to cheat on his schoolwork. He hadn’t been the brightest guy, but he’d been a good friend. Totally cool about the gay thing from day one. Sometimes, when Pete was still alive, I’d wish I could’ve fallen for him instead of Tor. True, he’d been 100 percent heterosexual, but at least he hadn’t had a million issues like Tor did. Pete really had been a straight line.
He’d just finished the presentation, having pronounced Hiroshima and Nagasaki perfectly, but I still felt nervous for him, because now he had to get through the mandatory Q and A. As Ms. Utter switched the classroom lights on, I heard a noise behind me and turned. At the back of the class, Franklin Kettle had pulled on a mask. I recognized it right away. I saw it all the time in TV ads, on billboards, on Franklin’s backpack and Nil’s. There were also mass-produced Halloween versions, but this one he’d made himself. As I’d learn from news reports later, its gas mask and infrared goggles actually worked, and it even had prescription lenses so he could see clearly while wearing it.
Franklin’s right fist rose, with a Beretta M9 tucked into the palm. Its muzzle was like a black hole that sucked up all the sound and breath in the room.
“Say ‘I didn’t know Napoleon was that small,’ ” Franklin ordered Pete, his low, level voice flattened out even more by the mask.
Nobody else made a noise.
“Say the words, Pete,” Franklin repeated. “ ‘I didn’t know Napoleon was that small.’ ”
Pete never said them. Instead a dark stain spread over the crotch of his jeans. Then BANG, and the inside of his head splattered the blank whiteboard behind him, like a bouquet of red flowers dropped on the snow.
Thinking about it now, I felt dizzy, the same way I always did when my mind jumped back to that day. I clamped my hands hard on the steering wheel to keep from keeling over and spent a few seconds inhaling and exhaling until the woozy feeling passed. The grief counselor the school had brought in last year taught us to do that. The way the woman talked, nodding and overenunciating like a kindergarten teacher, had driven me crazy, but her technique actually worked.
She hadn’t had any bright ideas about how to stop the nightmares, though.
I shook my head, wrapped my long blue scarf around my neck, and headed into the Mother Ship.
The main hall, with its sleek lines and high ceiling and concrete floor, didn’t feel much warmer than outside. The building had only gone up a little over a year ago—thanks in large part to Mom’s dogged efforts—and it still smelled like fresh paint.
“You must be Jeremy,” the receptionist behind the white swooping desk said. “I’ll let your mom know you’re here.”
He spoke a few words into a phone, handed me a visitor badge, and nodded me toward the elevator, which whooshed me to the top floor.
The elevator opened on Mom. She planted a firm kiss on my cheek. “Let’s talk a bit in my office first.” She walked me down the hall, touched her badge to a reader, and opened a door. Some kind of weird music blasted out at us. It sounded like a bunch of tone-deaf guys chanting in gibberish while banging arrhythmically on an assortment of pots and pans.
“Gertie!” Mom called over the din. “Would you turn down that goddamn noise?”
We entered the main lab, a big room with rows of white tables in the center and desks lining the periphery. Half a dozen scientists looked up from their computers. Gertie tapped her keyboard, and the music disappeared. “Sorry, Dr. Braithwaite. I was just playing this new piece I discovered. I thought it might help us stay awake.”
“Try coffee. It’s quieter.” Mom steered me toward her office at the back of the room and shut the door. “Gertie thinks she’s an avant-garde music connoisseur,” she said. “Speaking of coffee, would you like some?” She grabbed her metal mug from her desk and topped it off from a pot on a side table.
“That’s okay.” I peeled off my coat and scarf and dropped onto the couch. On the other side of the floor-to-ceiling window, Lake Superior had darkened to gunmetal gray. Four o’clock in the afternoon, and the sun had already started to set.
