Point B (a teleportation love story)

by Drew Magary

  At Gould House, she begged Burton for a new weighted blanket.

  “I don’t see Alyssa anymore!” he protested.

  “Aren’t you lonely, Burton?” Anna asked him. “Couldn’t you use the company of a lady for the night?”

  “Okay, A) You’re not Bamert, so stop talking like him, and B) I have done just fine for myself since then.”

  “You have?” she asked, stunned at Burton’s cocksmanship.

  “Everyone loves a tambourine man.”

  “I don’t.”

  “You don’t like any men. The point is: I can’t get you a blanket. I’ve been paranoid ever since they booted Bamert and you should be, too.”

  “Burton, if you only knew how deep my paranoia goes.”

  As a substitute, she grabbed the scratchy blanket her mom gave her out of her closet. It wouldn’t be nearly as effective at muting portclaps as the weighted beast Bamert once had, but it would have to do. She couldn’t use the spot by The Crater anymore, because Wade had that area locked down. Even the old school potheads were too scared to venture behind the infirmary anymore. Instead, Anna would have to port from the playing fields.

  Druskin Stadium was built in 1948. Ever since its construction, trustees and alumni had steadfastly refused to renovate its aggregate concrete stands because they wanted it to look the exact same every time they came back to school to get loaded for Homecoming. Underneath its washed-out bleachers was a grubby home team locker room that was left open at all times. In the dead of night on Friday, Anna slipped through South Campus with the blanket stuffed into her backpack, still wearing the bracelet Lara gave her around her arm for optimism’s sake. It was not an optimism she trusted.

  She crossed the practice fields in the cold and mud, and then walked along the old bridge overlooking the creek. No stars out tonight. The clouds had rudely shrouded them all. She stopped for a moment and looked over the parapet and down at the water below: now frozen and unforgiving. Nothing moved. She looked over to the banks of the river and felt a pull inside her, followed by a pang of guilt.

  But Anna couldn’t waste any more time. She scampered across the jayvee football field and rushed into the dark, exposed locker room. Once inside, she shut the door and turned on her counterfeit PortPhone, snatched from the ceiling tiles of Sewell Hall and still in working condition. Then she hit PORT and got an error message.

  MASS LIMIT EXCEEDED.

  “Dammit.” She shed her scarf.

  MASS LIMIT EXCEEDED.

  She shed her knit Druskin hat, then hit PORT and felt the shiver.

  There was a PortHut on Connecticut Avenue in the DC free zones that sold pre-paid phones with a set number of trips on them. She grabbed a 50-trip model off the rack inside and registered that phone to a new Bumlee daughter, who was born in 2005 but didn’t exist until Bamert had drawn up her official proof of address a day earlier. After Anna got the phone registered, she calmly walked past the dead Cleveland Park Metro stop and paused at the casual steakhouse at the corner of Connecticut and Ordway. Armed PINE guards roving up and down the avenue took no notice of her, but she heard one of them bark at a port tourist for papers. Soon, shots rang out from that same spot.

  No one else on the street paid the commotion any mind. It was a busy night, with customers porting to the door of the steakhouse to get a look at the room, give their reservation name to the maître d', roll their eyes at their table not being ready yet, and then vanish so they could spend that wait anywhere else. Vendors appeared at the back door to deliver fresh meat and julienned russet potatoes, two kilos at a time. A decent portwall and a $30 cover charge helped keep most of the street riffraff away, not to mention the innumerable PINE agents patrolling Connecticut Avenue all the way down into the heart of Washington. The area was smothered in choppers buzzing low overheard, scouring the ground for things to be angry about.

  Through the steakhouse window, Anna watched the diners partake of high roller Cabernets served in bulbous wine glasses and slice into their grass-fed beef, hand-delivered directly from Estancia Ranch in Argentina. She saw a waiter come bounding through the double doors to the kitchen, hoping she might catch a glimpse through the doors of her mother scrubbing away at the plates and cutlery in back, but no such luck. Christmas break had only ended a few days prior, but already she missed Sandy terribly. There was an adjustment period in going back to being alone, and that adjustment remained its own form of hard labor.

