by Douglas Jern
Bobby could not remember his own father, and his mother refused to talk about him. There had been several men coming and going throughout Bobby’s early years, some of them nice, some of them real buttholes. None of these relationships lasted long, and his mother always cried a lot after each one ended. Alan seemed to be in it for the long haul, though. It had been two years since he had first set foot in their apartment, looking cool in his goatee and sunglasses, greeting Bobby and Rick by giving them each a big bag of candy from the corner store. Bobby’s subsequent adoration had held through several scoldings, spankings, and slaps over the head. It finally broke after one particularly nasty beating that saw him rushed to the ER to stitch up a cut in his forehead, an injury sustained when Alan had hit him in the face with a shoehorn. Alan had intended to spank him on the ass, but Bobby had tried to squirm away at the last second, causing the blow to land on his forehead, the metal shoehorn splitting the skin and cutting deep into his head. The doctor who sewed him up at the ER casually commented that the cut went almost all the way to the bone.
Not that Alan would be held responsible. When he brought Bobby into the hospital, he told them that Bobby had been balancing on the fence surrounding their yard when he slipped and fell headfirst onto a big shard of glass. Bobby had left the hospital with six stitches in his head and a burning hatred of Alan, which he despite his young age was smart enough to hide well.
For all the torment Alan visited upon Bobby, he never laid a hand on Rick, even when whatever excuse he had for walloping Bobby had been Rick’s fault. This was almost the worst thing of all. At one time, for example, Rick had been stealing cookies, and Bobby had taken the fall for it. He had squealed and cried as Alan pulled him by his hair and slapped him, but neither his mother nor Alan would believe that Rick was the real cookie-thief. It was just not fair. Even when the two of them together were up to no good, it was always Bobby who tasted Alan’s fury, while Rick stood off to the side, looking troubled by the violence but also perversely pleased that he was off the hook.
“It’s the bottom of the ninth, bases loaded, the crowd is on the edge of their seats!”
Bobby, getting ready to finish the game, decided to go out with a bang, hyping up the final pitch as much as he could. This was always how their sessions ended; the brave pitcher making one last desperate play to win the game against all odds, conveniently forgetting that he had dominated it from the start. Rick flourished the bat and raised it, bending his knees and fixing his gaze on the ball in a pitch-perfect impersonation of a pinch hitter under pressure. Bobby grinned. Rick could be a pretty cool guy, sometimes.
“Hurst steps up to the mound,” declared Bobby, stomping the dry earth with a sneakered foot and sending up a small cloud of dust. “And here we GO!”
He brought his arm back, shifted his grip on the ball, intending to throw a magnificent curveball that Rick would never see coming, and threw.
The instant the ball left his fingers, he knew that it was off. His fingers had slipped, and the ball went wide. He watched in horror as the ball described a gracious curve through the air, away from Rick and right toward the living room window as if drawn by an invisible baseball magnet.
For a moment, all was silence. The wind had died down, and even the crows had stopped their cawing. It seemed to Bobby like the whole world was watching his failure.
The ball crashed through the window, scattering glass all over with a loud, melodious tinkling that made Bobby wince. The living room window now had a big, jagged hole in the middle. It looked like a grinning mouth, lined with wicked teeth that could chew up bad little boys into hamburger like nobody’s business. But the window wasn’t the real danger.
“You’ve really done it now, you little punk!”
Alan was out of the deckchair and walking towards Bobby with slow, ominous strides, swaying from side to side as he went.
“It was an accident!” squealed Bobby. “I didn’t mean to! I’m sorry!”
“Sorry?” Alan spat out the word with a fierce lurch like a sneeze. “Sorry ain’t gonna fix that window, now is it? Huh?”
Now he was only a few steps away from Bobby, who was too scared to move a muscle. He looked at Alan’s hand, which was curling into a fist as he approached. This was not going to end with just a spanking. He caught a glimpse of his little brother out of the corner of his eye. Rick was looking from Alan to Bobby with eyes wide as saucers. There was fear in his eyes, but also, thought Bobby, a hint of relief.