Mom sat down next to me. “I just went to visit Franklin. He knows you’re coming, but before we start, I want to tell you a little about what’s going to happen. He’ll have chains on, like I told you this morning, and guards will stay in the room with you at all times. He won’t be able to do anything to you physically. But you may find this encounter difficult. You watched him kill someone in cold blood, so seeing him again is bound to raise feelings in you. And he can be disturbing to talk to.”
An afterimage of the whiteboard splattered in red lingered behind my eyes, but I blinked it away. “Come on, Mom, he’s just some kid who’s lived on my block since kindergarten.”
“He’s also very sick and very intelligent. He knows how to get under a person’s skin. That’s why I want you to do your best to keep the conversation neutral. Don’t bring up anything connected to the shooting, is that clear?”
“What does that leave? I know zero about computers, and I hate video games.”
“I already said: art.”
I scrunched my nose.
“According to his caseworker,” Mom said, “it was the only thing he took any interest in at the detention center, since he didn’t have access to a computer. She told me he spent hours every day with a notebook and a piece of charcoal, just drawing.”
“Drawing what? Dismembered human bodies?”
Mom sipped her coffee. “She didn’t know. Apparently he wouldn’t let anyone see the pictures. He’d tear them up and flush them down the toilet immediately after finishing them.”
An image flashed in my head: Franklin sitting at the back of the class, his head down, his hair, dyed blue-black then, falling over his face, a notebook open on the desk in front of him, one arm bent around it to conceal the pages from prying eyes, his pen scratching away. I’d seen him carry that notebook around all the time. He’d decorated the cover with a Son of War sticker—of course—and written his name in red ink down the side, on the edges of the pages. I’d never gotten a look inside, but it had always seemed incongruous to me, a computer expert like Franklin using an old-fashioned paper notebook instead of an iPad or something.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll ask him about his art.”
“Thanks, Rem. It doesn’t even matter that much what you two talk about. We just want to observe how he interacts with someone who was peripherally involved in the shooting.”
“And then see if his behavior changes after the procedure?”
“Exactly. The conversation will only last five minutes. We’ll cut it even shorter if things don’t go well. And, Rem,”—she grabbed my forearm and gave it a squeeze—“thank you for doing this, honey. I know it can’t be easy having a mad scientist like me for a mother.”
Back in the main lab, Mom introduced me to two of the guards who’d come along with Franklin from the detention center to watch over him. One man, one woman, both built like football players, they wore crisp gray shirts and walkie-talkies on their hips that let out occasional burps of static. They gave me a nod and headed out to get their prisoner.
“You’ll meet with him in here.” Mom unlocked a door with her badge and held it open for me.
“Good luck, Rem,” Gertie called from her desk.
Mom gave me another hard kiss on the cheek. “I love you,” she said. “You know that, don’t you?”
I nodded and stepped through the door. The room I entered, though about the same size as the one I’d just left, contained almost no furniture. A white table and two metal chairs stood near the window, and that was it. Like Mom’s office, this room looked out on the lake. Outside, the sky had darkened even more, the clouds turning p
urple and black. I sat down in the chair across from the window.
A door to my left swung open. Right away, my fingers clamped onto the armrests. My forehead and cheeks felt cold, like they did whenever I woke up from one of my nightmares. It took me by surprise how fast the feeling crashed over me. I tried to remember all the reasons I shouldn’t feel this way—Franklin would have chains on, he wouldn’t have a weapon, the guards would stay the whole time—but my nervous system wasn’t convinced. My heart seemed to bang at the same volume as that “music” Gertie had been playing out in the main lab.
Franklin Kettle slunk in, with the two guards close behind him. One of them, the lady, escorted him to the chair across from mine and sat him down. He looked pretty much the same as I remembered. He had on his bulky black glasses, and his hair fell down over his face in spikes. He hadn’t managed to keep it dyed, though. It had faded from that startling blue-black to regular dark brown. And he didn’t have on the old black denim jacket, tattered and held together with safety pins, that he’d worn all the time over a black T-shirt and a pair of narrow black jeans. Instead he wore a new but cheap-looking outfit I figured one of the lab techs must’ve bought for him at Target so he wouldn’t have to wear his detention center jumpsuit. This wasn’t much better, though: gray sweatpants and a hoodie the blinding orange shade of traffic cones.
