Point B (a teleportation love story)

by Drew Magary

  (Jason Kirsch is not entirely correct here: While passenger automobile deaths are now nearly extinct, trucking fatalities have increased over 500% since the advent of porting, thanks to decaying highway infrastructure plus huge increases in demand for construction and shipped goods in formerly remote areas.)

  Melanie Greenberg has never seen her son’s body. To visit Jeffrey, she would either have to pay an outrageous amount to have it removed from Everest, or she herself would have to port to the summit, something she is terrified to do both from a physical and legal standpoint. For now, Jeffrey’s body remains on display in a permanent, open wake she’ll never be able to attend. She long ago forgave Paul Gallagher for his role in Jeffrey’s death. Instead, she saves the bulk of her ire for PortSys and the Kirsch family. Sometimes, when she wakes up in the morning, she discovers that she’s written hundreds of words in frantic night scribbling. She shows me the notes, which take up an entire filing box.

  Are all those notes for the Kirsches?

  “Not all of them. I spare more than a few for myself.”

  I don’t think you’re alone in having a hard time reckoning with how much freedom to give your children.

  “Yeah but my son is dead, so I have hard proof I did a lousy job, don’t I? I caved when I should’ve been stronger. And I let him have this power, because I wanted to have it too.”

  This is when I notice a rectangular bulge in Melanie’s pocket. She takes out her old PortPhone6, the screen slightly cracked and the chrome edges nicked and scarred. She knows what I’m about to ask, so she goes ahead and answers in advance.

  “It’s for the Kirsches. It’s my only way to get to Emilia and Jason. When they do one of their bullshit listening tours, or when Jason stages one of his insufferable new product launches, that’s when I’m gonna port in and tell them about my son.”

  And then?

  “And then, I swear to you, I will throw this thing in the fucking ocean.”

  DEAN’S RESIDENCE

  Anna arrived at Vick’s small white house at 7pm on Wednesday, as instructed. She dressed light, clad in only a white t-shirt and black leggings. It was a sad dumpy house located a block off the main campus. The exterior looked like it hadn’t been painted in over a century. She stared at the front door, wanting to throw up. When she finally rang the bell, Vick answered immediately, clad in generic chinos and a black t-shirt. There was apparently no one else in the house. Doesn’t he have a family? A wife? Kids? Where are they right now, at dinnertime on a weeknight?

  “Come in,” he said curtly. There was no difference between Vick at the office and Vick at home. One time, a seventh grade teacher of Anna’s invited the whole class over for punch and cookies. When she ported to Ms. Navarro’s house, it was like a completely different person was greeting the class at the door. Her hair was down. She was out of her work clothes. She flashed a smile at the kids that she never flashed in class. She was at ease and relaxed, almost uncomfortably so.

  But Vick was consistent: face of stone, zero pleasantries. He didn’t even bother to offer Anna water. When she walked in, he locked the door behind her. The whole house smelled like wallpaper glue. There were no toys lying around. No pictures on the walls. Nothing cooking on the stovetop. No life of any kind. She nervously tugged at her leggings and snapped them back against her hips. Vick passed her and then opened a creaky basement door underneath the main staircase. He flicked the light on and the basement glowed with a sickening fluorescent light.

  “Follow me,” he told her.

  Don’t do that. He’ll fucking kill you, or worse. Shove his ass down those stairs instead.

  He took one step down and then turned, scowling at Anna because she was still frozen in place.

  “I said to follow me, right now.”

  She did as she was told. You coward. You total fucking coward. Why was she voluntarily following this man to her doom? She kept her head down and thought hard about holding hands with Lara, so that she wouldn’t feel quite so alone.

  The basement was unfinished; just a dusty slab with a CFC bulb on a bare wire dangling from an exposed ceiling. Vick walked to the other side of the basement and opened up a thick iron door. Anna could tell she was about to enter a soundproof room. Isolation on top of isolation.

  She followed Vick inside to a bare white lab. There was an X on the floor marked with black electrical tape. Vick put on a lab coat and cracked open a laptop resting on a table to the side. To Anna’s shock, the peppy Brendan McClear was also in the lab, staring at a tablet and not looking up.