Bobby knew that Rick would be spared from the violence that was to come, and he knew that Rick knew as well. The knowledge sent a wave of indignation through Bobby’s mind. Why was he always the one to take the blame? They had both been playing, hadn’t they? True, Bobby had thrown the ball through the window, but he never would have thrown it in the first place without a batter, right?
Alan’s large, rough hands reached for him, their fingers crooked like claws as they sought his shirt collar. He looked from Alan’s hands to Rick’s eyes and wished, not for the first time, that Alan would spare him and take Rick instead, just this once.
He stared into Rick’s eyes, wishing that their places were reversed, and suddenly felt a strange sensation in his mind. The entire inside of his head felt hot, like he had a fever, and he thought for a second that he had gone sick with fear. The unfortunate pitch and the glassy aftermath replayed itself in his mind like an old film reel, but his mind substituted Rick for himself. It was Rick who threw the ball, not Bobby. It was Rick who broke the window, not Bobby. It was Rick who was about to receive a beating, not Bobby.
Even amidst the heat and dizziness, Bobby wished with all his heart that the film in his head could be real. His ears were ringing. No, they were buzzing as if a swarm of angry hornets had flown in through his ears and were tearing through his brain. And there was something else within the buzz. A voice that wasn’t a voice speaking words that weren’t words.
The past was always written in stone. That is how things are.
If only it weren’t so! If only things could be the way he imagined them in his head!
You are the first of your kind to perceive me. Things are not what they seem. Interesting.
Bobby heard the words, but they made no sense to him. The heat and nausea and panic was like a smokescreen, blocking out everything. He couldn’t even scream.
Your desire is understood.
The heat rose rapidly until it flashed, and the world went blurry and twisted around him.
Switch
His head was spinning like he’d just stepped off the teacups at the carnival. Strange lights flickered in front of his eyes. He blinked to clear them away. When his vision came back, he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Alan had made an about-face, and was now walking toward Rick, who was crying and begging for forgiveness. Alan grabbed him by the collar.
“I always went easy on you, Rick,” he said. “Thought you’d learn something from watching your brother. But I guess I have to teach you a lesson.”
He hoisted Rick up by his collar and carried him off. Bobby watched Rick struggle in vain as Alan opened the door and disappeared into the apartment. A few seconds later he could hear thumps and screams through the broken living room window. Bobby stayed where he was, too amazed to move. His wish had come true. It was not him, but Rick who had thrown the ball and broken the window.
The past had changed.
The realization made him shudder with fear and guilt but also with excitement. Had this sudden magic been a one-time occurrence, a miracle granted by God, or could he do it again?
Bobby listened to his brother’s screams of pain and Alan’s angry yells, and a small smile started to play on his lips. Had he been standing in front of a mirror, he would have seen a face that looked just like Rick’s did whenever Bobby was the one being beaten.
25 YEARS AGO
Who controls the past, controls the future.
Bobby closed the worn, dog-eared copy of Nineteen-Eighty-Four and caressed
the cover. He understood now. When he had first read the novel, he had found most of it boring and incomprehensible, but those seven words had jumped off the page and engraved themselves on his mind the moment he laid eyes on them. The simple sentence resonated with him on the most intimate level. Of course he knew that Orwell had not been speaking in the literal sense; as far as anyone knew, it was impossible to alter the past, other than in the minds of people. Only Bobby knew different. His power controlled the past, and thus the future belonged to him.
He owed this realization to the book which now lay in front of him on the bed. He had stolen it from the local library, enthralled by the concepts it described and how well he himself embodied them. The book had even provided him with a perfect name for his power.
“Memory Hole.”
Bobby whispered the words to himself, his spine tingling with pleasure at the sound. Yes, that was what his power was. A bottomless pit where the true past could be discarded and burned away to nothing, to be replaced by a past of his own design. Everything he’d done, everything that had happened to him, passed on to someone else. All he needed was a person to switch with. Right now, he knew who that would be.