He also had on his chains. They clanked with every tiny movement he made, as if they didn’t want you to forget they were there.
I willed my fingers to uncurl from the armrests. “Hi.” My voice sounded thin in my ears. “Um. My mom said you asked to talk to me?”
Franklin shot his eyes toward one of the cameras hanging from the ceiling. “I just didn’t feel like talking to them. I figured talking to you would at least be a slight improvement. And I figured your mom would jump at the chance to watch me interact with one of my peers.”
“I guess you figured right.”
The chains rattled as he shifted in his chair. “It’s kind of ironic, though, isn’t it? In real life, we wouldn’t be interacting at all. Sure, we know each other, but it’s not like we really know each other. Have we ever even had a conversation before?”
He didn’t say it with any apparent anger. As always, he spoke in a quiet, empty voice. Still, ten seconds in, the conversation already felt like it had left neutral territory. I glanced at the guards. They stood on either side of Franklin, several feet back, in front of the glass wall. Each of them wore a small earpiece, which Mom would use to tell them to call the meeting off if things went south. For now the guards didn’t move.
“Probably not,” I said.
“At least you were never an asshole to me, like everybody else at school.”
Behind his hair and his glasses, his eyes narrowed just the littlest bit. My chest tightened. I blinked and fumbled for something to say. “I don’t—”
“I guess we never had many interests in common. That might be the reason we didn’t socialize more.”
I was pretty sure he’d meant that sarcastically, but the tonelessness of his voice and the expressionlessness of his face made it hard to tell. “Maybe,” I said. “But my mom told me you’re into art. That’s cool. I actually do a lot of drawing my—”
The chains clattered some more while he settled into a deeper slouch. “Nope. Not really into art. There was just nothing else to do at the detention center. They didn’t let us near any computers. That’s what I’m really into. Computers. Video games.”
“Son of War.”
The second the words jumped out of my mouth, I wished I could stuff them back in. A tiny smile curled the corners of Franklin’s mouth. “You play? Because that would be something we have in common.”
Again I suspected sarcasm. I shook my head.
“I didn’t think so. Mr. Nice Guy—isn’t that what everybody calls you? Way too nice to play a game like Son of War.”
On the other side of the window snow had started to fall. The flakes made a whispering sound as they tumbled against the glass.
“You’re probably right,” I said. “I don’t know much about that game. Why don’t you tell me?”
“It’s not too complicated. You just kill stuff.”
“You’re a soldier or something?”
“Yep.”
“And you shoot at things?”
“Yep.”
He studied his fingernails as we spoke, as usual not so much avoiding eye contact as seeming indifferent to the whole concept. I glanced around, hunting for a clock. Our five minutes had to end soon, right? “But you must have a mission. I mean, there must be something you’re trying to accomplish other than just shooting things up.”
“Yeah, but mostly you’re just killing stuff.”
“And you get points? Like, for killing bad guys?”
“For killing anyone.”
My sneakers settled flat on the smooth concrete floor. I glanced down and realized I’d gone back to clutching the armrests again. My knuckles had turned white. “For killing anyone?”
His eyes stayed on his fingernails, but his grin widened. “Sure.”
“Even innocent people?”
“Depends on what you call innocent, I guess. Maybe there is no innocent, really.”
Tendrils of nausea snaked through my belly. I couldn’t look at him anymore. Outside, the snow had thickened. The huge window looked like a TV screen on static. “I think that’s disgusting.”
“It’s how war works. Kill or be killed. The game’s just teaching you how to be a real soldier. Did you know Son of War is used in military training programs all over the world to prepare soldiers for combat? And I still have one of the all-time high scores, which means—”
“Real soldiers don’t shoot civilians,” I said.