  “Where’s your name tag, Brendan McClear?” she asked him. He didn’t respond.

  “Stand on that X,” Vick told her.

  “What is this?” Anna asked him.

  “Stand there.” God, talking to him was so miserable. Every word swatted down. It was like talking to an anti-person.

  She took her place on the X. Vick walked over to a rack on the left-hand side of the room and grabbed a kettle bell marked 2.5kg. He handed it to Anna.

  “Take this.”

  “I wanna know what you’re doing and why the hell sailor boy is here with you.”

  The corner of Vick’s mouth spasmed upward ever so slightly. Seeing him smile was worse than seeing his eternal scowl. It was a gross smile. There was no happiness in it, only cruelty. Anna wanted to peel his face off of his skull.

  “Take the weight,” he told her.

  She grabbed it and it tugged down on her shoulders. She felt so hollow and bare, the kettle bell could have pulled her arms right of their sockets.

  Vick walked back over to laptop and opened up a video call. The screen was turned away from Anna. He aimed an external camera at her.

  “You all set over there?” a voice from the computer asked Vick. The voice sounded oddly familiar.

  “Ready.”

  “Okay. Send the pin.”

  Vick punched ENTER and suddenly a wormhole opened up in front of Anna.

  “Where am I going?” she asked Vick.

  “Nowhere. Now step forward.”

  Again, Anna did as she was told. In an instant, she was burning. This wasn’t like regular porting. There was no shiver and snap. No, this was like five thousand needles were piercing the front of her body at once: stinging hot pain everywhere. Her back was still in the basement lab. But the front of her body was now elsewhere. Everywhere, like it had been transformed into an aerosol. Her eyes, if they still existed, were sealed tight but she could see a strobe of hot light rat-a-tat-tatting through her eyelids.

  This was taking longer than normal porting. Much longer. There was no time inside this particular portal; only crude, brutish pain. She tried to scream but her mouth was absent. She had no face at all. She tried to let go of the kettle bell but now she had no hands. Someone had sawed off the front half of her and blown it into space. A great, horrible spreadening.

  And then, with suitable disrespect, the wormhole spat her back out onto the lab floor. She dropped the weight, clutched at her face, and screamed. Technically she was still alive and intact, but inside she had disintegrated. The burning in the front of her body settled into hostile numbness. Her face had fallen asleep. She rubbed her eyes furiously to bring back the feeling. When she finally opened them, Vick was sitting at the table, typing away. Brendan McClear was eyes deep into his tablet.

  “What’s the status?” the voice on the laptop asked.

  “Rejected,” said Vick.

  The voice from the laptop grew angry. “YOU PEOPLE ARE FUCKING USELESS. I WANT THREE, AND I WANT IT BY DECEMBER.”

  Vick clicked out of the video call, then swiveled in his chair toward Anna. “Do you remember your name?” he asked her.

  “Anna Huff.”

  “Do you remember my name?”

  “Yeah. Asshole. Your name is Asshole.”

  He gave her a menacing stare. Her own feline scowl was no match for it.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I must have forgotten.”

  “Say my name.
”

  “It’s Charles Vick, dean of students.”

  “Good.”

  “What did you do to me?” she asked him.

  “Nothing,” he said. “You failed.”

  “Failed what?”

  “Come back next Wednesday. Same time. Dress light.”

  “I won’t.”

  Vick stood up and looked down on her pitilessly. “Same time. You will not tell anyone. I’ll know if you do.” He gave her a sharp kick in the ribs, nearly parking his shoe inside her lung. “Now get up and leave.”

  Gasping in pain, Anna tried to scramble to her feet but her muscle memory wasn’t quite back yet. Whatever was in that wormhole, it had put her in a space-time coma. She was suffering from a kind of physical amnesia, and the idea of it being permanent terrified her. Everything was off balance. The ground itself felt unsteady, constantly moving and shifting. She had been robbed of her vestibular functions.

