Strange Days

by Constantine J. Singer

  I feel a little relief knowing how to use the feather, but all the stuff I really want to talk about is still penned inside me.

  Frustrating.

  Paul stays in the chamber to dictate and I walk back to the room alone.

  At first I have plans for eating lunch and maybe playing some VR games, but instead I lie down on the bed. Paul said witnessing made you tired, but I had no idea. In the moments before I fall asleep, I try and remember what life was like last week, but instead I end up thinking about Jordan Castle.

  I’ve always wondered what it would be like to be someone else, to know how they felt, to know how they knew what to say or do, because I never seem to. Now I’m seeing it. My wish is coming true, but I’m more confused than ever.

  I’ve seen Jordan Castle on Channel 0, which we have to watch every day during advisory period for current events, and she always seemed so sure of what she was saying, like she really believed all that stuff. At the time I never thought much about her except that she seemed unreal, like a grown-up in a kid package. But she’s not. She’s got secrets and she doesn’t say what she means even when she wants to. Just like me.

  She hides whole parts of herself from her parents, just like me.

  We’re a lot alike. She looks like the people around her, sounds like them, but she doesn’t feel like them, doesn’t know what they’re talking about.

  Twenty-Six

  I wake up when Paul comes in. He flops down on his bed. I look over at him, but his wall full of stuff catches my eye instead. “Where’d you get all that?”

  “All what?”

  I point at the flag and hats on his wall with my chin. “That.” And then: “And the guitar?”

  He looks up at the wall. His energy changes. “I had it all with me when I came here.”

  “Why would you have a flag and a bunch of cowboy hats?”

  Paul sighs and sits up, leaning his back against the wall below the flag. “I just did.”

  “You just did?”

  He shrugs a little bit, sits up, and reaches for the guitar, pulling it onto his lap. I suddenly want to play, too. “I didn’t come here straight from home and I didn’t want to leave any of it behind.” He looks up behind his head at the stuff on his wall, strums the guitar. “When I left home, I didn’t know what to bring—it was complicated—so I just grabbed the things that felt important.” He strums the guitar again, starts simple straight blues progression when he talks. I’m concerned he’s going to break out in song, but he doesn’t. “The flag was my grandpa’s—from when he died, and that hat”—he gestures at the more beat-up of the hats on the wall—“belonged to my uncle and I got it when he died.”

  Him talking about those things makes me send my hand to my pocket to search for my dad’s key chain photo. It’s not there and for a moment I panic and it’s hard to breathe but then I remember: It’s in my hoodie, which is hanging on a hook by the door. I get up and grab it.

  “This is all I’ve got from my family.” I look at it. My dad’s laughing and Pete’s making a face. My mom’s got her head tilted back so her eyes nearly disappear in her smile. Ten-year-old me looks happier than I ever remember being.

  I hand the photo to Paul. He takes it, examines the picture. While he’s looking at it, I start to get tense because I don’t know what he’s going to say. I imagine him giving me sympathy and it makes me feel irritated, but so does the thought of him treating it like it’s nothing.

  He looks up at me. His face is serious and sad. I tell myself to relax. He’s trying to be nice.

  “What do you miss the most about them?”

  Which is something I’m totally not ready for. I’m too surprised to lie or pretend I don’t know. “They made me feel safe.” It’s out before I can stop it. It’s pure truth.

  He nods. When he speaks, it’s quiet. “You were really lucky to have that.”

  I nod back at him and then look up at the hats and flag again, pressing my tongue hard against my front teeth until I’m back in control.

  Eventually, I gesture at the stuff on the wall again. “So you brought all that with you here?”

  He shrugs. “I didn’t know anything about here when I left home. I walked out of my folks’ place months before I even knew here existed. I got my letter at the youth services shelter in Phoenix when I stopped in for a shower.”

  I sit up on my bed. “Why’d you leave home?”

  He shrugs again. Strums the guitar once more before picking out a twangy country riff. Then he mutes the strings before looking straight at me. “You’re really asking?”