He sat up and looked at the other bed across the room. Rick’s bed, all made and neat. No one had slept in it for months. And that was Bobby’s fault. Ever since the day of the catastrophic baseball game, Alan had tormented Rick and Bobby equally, doling out his punishments whenever he got the chance. Bobby soon found himself harboring a profound guilt over dragging Rick down with him.
And then one day…
It had happened so swiftly that neither Rick nor Bobby had had time to react. They had been about to watch some cartoons one afternoon and had mixed themselves two big glasses of chocolate milk to go with it. They’d been joking and yucking it up as they went to sit down on the couch, and Bobby had playfully punched Rick on the shoulder. Unprepared for the sudden shock, Rick had stumbled and spilled half his chocolate milk on the couch. The left seat of the couch looked like someone had crapped all over it. Alan had flown off the handle. He jumped up from his armchair and charged at them with a vengeful roar rising from his throat. Rick had been closer, so he had hit him first.
One punch was all it took.
Bobby remembered the event in a stop-motion stutter. Rick had been standing next to the couch with his half-empty glass in his hand. The next moment he had been lying motionless on the floor. The cause of death, the coroner later concluded, had been a sudden seizure brought on by physical trauma. If it was any consolation, he had said to Bobby’s mother as she cried in Alan’s arms, Rick had not suffered. How wrong he had been on that point. Both Rick and Bobby had suffered plenty.
Alan, ever the schemer, had passed Rick’s death off as an accident, an unlucky fall from the back of the couch while playing with his brother. Bobby, of course, had said nothing, fearing retribution if he squealed. But Alan had restrained himself after that, letting Bobby off with lighter beatings and verbal abuse. Life in the household began to resemble something that could very generously be called normal, but it did not make Bobby any happier. Rather than ease his mind, the new peace only intensified his hatred for Alan and his guilt over Rick’s fate. It was there every time he brushed his teeth and saw the empty spot in the cabinet where Rick’s toothbrush used to be. It was there every morning when he woke up and saw the empty bed, and every night when the absence of Rick’s soft snoring became too loud to bear.
He reached under his bed and dragged out a padlocked metal box. Opening it revealed the old baseball. Bobby picked up the ball with both hands and held it to his forehead. The memories came back to him as if they had been poured from the ball into his head. He saw Rick, frightened and small, and Alan, huge and terrifying. With a sigh of relief, Bobby felt the guilt inside him begin to change, become hot and invigorating. He was angry. No, he was furious. He concentrated on the memory of Alan, how much he hated him, feeding his anger until it burned red hot. Then he put down the baseball and retrieved another item from the box. A plastic bottle filled with a clear liquid. He unscrewed the cap and winced at the sharp smell.
It was time to take his medicine. It would be bitter and awful, but he would swallow every last drop.
“I’m sorry, Rick,” he whispered as he brought the bottle up to his mouth. “Cheers.”
Alan was sitting in his favorite armchair in the living room watching TV. While Bobby’s mother was out working herself to the bone even on weekends, Alan still did little more than mope around the house or go out drinking with his buddies. Bobby had long since given up on trying to understand what his mother saw in this deadbeat and had written them both off as lost causes. He couldn’t wait until he was old enough to move out of this dump and live his own life.
He walked up to Alan’s armchair and looked at him, still counting the seconds that had passed since he had drained the bottle of its contents. Fifty seconds had passed so far, and he was starting to feel the effects. His throat and stomach were on fire and he had to bite his tongue hard to keep himself from howling in agony. His heart was racing so fast he felt as if it would explode.
Finally Alan turned away from the TV screen and looked at Bobby with dead, fishlike eyes. Bobby felt for the switch inside his head, the one that activated the Memory Hole. He flipped it, concentrating on the moment which by now was fifty-four seconds ago. Another heat, different from the one ravaging his throat, flashed inside his head, and the world started to twist around him. It was working.