  Then, after a few seconds, it all came back. She stood up, wobbly but still erect. A touch nauseous. Neither Vick nor Brendan bothered to guide her back to the front door. She bolted up the basement steps and ran back to Sewell as fast as she could. When she got to her room, she pulled the blankets over her whole body and shook.

  KIRKLAND HOUSE

  Whatever grand plans Anna Huff had for wallowing in her trauma and lovesickness—spending her days curled into a ball and eschewing personal hygiene—were thwarted by the punishing regimen of fair Druskin Academy. Classes went till 6pm every night. Saturdays featured a cruel slate of additional morning classes. Every otherwise open crevice of time was stuffed full with work and sports and more work.

  The schedule provided an occasionally effective diversion from her misery, but that didn’t lessen how crushing the workload was in its own right. Even the kindly Mr. Nolan regularly assigned 200 pages a night, and they weren’t easy pages. Her first diving meet wouldn’t be for another four months but her coach, a white-haired bastard named Mister Willamy, had them in the well for seventy-five minutes a day right from the start. The satisfying bounce of the springboard under her feet was the only good part of those seventy-five minutes. For simulated meets, Willamy appointed himself judge and dished out merciless, unfair scores that had Anna and the rest of the team cursing his arbitrary judgment under their breath. He also had the team do interval sprints every day around the dirt track inside Druskin Cage, a decrepit brick fieldhouse choked with dust kicked up from athletes constantly running laps. Anna would end those laps caked in gray dirt, grit seeping into her mouth.

  Oh, but that wasn’t the end of practice. Hardly. After running came strengthening. After strengthening came calisthenics, including Dying Cockroaches: a ten-part leg lift sequence that Willamy had cribbed from an amateur militia training video he found online. After calisthenics came balance: Willamy would force them to stand on one leg for minutes at a time and stare at a small X he had marked on the wall of the cage. You couldn’t look away from the X or else Willamy would force you to run suicides. Anna hated that X. She was getting really sick of Xs marked in places. If they ever tested her on what that X looked like, she would have grudgingly aced it.

  When Willamy’s back was turned, she would let her eyes wander around the cage, keeping her head perfectly still but focusing on anything else could find, even lines in the dirt. Sometimes she would steal a quick glance at cute girls who were still doing laps, but they weren’t Lara. No one was Lara. Only Lara would do. This longing would always be with her. She could tell. She knew it would be her eternal companion if Lara couldn’t be.

  After balance came stretching. Endless stretching. Willamy would have all the divers hold a split for minutes at a time, until Anna could feel her groin muscles about to pull off the bone. If anyone broke into a giggle, more suicides. She hated suicides.

  Piano lessons occupied just two hours a week, but they always seemed to come when Anna could least afford to sequester herself inside the Music Center. Even getting ready in the morning was a chore because of Druskin’s antiquated dress code. Boys had to wear a coat and tie. Girls had to abide by a far more detailed section of the code that demanded “non-revealing, appropriate attire.” Skirts had to run past your fingertips. Straps had to be more than two fingers wide. Tights were mandatory and awful. One girl had already violated the dress code by having the gall to try to pass off leggings under her skirt. She was immediately remanded to Vick’s office. Anna shuddered to think about what awaited that poor girl in Vick’s basement. Kids who were neither male nor female had to get special permission for their own set of dress guidelines and for residence in unisex housing. Druskin, being Druskin, made the application process for those privileges its own taxing courseload.

  Anna was forced to return to Vick’s awful house every Wednesday night. Same time. Same dress. Same wormhole. Same kettle bell. Same Brendan McClear acting as toady. Same horrible, burning result. There were new flavors of pain to the experience every time she stepped forward, but in the end the wormhole still spat her out right where she was. If this bothered Vick, he didn’t show it. He would simply ask her once more to recite his poisonous name, and then he would send her back into the crush of Druskin as if nothing had happened.

  There was barely time to eat. Anna would make sloppy PB&J sandwiches at Main Street Dining Hall and then smash them into her mouth on the go. This conveniently absolved her of finding people in the dining hall to sit with, but that bit of antisocial maneuvering came in handy given that Main Street sucked. A full quadrant of that dining hall was perpetually occupied by the football team loudly talking shit to one another and adhering to an all-steak diet. One afternoon, she was walking out of the hall when she spotted some other kid peeling an orange and tearing it carefully so that it was in the shape of a man, with the central column of its pith sticking out like a penis. She shuddered and doubled her walking speed out of there.