  “I . . .” I do want to know, but things are getting heavy and it’s making me uncomfortable. “Yeah . . .” I manage. And then: “If you want to tell me.”

  He stares at me a moment longer. I can feel him judging me. “Alright.” He puts the guitar back onto its stand. “I’ve known who I am for a while—like since I was a kid—and I’ve never been one to keep things to myself, right?”

  I haven’t known him long, but that seems about right. I nod.

  “Yeah. Well, my folks—they weren’t so into the idea of me being gay. They didn’t send me to reparative therapy or anything, but they kept telling me that if I gave girls a chance . . . if I just acted like . . .” He shrugs, leans back against the wall. “So we didn’t talk about it much. My brother, Danny, he pretended I didn’t exist. Anyways, the charade sustained itself until I was in eleventh grade, when me and a boy got caught together at school.”

  When he says it, I cringe without meaning to. I don’t know what his school was like, but I know in mine, there were a lot of kids who wouldn’t tolerate that. There’s a reason Julio acts like everyone else when he’s in the neighborhood. “Caught by who? What’d they do?”

  He purses his lips and smiles at me. “They beat us up.” He says it like an apology—as if he’s sorry for me to have to hear it.

  “Jeez, man, I’m sorry.” It feels so strange to me to say I’m sorry about what he’s telling me, because even when I’m saying it, I’m also remembering all the times I stood by when kids called other kids faggots and threatened to beat their asses for being gay.

  I didn’t think about it much then, but hearing it now from Paul, I really am sorry about what happened to them.

  “So when my folks came to get me at the hospital—” He sees the look on my face and waves it off. “It wasn’t that bad. I didn’t really need to go. The school insisted for liability reasons. Anyways, when my folks came and the counselor who was waiting with me told them what happened . . .” He shakes his head, twists around a little on the bed before he finishes. “They told me that I needed to get myself under control because otherwise they wouldn’t be able to deal with me anymore. Then my mom asked me if I knew how humiliating this was for her.”

  “Yeah, I bet.” I say it before I even think about it—I’m thinking about what Julio’s mom would do if she knew—and it just comes out of my mouth and falls there into the space between us. Even before I finish the sentence, I can hear it echo in my head, like it’s being fed through a reverb. I want to take it back before he hears it, suck the words right back inside, but I can’t. It’s too late.

  Paul sits perfectly still on the bed. His eyes are hard again. “Fuck you,” he says quietly. He stretches out on his bed. “I’m tired. I’m going to sleep.”

  “Paul, man . . .” But he doesn’t look at me. He closes his eyes. I get up. I’m not begging anybody for forgiveness. “Forget you, then,” I tell him as I walk out the door, closing it hard behind me.

  * * *

  • • •

  I spend the afternoon in the commons watching soccer with Maddie. She knows every player on every team and spends the whole time telling me about them. I can barely track the ball because my mind is still replaying the whole thing with Paul.

  I shouldn’t have even asked him about
shit, but like a dumbass, I opened my mouth.

  And then I couldn’t just keep it shut, nod my head or something. I had to say something. Even when I said it, I knew it was stupid.

  He didn’t have to be such a dick about it. I tried to apologize. He’s too sensitive.

  Paul’s not . . . He’s . . .

  Fuck. I’m trying to feel better, but all the words in my head can’t cover the truth: I’m a dumbass.

  Every time I replay the whole conversation, my cheeks start to burn.

  Maddie talks constantly, playing with her ponytail the whole time. She played soccer, too. Played since she was three. She’s giving me her history along with the history of all the players on the teams.

  “You could at least pretend to give a crap,” she says finally.

  “Sorry.” I shake my head. “I’m trying.” Then I stumble for more words. “I got things on my mind.”

  She nods. I look at her, trying to focus on what she’s saying. She’s got blue eyes and a face that’s edged nicely by the bones in her cheek and jaw. She’s really pretty, but it’s hard to think about her that way.

