by VK Fox
“He’s got a bug, but you know it could be much more serious for him.” Her mouth was in a thin line, and Dahl tried to cover his surprise. She was worried about Zack? She was also implying she knew he had AIDS. How had that conversation gone? Better than Dahl would have anticipated, based on her fussing with the cough syrup.
“Yes, thank you for bringing it to my attention. I’ll speak with him.”
“Good.” She closed the cabinet with a snap. “What a sad situation. As if anything could make the dentist more horrible. I am going to insist they sanitize the tools while I’m watching from now on.” Lizzie nodded once and strode from the room. Dahl puzzled over her declaration while adding milk, oil, and eggs.
“What kind of pancake do you want, kiddo?”
Fitz glanced up from the floor where he was unpacking tiny bits of shell from his backpack. He signed, “Dinosaur!” and went back to arranging the pieces.
Dahl attempted a dinosaur pancake. This one was an improvement. A Stegosaurus was marginally more legible than the T. rexes he’d tried on other mornings. He helped Fitz gather his shells, wash his hands, and lifted him on a chair, sliding the Rorschach-test pancake over for inspection.
Fitz excitedly signed, “Dinosaur!” and began to eat. Lizzie Davis had left and Zack was in the bathroom. Dishes and cards still covered the table. Dahl ground his teeth and cleared them.
A toilet flushed, and Dahl kept an eye on Fitz while Zack crossed the room. Fitz watched him with enough focus that he stopped eating but didn’t rush to Dahl for comfort.
“Ohhh, pancakes?” Zack stared solicitously at the pan while he made more tea.
“So it seems.” Dahl covertly glanced at the man. He did look sick. Not terrible, but Dahl had no idea how much he was hiding or what kind of danger he was in.
“May I have some pancakes, oh fearless leader, King of Hearts, paragon of ingenuity and charm?”
“I’m good looking too.” Dahl ladled batter into the pan.
“I didn’t want to gild the lily.”
“Is round acceptable, or do you need a special shape?”
“Oh my God, that’s an option? Give me Edvard Munch’s Weeping Nude.”
Dahl tried to repress a chuckle that threatened to spoil his carefully crafted demeanor. “Do you have a favorite version?”
“Chef’s choice.”
Batter hit the pan with a sizzle, and Dahl puzzled over Zack again. Intelligence and education were not the same thing, and from what he could gather, Zack did not have access to excellent academics. Megan mentioned he went to school whenever possible because he could charm a free lunch out of the cafeteria ladies, but he’d routinely flunked or been expelled. Yet he was familiar with Edvard Munch’s work, and not just The Scream, but something as obscure as Weeping Nude. Was this a random factoid dropped in the right place to be impressive, or did Zack enjoy art beyond technicolor manatees?
Turning with a question on his lips, Dahl stalled out. Zack had paused mid gesture, coughing a few times, but was in the process of adding a used teabag to a plate on the counter overflowing with used teabags.
“Do you need me to throw those out for you?”
“Why would you do that? I’ve been collecting them since I got here. You can get several cups out of each, you know.”
“Zack, you own a Ferrari.” Dahl plated the misshapen pancake before it burned.
“Waste not, want not. We aren’t exactly near 7-11. You could speak to your boyfriend about not opening new ones all day long when we have a plate full of perfectly good second chance bags already.” Zack pulled a jar of mayonnaise off the shelf and started topping his pancake, examining it thoughtfully. “This looks much more like Munch’s 1919 version, and I do believe I prefer the earlier one. I was thinking, man friend, we may have reached the magical moment in our partnership when you would want to know where the linked books are.”
Dahl smothered a stupid question somewhere in his lungs and instead borrowed a page from Everest’s book, quietly going about his business. Not ignoring, but not interrupting either.
Zack coughed softly and cleared his throat. “You know, since you’re the new leader of the Suicide Kings and all. We do have five of them. Just thought I’d mention it.” Zack popped a spoonful of mayonnaise directly in his mouth and Dahl tried to stifle his gag reflex. “It sucks that we can’t use them. Everest was an indispensable part of the plan—being able to tell who we should recruit since we don’t have the benefit of a billion children groomed to be super soldiers. But since Everest’s broken—er, um, going through a very special time in his life, our grand idea doesn’t work anyway.”