  She finally found her precious energy drinks at the school Grill, refilling her dorm room fridge over and over with cans of the stuff and snacking on Grill owner Cecilia’s black beans-and-rice every afternoon. She racked up a tab that had a piqued Sandy angrily texting her in all caps. Every day, Anna had enough sugar and caffeine coursing through her body to power a city block.

  And then there was the walking. So much walking. Robbed of the ability to port, Anna felt every tedious step from the dorm to the academic buildings to the dining halls to the gym, the last of which was a mile away from everything. Before Druskin, Anna saved the bulk of her walking for new, exciting places. London! Paris! Phuket! Miami. She had forgotten how boring it was to tread the same ground over and over again. The soles of her mary janes were coming unglued and flapping around. Her cheap New Day tights kept slipping down and bunching all over, greasing her poor feet with sweat. She had never been forced to carry books so thick (and dull).

  Everyone, save for Bamert and Burton, continued to ignore her. Everyone had to ignore everyone anyway because they were just as put-upon. Unlike the inside of a wormhole, there was no manipulating time and space at Druskin. Those were definite entities here, and they were relentless. She did her best to look glum, wanting everyone to see that she was lovesick without having to announce it, but all of the evil stares from classmates she had gotten along the quad paths for a few days had given way to general indifference. She was nobody.

  Worst of all, she had virtually no time to break out of school. The coursework was making her smarter, and the walking and endless diving practices were making her fit. Yet it all felt like a grand distraction from the real work that she wanted to do. For the three weeks she was locked down by Vick’s imposed restrictions, she was forced to check into Sewell at 8:30pm and remain there for the rest of the night in her half-deserted room, with cursory web access and a pile of work that only grew in size the more she hacked away at it.

  Even when she procrastinated, she couldn’t bring herself to do it productively. Instead, she would daydream about shoving Vick into a wood chipper, or she would run
down to Mrs. Ludwig’s apartment for a free macaroon, or she would check in on (stalk) Lara through Lara’s WorldGram account.

  She didn’t formally follow Lara. She was content just to lurk, forced to accept that she had been demoted from Lara Kirsch’s real life back to being just another weirdo ogling pictures of her online. There was Lara at the Arctic Riot festival. There was Lara partying on a very large boat with a gaggle of unimaginatively named DJs. There was Lara scoring a table at Arsen Lang’s newest restaurant, accompanied by an unidentified guy. Who’s he? Why’s she running with that dipshit? She comforted herself by assuming Lara didn’t really like the guy. She assumed it over and over until, in her mind, it was outright fact. After all, he didn’t get a bracelet.

  She also caught a photo of Lara in Sassari, Sardinia. Anna knew Sassari. Sarah took her to Sassari two years earlier because it had become a popular meeting ground for lesbian women, many of them ten to twenty years older than Anna at the time. With porting, like-minded people tended to cluster themselves in various locales, a trend that was bordering on self-segregation. It seemed like a good idea for Anna to give Sassari a shot. But with its gleaming piazzas packed with festive women and old Sardinian Catholics loudly protesting the now-consistent presence of those women in their town, the town proved more overwhelming than Anna could absorb at fifteen. She may have had something in common with those tourists, but they were tourists all the same. She quickly ported off of Sardinia with Sarah and didn’t have the nerve to give it another chance.

  Now here was Lara in the Piazza d'Italia, posing for a selfie with another woman, a few years older: pecking that woman on the lips and tagging her post with #NewWorldPrideDay and #LoveIsLove. Maybe she was kissing that woman out of support, maybe out of passion, maybe both. Either way, Anna wanted to clock that woman right in the jaw. First, she’d chase down Sarah’s killer. Then this jackass. The woman only appeared in that one post on Lara’s feed, but that was one too many. She probably had a dumb name, too: Cantaloupe or something.