  Not like Corina.

  I run through what I remember of what she was saying, trying to come up with a question to ask that’ll show her that I was paying even a little bit of attention. All I can come up with is: “Why’d you stop playing?”

  She shakes her head, rolls her eyes. “My coach screwed me.”

  I don’t know how she means it. “Wow.”

  She bites her lip. “He suspended me from the team in the middle of scouting season.”

  “Really?” I don’t know what else to say.

  She nods. “He was an asshole.”

  I nod. I’m not going to ask what she did. I’ve learned my lesson.

  “Bunch of girls cheated on an English final and he said it was my fault because I’d been in the class before and gave them a copy of the test I’d kept.” She shakes her head. “How was I supposed to know their teacher didn’t change it every year?” She raises a finger like she’s warning me. “Not my fucking fault.”

  “Oh no.”

  “Yeah. It was awful.” She looks back at the game.

  I nod and don’t say anything, wishing I’d done the same thing with Paul. My cheeks start to burn again.

  When Maddie and I get to the dinner table, Paul’s already there talking to Calvin. He doesn’t look up when I come in, and I feel the whole weight of this afternoon all over again.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Corina asks when I sit down.

  I want to tell her, but I also don’t want to tell her because she’ll think I’m such a dick. “Nothing,” I try. “I think I’m just tired.” I look up at her. “Witnessing . . .”

  She nods. “It’ll tire you out, that’s for damn sure.” And I think I’ve gotten away with it, but then she adds: “But it won’t make you look like a puppy died. What happened?”

  I sigh. Pick at the pancakes the cat carrier gave me for dinner. The room around us is filled with people talking, and I don’t see anybody listening to us just now. “Paul’s mad at me about something I said.”

  “How mad?”

  I sigh. “He said ‘fuck you.’”

  Corina just nods and pulls up a forkful of pasta. Then: “Damn. Paul don’t cuss. You probably shouldn’t say whatever you said anymore.”

  Which makes me laugh because it’s such dumb advice. “Yeah, alright.”

  “And you should probably go apologize.”

  “He doesn’t want to hear it.”

  She shakes her head. “He didn’t want to hear it. You don’t know what he wants now.”

  * * *

  • • •

  I can hear Paul playing guitar from down the hall. My chest tightens but I suck it up and walk into the room like I live there. “Hey.”

  He looks up at me. “Hey.”

  I don’t want to sit down, because it feels weird, so I just stand in the middle of the room above him, twisting like an idiot just like the last time I apologized to him. “Look, man . . .” But it comes out as a mumble. A little louder: “I was a dick before.”

  He stops playing and looks up at me. He’s perfectly still, then shakes his head slowly. “Alex, I am sure you are a good guy at heart, but I am absolutely not ready to talk about any of this yet.”

  “I didn’t even know what I was saying . . . I didn’t . . .” But I can already feel the heat on my neck and my throat is small. It’s hard to breathe and if he doesn’t give me something soon, then screw him and all of this because I’m not going to dangle—

  He holds up a hand. “Just come on in—it’s your room, too—and do your thing while I do mine for a while, alright?”

  I look away from him, stare up at my big blank wall. “Whatever, man.” Then I grab my toothbrush.

  When I get back to the room, Paul’s gone and so’s his guitar.

  It takes me a long time to fall asleep, but even so, Paul’s still gone when I do.

  * * *

  • • •

  Paul’s already gone when I wake up. He’s gliding today, but I’m not. What I said yesterday starts playing in my head before I’m even in a sitting position.

  By the time I’m on my feet with my shower stuff, I’m already reliving the part where he told me that he didn’t want to talk about it yet.

  By the time I’m out of the shower I’m completely spun again. Half of me hates myself and the other half hates everyone else.

  At least I won’t have to see anybody today—I’m the only one not working. I’m a little sad I won’t get to spend more time with Jordan, but really I’m thinking about how good that is when I walk into the kitchen.