Dahl turned to study him. His breathing had a rattling quality that didn’t sit well. His posture was rigid, and he looked exhausted from standing. Here he was, doggedly trying to talk strategy. God, Dahl knew that feeling.
He dropped the light-hearted act and caught the man’s glazed eyes, voice as gentle and soft as he could make it. “How are you feeling this morning, Zack?”
Zack Slaughter melted. He hugged himself and started shaking, squeezing his eyes closed like he was going to block the world out. Before Dahl knew what he was doing, he’d wrapped him in a hug, the way Ian always had when he was coming apart. Zack stiffened at first but didn’t disengage. As the seconds ticked by, fraction by fraction, he relaxed and lay his cheek on Dahl’s shoulder. His skin was feverish, and he didn’t stop trembling.
Dahl waited to speak until Zack let go, wiping his nose on the back of his hand. “I’m not too bad today, but…” Zack was panting and trying to speak too fast. “I think I might be getting pneumonia, but I’m already on all the antivirals my system can handle. I don’t know what else to do. Pneumonia can be bacterial, and I started antibiotics from the Davis’ stash yesterday. Maybe that will turn things around, but I feel worse this morning.” He had pulled away but not entirely back to his own space—lingering inside of Dahl’s bubble. “They’re in the trunk of my car.”
Dahl raised his eyebrows. “The antibiotics?”
“No, the linked books. I don’t want them. If you do, they’re yours.”
“Why did you lie?” Dahl turned the burner off and stood awkwardly, not sure what to do next. Zack was still close. “About how you contracted HIV, I mean.”
“What makes you think I owe anyone the truth?” Zack spat the words out and then rubbed his face with both hands. His voice muffled and Dahl almost missed the next part. “There is one bad day between sanity and hell, but the day I tested positive wasn’t the tipping point.”
Dahl shifted, leaning back against the counter.
“Once upon a time, nine years ago, there was a boy who laughed at my jokes and wanted to go to the movies. He was a total geek: goofy, grin full of braces, and completely unaware of how awkward he was. I was head over heels. I wanted to hang out with him and do normal kid shit, so I pretended to be someone he could like. I didn’t know...” Zack ran pale fingers through his damp hair. “Then he got sick—like a mild flu, but he didn’t bounce back right away. The day he got his blood work results…”
“Where is he now?” Dahl kept his voice even.
“I dropped out of school and never saw him again. I tried to look him up last year after Adam… I don’t know why. I found his obituary from a while back.”
“I’m sorry.” Dahl didn’t know what else to say.
“If he was alive today, he’d have options: effective medicine, real help, a life. How is it fair that I’m still kicking and he isn’t? What kind of a fucked up world makes someone pay that price for trust?” Zack grinned like a crack in the ice. “Does it make you feel better about me? About yourself? About the fact that we can unknowingly, with every good intention, ruin the people we love?” He ambled towards the door, chuckling. Back in his armor, his inner light smothered. “I thought not.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Everest sat at the Grit Room table while Dahl, Dahl, Dahl held his hand and Fitz napped on his lap. His love was wearin
g a new black and silver dog tag engraved with the word Dahl. When Everest first caught sight of the necklace it had been hard to sort his groundswell of emotions.
“Something small that might help. Blue showed me how to make it, and I picked lettering that would be easy for you to read at a distance, like a name tag. I hope you don’t mind.” Dahl’s words were quick and nervous, his forehead creased. “I don’t think anyone will infer anything by it if you’re worried about the others knowing—”
“It’s perfect. Thank you.” Everest couldn’t open his eyes for minutes and dearly wished they were still alone. He held the feeling inside him like a cracked seed: warmth and time coaxing out roots, and leaves stretching towards the good things in his life. It would still be there later, stronger and seeking the source of light.