Switch
“What are you looking at?” said Alan.
“No one,” said Bobby, breathing an inner sigh of relief. The pain was gone. “Just an unperson.”
Alan frowned. “The hell is that supposed to mean?”
Bobby shrugged. It didn’t really matter what he said now. The switch had been made. His job was finished. His heart was still racing, but it felt good now. Exciting. He wanted to see what was going to happen next.
Alan winced and rubbed his stomach. He cleared his throat and let out a cry of pain. Bobby watched, resisting an urge to lick his lips.
“What the fuck?” said Alan and got to his feet. His speech was slurred. “My throat…” He staggered towards the kitchen, kicking over a few beer cans lined up next to the armchair. At the threshold to the kitchen he went down hard, letting out a hoarse grunt. His arms and legs were shaking.
Bobby walked over and hunkered down in front of his face. Alan’s hand shot out and grabbed him by the shirt collar. There was terror in his eyes.
“B-Bobby,” he wheezed, a mouthful of blood splashing onto the dusty floor. “You gotta call 911. I’m sick.”
“Yes, I can see that,” said Bobby. “I guess you’re feeling pretty sorry about Rick now, aren’t you?”
Alan’s eyes widened even more. His grip on Bobby’s collar weakened. His breathing was getting labored.
“This is no more than you deserve, you piece of shit,” said Bobby. “You killed my little brother. Did you really think I was going to let you get away with that?”
Alan didn’t answer. He moved his lips, but only a wet gurgle escaped his mouth. Bobby realized that Alan was choking. His throat must have ruptured, and now he was drowning in his own blood. Bobby grinned.
“Well, looks like you don’t have long left now. The cops will consider your death a suicide, which is correct. You had no job, no hobbies, few friends. Stayed at home all the time. Anyone would believe that you were depressed and wanted to end it all. Case closed.”
Alan didn’t hear him because Alan was dead.
Bobby went to his room and fetched the empty bottle of drain cleaner. He carefully wiped it down and placed it in Alan’s hand. He looked at his watch. His mother would not be home for hours, so he had plenty of time to go out and create an alibi, just in case. But for now, he wanted to celebrate his revenge. He went to the kitchen and mixed himself a big glass of chocolate milk.
23 YEARS AGO
“You gonna get yourself killed,
Homey. The guy is, like, twice as big as you.”
“My problem. You just watch.”
Homer stepped up to the man in front of him, limbering up his arms and legs and stretching his back. He did this mostly for show—he would not be the one fighting today.
Diego was right; Homer’s opponent was indeed huge, towering over him like a grizzly bear in gang colors. He was sporting a thin, carefully trimmed mustache, and had a thick golden ring in his nose.
Not a bear, but a bull on two legs, thought Homer. A minotaur. I guess that makes me Theseus, then.
Biceps the size of footballs bulged from the minotaur’s t-shirt sleeves, and his broad chest threatened to burst free of his shirt with every movement. The youth calling himself Homer Moley looked emaciated by comparison.
He sized up his opponent, trying to predict how he would fight. With arms like those, he was most likely going to rely on heavy punches. It would hurt, but pain no longer held any terror for Homer. He supposed he should thank Alan for that; growing up around him had been the perfect exposure therapy, and Homer could now break his own fingers without batting an eye. Knowing that he would not have to face the consequences helped too.
He looked from his opponent to his watch, a cheap Timex that had taken its share of lickings over the years. 19:45. He started counting the seconds in his head without even thinking about it. All he had to do was avoid getting knocked out, and this fight was his.
“I’ll give you one chance, bitch,” said the minotaur. “Get on your knees and beg, and I’ll let you go.”
Homer laughed. “I could say the same thing to you!”
The punch came completely unannounced. The minotaur’s fist slammed into his stomach, knocking the wind out of him. He doubled over, and the next punch hit him in the jaw, spinning him around. He staggered to the side, nearly losing his footing. Something rattled inside his mouth, and when he spat out a mouthful of blood, it clattered on the ground.