“Don’t they? Have you watched the news lately?”
“I mean good soldiers. They try not to.”
“You mean your brother. The one that got himself popped.”
One of the guards put his hand to his earpiece and listened. I pictured Mom watching us on the monitor back in the main lab, hearing Franklin bring up her oldest son. I waited for her to call the whole thing off.
The guard’s hand fell away from his ear. He didn’t make a move.
I closed my eyes and commanded myself to breathe. Don’t take the bait. Keep the conversation neutral. But that word he’d used—“popped”—had snagged in my brain. Like Ethan had been a balloon, or a grape. “Well, congratulations.” I could hear how brittle my voice sounded, like thin, fractured ice. “It must feel good to be such a master player.”
Franklin lifted his shoulders and dropped them. “It’s okay.” He sank even further down in his chair, looking bored, and threw his head back to peer at the lights hanging from the ceiling. They flashed in the lenses of his glasses. “Did your brother ever play?”
My fingers bit into the cold metal of the chair. “I don’t think so.”
“Maybe he should’ve. Maybe things would’ve played out differently if he had. He was probably like you, too nice for all that fighting.”
I shot another glance at the guard. Why hadn’t Mom intervened? Hadn’t this gone far enough? “I don’t think you should be talking about my brother.”
“I’m curious, though: did you ever find out if he pissed his pants just before it happened, like Pete Lund did?”
The next instant I was on my feet and slamming my hands on the table. Behind me, something banged: I’d knocked my metal chair to the floor. “Fuck you,” I said. “You’re disgusting.”
The guards had already landed on us. The lady had clapped her hands on Franklin’s shoulders, even though he was still just slouching in his chair, and the guy, big as he was, had managed to pelt all the way around the table and grab me from behind in less than a second.
“Okay, buddy,” he said. “I think we’re done for today.”
Franklin just smiled. When the female guard took him by the arm, he stood without resistance and walked with her to the door.
“Bye, Rem,” he called over his shoulder, like we’d just finished a pleasant conversation. The guard pushed the door open, and Franklin’s chains jingled down the hall.
Long after Mom had guided me into her office and onto her couch, my heart went on pounding against my rib cage like it wanted to bust free of my chest. Outside, in the darkness, the snow continued its frantic dance. In my head I heard the grief counselor’s singsongy kindergarten teacher’s voice: Iiiiinhale, eeeeexhale, iiiiinhale, eeeeexhale.
Mom switched on the electric kettle on the side table to make me tea. “I promise you, honey,” she said, “if I’d known he’d pull something like that, I never would’ve sent you in there.”
I hadn’t uttered a syllable since leaving the meeting room. When I spoke, the words came out soft and scratchy. “Then how come you didn’t do something sooner?”
She stopped, an empty mug in her right hand, and blinked at me. Her left index finger jabbed the numb pad of her thumb. “The encounter was producing valuable data.”
I sagged into the couch a little deeper. “Right.”
“Plus, things escalated quickly.”
“Did you even hear the stuff he said about Ethan?”
Her face hardened. “Of course I did, Rem. I hope you’re not implying—”
I waved my hand to stop her. “It’s okay. I’m okay. Never mind.”
The kettle started to whistle. She wiped back her white lock of hair, took a breath, and turned away, busying herself with fixing my tea.
Maybe it shouldn’t have surprised me. Over the past couple years Mom had been constantly losing herself in her work, and this current project especially obsessed her. I understood the reason too. Ever since Ethan’s death, she’d needed something to focus on. So had I. That probably explained why I was always losing track of time and forgetting to wash my hands when I did my painting.
Mom sat down next to me and passed me the warm mug. “You can’t take what Franklin says personally. Remember, he’s a sociopath. From a neurological perspective, that means the parts of his brain that should allow him to experience empathy, to put himself in the place of other human beings, don’t function like they should. That’s why he could shoot Pete without feeling any remorse. That’s why he could say those awful things to you.”