Everest worked through the Fiver folder quietly, his love by his side. “I asked Jane to check my email while she was at the convent.”
“You did?” Dahl was watching him with cautious focus.
“The adoption agency wrote back and sent me contact information for my birth mother.”
“Oh?” It wasn’t what Dahl was anxious over, but it seemed like an easy opening statement. Something good and… not uncomplicated, but at least complicated in a different way.
“I’m going to reach out as soon as we’re back somewhere with internet access. Are you still willing to come with me?”
“Of course. I wouldn’t miss it.”
“Good.” Everest thumbed through the rest of the file for the third time. Dahl was fidgeting. Speaking the truth out loud was going to hurt. One word at a time. Let it flow. Everest drew a breath and held it for five seconds before forcing, “Future sight is interesting. I never analyzed how it works. Not to the level presented here, at any rate.” Dahl went still and didn’t respond, so Everest continued. The lack of prompting made it easier to talk. “According to Sana Baba’s analysis, I’m able to see all the different iterations of reality at once and intuit the likelihood that something will occur in our reality.”
Dahl shook his head. “Explain it like I’m five.”
“Alright.” Everest worried the edge of the paper, fraying the fibers under his restless fingers. “Do you have any M&Ms?”
“Sure.” Dahl patted his pockets in the same order he always did before fishing out a packet of candy from where he always kept it. The routine made Everest grin through his nerves. He knew this. It was real.
“Put ten M&Ms on the table.”
Dahl obliged, counting them out carefully.
Everest glanced at the small pile. “How many are red?”
“Seven,” Dahl responded instantly.
“Right, seven. You don’t have to count or puzzle it out. Your brain does the math instantly. If I were to close my eyes and reach for an M&M, what color would you say I was likeliest to get?”
“Red.”
“Correct. You perceived a primarily red group of M&Ms, so you can tell me I am most likely to pull a red M&M. Looking at a single variable in a small group, it’s pretty easy to predict the most likely outcome.
“Future sight is similar. Through my second sight I perceive all the versions of reality closely enough related to ours to give meaningful information—like glancing at a pile of M&Ms. I isolate for certain qualities, like color. Then I get a reasonable prediction of what the most likely outcome is.”
Dahl’s brow wrinkled. “So if you were trying to predict the next person to enter the Grit Room this morning, you are glimpsing all versions of reality where the Grit Room exists, isolating for the people that are here, and looking just far enough into the future to see who comes through the door next in the majority of instances?”
“Yes. That’s why it gets less accurate the farther into the future I go. There are more and more possibilities. The people who are here today might not be the same people who are here tomorrow. On a short timeline I can screen for a lot of variables instinctively and kick out the ones that don’t fit our specific situation. Obviously, this morning the answer is going to be Blue, Lizzie, Billy, Anna, Kristen, Zack, Megan, or Sister Mary. But if I was trying to look at four days from now, there are versions of the future where these people are here and there are versions of the future where some or all of them are not. There are also versions of the future where the Grit Room doesn’t exist anymore for one reason or another. I have many more variables to subconsciously factor, so my prediction becomes less and less accurate. Like pouring more M&Ms on the pile. It’s harder to tell if there’s a dominant color.”
“I see.” Dahl’s expression was smooth and serious.
Everest pushed himself on, his voice too fast. “I believe this is related to both the degradation of my future sight and Ian’s unclear prophecies. As the barrier thins, I’m less able to sort the instances into meaningful insights. I don’t know the nuts and bolts of Ian’s dreaming, but there are likely shared elements. So I can still glean some amount of information, but not to the level and accuracy I used to be able to.”
Dahl nodded.