  She stepped aside from the window, hit PORT, and now she was in Manhattan at the corner of 57th Street and 6th Avenue. This part of town was hollow at night. The office buildings were mostly dead dark. The cross streets had long been cleared of taxis and cars to make the whole city a pedestrian zone. The only commotion nearby came from the line outside a Japanese mega-restaurant and a handful of tourists and drunks ducking away from the retail stretches of Fifth Avenue and Times Square to smoke weed and have sex down in the darkened hull of the F train station. On that station’s platform was a series of open cars waiting for anyone looking to camp out or indulge in less restful activities.

  A score of PINE agents were sweeping the area. They, along with the port immigrants they hunted, usually preferred scouting around warmer areas in the middle of January. But they never neglected Manhattan entirely. They could always find someone there who wasn’t supposed to be there.

  Anna was cold. Bereft of a hat or scarf, she covered her ears with her hands as the wind came hurtling through the skyscraper canyons. It rattled the bare flagpoles: stiffened iron arms that stretched out above the shuttered revolving doors of virtually every office building. There were a handful of office lights still on, but people working in those offices rarely bothered to set foot on a New York sidewalk after filling out their timesheets for the day. She took out both her PortPhones and left them behind the bench of an abandoned bus stop. She had eight blocks to walk, and they were not short ones.

  She crossed Fifth Avenue. During the day, it remained a tacky street fair of tourists and scammers desperate to hustle them with port tours and lightweight merchandise. The hordes of tourists had mostly dissipated now, but Anna still had to muscle her way through a small and raucous throng at the intersection before emerging on the East Side and finding herself back in the dark, menacing cold. Half the apartment buildings she walked by had a SHARESPACE banner draped across the front. The others were either filled with port squatters or about to be.

  When she got to Sutton Place, she walked up the decaying access ramp and onto the promenade along the East River.

  No one was there. Lara Kirsch was late yet again. From a nearby building, Anna could hear a couple of squatters screaming at each other from the inside of an abandoned one-bedroom apartment. It made her brace for gunfire that, blessedly, never came. Regardless, she felt naked out on the promenade, as if every window above was home to a sniper with a rifle scope trained on her.

  You pushover. Lara’s not coming. Emilia is coming to toss you in the East River, you absolute sucker.

  She pocketed the rose pink bracelet in solidarity with her conscience.

  There. Now you can’t fool yourself anymore.

  To stay distracted, she stared across the East River at the resurrected Domino Sugar factory. She would be stronger this time. She would obey the directorman in her head. Lara Kirsch owed her. Lara should have been on time, and she should have ported in on her knees, begging for forgiveness and dying to get back in Anna’s good graces and not the other way around. Furthermore—

  “Anna?”

  She turned around and there was Lara at the top of the ramp, wearing sunglasses, ruby red lip gloss and a long blue wig. She was holding a plain manila envelope and looked scared to death. Like Anna, Lara felt eyes all over her. Both of them knew Emilia well enough to know what her evil eyes were capable of. She ran over to Anna and tucked the envelope into her hand.

  “Take this.” Lara told Anna.

  “What is it? Why are you dressed like that?”

  �
�Photographers can sometimes spot me by my hair.”

  “Oh.”

  “I did a bad thing, Anna. You’re the only person I trust with this, even though you have no reason to trust me.”

  “What is it?”

  “I’m sick of Emilia. I’m sick of my brother. They think they saved mankind but all they really did was port the can down the road. I may be seventeen, but I’m old enough to be ashamed of my family, Anna. Of who they are. Of what they did to you and so many others. No amount of weed makes that shame go away. I can try to run away from home all I like but that doesn’t mean I can get away. And being a brat to Emilia about it isn’t enough. So take this and maybe it’ll do some good. Jason and Emilia saved these notes for posterity, but I took them. Valeria knew where they were hidden. I had her port into the family vault to grab them while Emilia was paying us a visit at—”

  “Salton Boathouse.”

  “Salton fucking Boathouse,” Lara said triumphantly. “I had to keep you in the dark about the real plan, otherwise it might have gotten all fucked up somehow. But it worked. Valeria wasn’t too happy that Emilia had her deported after firing her, so she got the notes for us. She rules.”

  “But what are the notes?”