  “Hey, Alex.” Richard’s sitting at the table, smiling at me. He lifts his coffee mug at me. “Enjoying your day off?”

  “Yeah.” I don’t look at him and head straight for the cat carrier instead, hoping it’ll give me something really good that’ll take my mind off of things.

  Pop-Tarts, a banana. Nothing exciting, but watching them form, I can’t help but know that nothing I was going to eat was going to be all that good today, so old standards are probably the best choice.

  Richard’s still at the table when I get back. He must see me hesitate because he says, “It’s alright. Don’t have to talk if you don’t want to.”

  I nod, sit, start to eat. I can see him out of the corner of my eye, reading something on a tablet, sipping his coffee. My eye wanders to the design in the center and then to the big one on the wall.

  “What’s with the Live-Tech logo thing?”

  Richard looks up at me, surprised. “What?”

  I point at the design on the table with the uneaten side of my Pop-Tart. “The design. It’s all over everything here. What’s it mean?”

  Richard looks at it, then smiles, sets his tablet down, and reaches out with his hand to trace the edge of the pentagon closest to him. “This?”

  I nod. “Yeah, Live-Tech.”

  Richard chuckles. “Jeff uses a simplified version of this for Live-Tech, but it’s much more meaningful than just a corporate logo.” He strokes the design again with his finger. “This is a powerful symbol—something the Gentry used to explain things to Jeff when they first contacted him.”

  “How’d they do that?” He looks confused, so I clarify. “First contact Sabazios?”

  “They sent him a patch.” Richard takes a sip of coffee, leans back. “The device we use to send letters back and such? Well, since space and time are essentially of the same substance, it’s useful for sending small objects over great distances to specific places, as well. Under the guidance of the Oracle device, they could drop a winning lottery ticket into the back pocket of my great-grandfather as he walked across campus in nineteen seventy-five.” He looks at me like he’s hoping I’m impressed.
<
br />   I don’t really get all of what he’s saying, but I’m glad to listen because it’s got me thinking about things besides how much my life sucks right now. It also explains how the photo ended up in the time capsule. I nod. “So they sent him a patch? They can’t do what the Locusts do?”

  Richard shakes his head. “Nope. What the Locusts do is unique. The Gentry have to stick to the limits of their own technology.”

  I scratch my chin and try to look wise.

  “So they sent the patch, Jeff put it on and they’ve been guiding all this ever since.”

  “So he’s never, like”—I shrug—“seen one or anything? A Gentry?”

  Richard shakes his head. “Nope, though we can fairly safely assume they look a bit like us.”

  “Why?”

  He leans forward, raises his eyebrows. “They’re the ones who seeded us here.”

  He looks at me like he’s expecting me to fall on the floor in shock, but that’s not how I feel. I just wait for him to continue.

  “Evidently, there’s all sorts of different kinds of life in the universe, but not all of it can communicate. The Gentry, a hundred million years ago when they first made the leap to become an interstellar civilization, found that they were nearly unique—couldn’t really talk to anybody else—so they seeded the galaxy with life that they would, eventually, be able to talk to—including life here on Earth.”

  My mind’s blank. I know what he’s just said is huge—like life, the universe, and everything huge—but it doesn’t even feel like that. It just feels . . . normal. “They made us? Like God?”

  “I don’t know about that, but they’re responsible for much of life on Earth being the way it is.”

  “Oh.” It’s all I can think of to say.

  He points at the design on the table. “And that’s got a lot to do with the insignia.” He taps the edge. “It’s got a couple different meanings.” He drags his finger across the field of gray dots. “The dots can be seen as stars and the red dots can be seen as the homes of species like us—the ones the Gentry created who are working with the Gentry against the Locusts.” He traces the triangle. “The triangle is the strongest physical shape.” He pushes at the top dot with his finger. “Pressure up here—it’s distributed evenly to both sides, which makes it very strong—that’s why bridges are made with triangular trusses—so they can bear all the weight on top of them.”