Everest continued. “It’s also related to my dementia.” Dahl went back to absolute stillness. Fitz snored softly. “My mind is no longer able to differentiate between our version of reality and closely related versions… in some areas, I am perceiving things that could have been at the same time as things that are.” Dahl closed his eyes. Everest’s mouth was tacky and fingers restless again. “This means I can’t subconsciously sort the possibilities with my second sight. It confuses my views of the future, but it also convolutes parts of our reality to my mind. It’s likely, in some adjacent reality, Adam lived. I don’t know if I still found Fitz and came to Camp Nowhere, trying to save the world, or if those are simply areas where my mental barriers haven’t eroded, but that’s my best guess about why I continue to struggle with certain facts… Like… Like your name. I’m not sorting reality from alternate reality subconsciously anymore, and sometimes the information gets crossed.”
“So I was right.” Dahl gave a smirk—the one he saved for finding humor at inappropriate times. “Looking at the future does change it.”
Everest frowned. “Go on.”
“By using future sight, you are not considering the instances of reality where you do not use future sight. By the time you’re predicting what’s most probable, you’ve run the scenario through an initial screening process without even realizing it.”
Everest shifted Fitz carefully to a more supportive position, his arm sweat-damp and slightly numb. “I suppose I can see your angle. I’ll have to ponder it.”
Block A smelled like glue, WD-40, and cinnamon air freshener. Had Blue brought the air freshener with her? Everest sniffed at the tree-shaped potpourri card by the door, the scent taking his mind back to Blue’s Las Vegas studio. Not happy days, exactly, but important days. Healing days. Days full of hard work and new commitments, the mixture of cinnamon and chemicals were the votive incense of his life.
“You boys are going to lose your shit when you see what I’ve done.” Blue’s voice was the audio equivalent of Mountain Dew: effervescent, high fructose, and clearly signaling the wisest course of action was to back away.
“I have a coffee-like drink and bread with jam if you tell us without hurting us.” Dahl slid the offerings onto a large, plastic, fold-out table dominating the center of the room. All the furniture had been pushed against the walls, creating a clutter-ringed space in the middle. Everest grinned. Blue’s preferred working conditions.
“Thanks, you’re a doll!” Blue giggled and wiped her eyes while Dahl stared at her unblinkingly until she composed herself. “Over here, guys. You better act appreciative, because I put my top sheet over it for an epic unveiling. That kind of extra effort deserves recognition.” Blue strode to a bedsheet draped over something vaguely humanoid and about seven feet tall.
When Everest was fourteen, he’d gone to see Who Framed Roger Rabbit with friends. They’d eaten butter-drenched popcorn and nudged each other every time J
essica Rabbit flounced across the screen. The movie slipped by in a mix of enjoyable laughter, teasing, and junk food. Near the end, after the steam roller went right over Judge Doom in an unrealistically brief seventeen seconds and with zero blood, Everest knew, he knew the man was going to get back up and the image would haunt him long after he left the theater.
The shape under Blue’s sheet dredged a flattened Judge Doom from the depths of Everest’s memory, as she completed her grand unveiling with a “Ta-da!”
The golem was a flat humanoid. Arms and legs of jointed, cast aluminum achieved a shape capable of holding life. An empty pie tin served as the head, and Blue had spared a moment to give it a smiley face in sharpie. The body was three large aluminum cookie sheets riveted together and polished to a mirror finish. The aluminum man’s hand twitched, perhaps in greeting, and its head wobbled ponderously side to side. The entire effect was the procreative fruit of Judge Doom and the Tin Man of Oz: appallingly and hideously alive when it probably shouldn’t exist at all.
“Fuck me, Blue.” The words tumbled out of Dahl’s mouth as he truncated a step back. Blue dissolved into peels of sanity-adjacent laughter.
“Touché, Mr. Dahl. You are a worthy pun-ponent. Meet your new mirror! Much better suited to extranatural containment than a sports car rearview, and just as portable, so we can take full advantage of existing thin spots in the barrier.”
It was considerate that Blue had drawn a face. The golem smiled unflinchingly down as its head gently swayed like an inverted pendulum. Was this better? Blue’s design reflected impeccable functionality, if hasty form. The mirrored torso spaciously accommodated Everest’s likeness. He would be able to step through a gate this size without stooping or scrambling. Functional legs would be useful for testing the gate at different locations. The aluminum gleamed with a high polish, reflecting the room flawlessly.