  “They’re the end of Jason and Emilia. I told you I knew things. Dr. Stokes will know what this is when he opens the envelope. Take it to him. If I try to deliver this to him myself, I’ll be spotted. And if anyone tries to send a digital file of this, PortSys will know. Ask the reporter Sean Grann to help you find him. And warn Grann. Emilia knows where Grann lives. She has eyes on him. PortSys is her magic mirror. I’m scared of everywhere because of her.”

  “Lara, I’m tired. I can’t hold in one more thing.” Anna got zero warning about the tears. They erupted out of her, her belated attempt to contain them producing a HONK so loud, it was as if motor vehicle traffic had returned to New York City once more. Her lips crumpled. Her hands fell to her sides. Part of her didn’t want Lara to see her like this, but another, stranger part was very much into the idea. Every moment with Lara was so primal and raw that it could only result in something this emotionally monumental. Lara was an event. Lara was the only event in Anna’s life. She wanted every second with her to be real and indelible and big. Also, the wig on Lara looked terrific. No hope with love. No love without hope. God dammit.

  “Anna, I have to go soon.”

  “You can’t just summon me here, in this cold, then hand me this envelope and leave me again. You said it yourself: we can’t almost tell each other things.”

  “I can’t tell you right now. Ask Grann.”

  “August 9th, 2029,” said Anna. “What about that?”

  Lara put her hand to her mouth in grief. First she was nodding, then shaking her head, then nodding once more.

  “He was there,” Lara said. “Jason was there.”

  “What time?”

  “11:56pm.”

  “Sarah’s time of death was midnight.”

  “Oh, God.” Lara leaned against an iron railing for support. “I should’ve known. I should’ve done something. I could have done something.”

  Anna, trying to keep her composure, didn’t offer a hand. Hearing Lara confirm the news—consecrate it—brought Anna equal parts pain and vindication. “I need the proof that you have that he was there.”

  “I can take a screenshot. I’ll have someone send it to your dummy number when I get back to my phone.”

  “Promise me,” said Anna. Her jaw was stone when she said it. There was nothing flirtatious about the order.

  “I promise.” Lara limped away from the railing and offered a hand. Anna took it and her resolve ended its second brief cameo. Lara pulled Anna close and wrapped her in her neon-bangled arms.

  “Roomie.”

  “Roomie.”

  “I’m so sorry,” said Lara.

  “I know,” said Anna.

  “We really need to stop making each other cry.”

  “I know.”

  They squeezed each other tight and the polyester fibers from Lara’s wig got caught in Anna’s mouth. It didn’t matter. She kept her hands perfectly still but they were screaming to do more. They wanted to touch every inch of Lara Kirsch. Cold? What cold? There was no cold anymore. The air felt as hot as blood now.

  It was this close to coming out of Anna’s mouth. I love you. She had edited this moment into so many different scenes in her mind. Each time she imagined saying it to Lara, it felt realer than the previous fantasy. There was an I love you on the bridge by Druskin Stadium. There was an I love you on the white sands of Anguilla. There was an I love you at the top of Uluru in Australia. There was an I love you for everywhere. Now it was gonna pop out at the exact time she did NOT want it to.

  But before she could say it, she had to acknowledge the harsher truth whipping around them.

  “Lara,” she whispered, “Your brother is a murderer.”

  “I know he is,” Lara said. “Not just elephants, huh?”

  “Not just elephants.”

  Lara stepped away. “They’re both murderers, Jason and Emilia. Take the envelope. Stop them. You’re braver than I am.”

  Before Anna could say one word more, Lara Kirsch kissed her on the cheek. She felt Lara’s hot lip gloss press against her dried, ashy winter skin. It tickled her face and felt so wonderful that she couldn’t bear it. Lara’s lips lifted away and Anna could feel the gloss still on her, like someone had lovingly branded her. That part of Anna’s face belonged to Lara now. It belonged to Lara forever. She wanted Lara’s lips. She wanted to press hard against them and have Lara kiss her back and know, in that moment, that Lara belonged to her as much as she belonged to Lara.

  But it was too late. Of course it was. By the time Anna had stored all of that in her hard drive, Lara Kirsch was sprinting back down the ramp and disappearing into the sinister caverns of midtown Manhattan.

  SHIT MEMOIRS ENTRY

  Date unknown

  GOULD HOUSE

  Anna held Lara’s envelope in her hands and felt along its smoothed, unlabeled front. This little packet of secrets pleased her hands to no end, and they were fickle little monsters about what they encountered. If they couldn’t touch Lara all over, this would have to do.

  She sat on Burton’s bed, legs spread the way Bamert used to do when he was holding court to an audience of two. She was wearing the bracelet again. Burton tuned his tambourine (which, he insisted, was a thing that tambourines required) while Asmi banged away at a history paper on her laptop. Earlier that morning, Asmi had taken her own ride with Mrs. Ludwig that, as with Anna, resulted in an emergency appointment with the porcelain of the Sewell bathroom. She herself had managed to pull off a round of feline identity theft: slipping her anklet around the neck of a cat named Noel, who was easily distinguishable from the others because he only had three legs. Asmi Naru now had the port identity of Esther Bumlee, along with the hardware to go along with it.

  “Are you gonna open that envelope?” Burton asked Anna.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Lara didn’t tell me if I could or couldn’t.”

  “That means you can.” Burton put down his tambourine and rubbed his face. He looked pained, like he was about to confess his sins.

  “What?” Anna asked him.

  “I’m going to say it, and you’re not gonna like it.”

  “You could put that disclaimer in front of anything you say, Burton.”

  “Lara’s not trustworthy,” Burton said. “She hosed you once, and she’ll hose you again.”

  “No,” said Anna. “It wasn’t like that.” Hours after Lara had fled Sutton Place, Anna got a picture message from an unknown number. There it was: Jason Kirsch’s porting history from the night of Sarah’s death. That it was digital piece of evidence felt flimsy and wrong given what it inferred, but Lara Kirsch had kept her promise.

  “Well, of course you don’t feel that way,” said Burton. “You might be biased!”

  “Trust me: Lara is
one of us, not one of them.”

  “I don’t believe that for a red second.”

  “A ‘red second’? Is that a real expression? Shut up already. Lara’s solid.”

  “Open the envelope,” Asmi told her. “Might give you a clue either way.”

  Anna ran her hand down the back seam before pinching the clasp and taking out a small sheaf of yellow legal notes. It was written in laser-precise longhand, good enough to be its own font. Yet it was incomprehensible: formulas and italicized variables and superscript numerals and Greek letters and random polygons and every other inscrutable mathematics symbol that Anna dreaded seeing whenever she cracked open an exam booklet. She was straight A’s in trig, but these formulas were far beyond her high school-level grasp. Attached to the pages was a small yellow Post-it note that read, in glittery purple ink: FOR DOCTOR STOKES. Another Post-it note included the address of journalist Sean Grann.

  “I know what this is,” said Burton. He pointed to a symbol at the top of the first page.

  _

  H

  “That’s antihydrogen,” he said. “Your old roomie handed you the formula for porting.”

  “Sounds like Lara didn’t screw Anna over at all,” Asmi said.

  “Oh, she hosed her, all right,” said Burton. “Just not the way I thought she would. Anna, you’re a dead girl if anyone catches you with that.”

  SEWELL HALL

  Anna was in bed, the envelope tucked inside her desk drawer but still gnawing at her. Under the top sheet, she rubbed her fingers together like it was still between them. She stared up at the small neon stars she had stuck to the ceiling, the same kind of decorative stars Sandy got from the Dollar Tree and put on their bedroom ceiling back in Rockville. Those prefab constellations still couldn’t push the envelope from her thoughts, so she turned to the wall and shut her eyes tight to make all the nagging questions go away. How am you gonna find Sean Grann? And what was with that kiss?

  Okay, so the kiss thing took up the bulk of her mental gymnastics. A kiss should bring more certainty, not less. Anna kept reliving it on a loop: a mental TikTok for her to add to her Lara compilation. When she had gotten back from Manhattan that night and looked in the mirror, she could see the imprint of Lara’s lip gloss on her cheek. She didn’t wash it off until the next morning. She hated—hated—that this was the thing she focused on the most, given the crisis at hand. It was the shallowest, most 17-year-old thing possible.