Bullettime (20 page)

The high school wasn’t far, and it had recently been let out, probably thanks to reports of a shooting in Jersey City. Dave heads there for no other reason than school is familiar. If he has a plan at all, it belongs to me, and if I have a plan at all, it’s because I’ve seen this particular strand of life—including my own ghostly role in it—play out over and over. Do you root for Luke Skywalker when you watch
Star Wars
? So do I, even though the scenes of his defeat, and victory, have already been shot, edited, developed, printed, scanned, uploaded, and digitally toyed with a dozen times.

There’s a peculiar sociological inevitability when it comes to schooling in New Jersey, where the rich snobs and the street kids and poor immigrants and fourth-generation Princeton legacies still occasionally find themselves sentenced to nine hours a day in the same prison. But it’s the ones least prepared for school who stick around. Rich kids have their lessons and hobbies and PlayStations; ambitious ones go home and get their homework done, or work for their parents in a little store. The kids who are nothing but trouble in school, they have nothing to do but mill around the bleachers, the handball court, the parking lot when it lets out early.

Oleg’s coat is in tatters, so Dave just uses it as gift-wrapping for the gun. He removes the magazine and drops it into a mailbox about a block from the school, then he finds a likely crowd.

There’s a quartet of excitable kids with pasty Irish faces milling around the school. They see Dave and their conversation stops. He’s a sight—nose still bandaged, new bruises and swamp mud all over his pants, and he’s carrying what probably looks like a dead animal from a distance. If he were an adult, the kids would probably just assume that Dave was homeless and crazy. Their parents would call the police, or seriously contemplate moving. Kearny is where one goes to get away from the scum of Newark and Jersey City.

Dave is beyond caring. He can talk to people, finally. Face the day without cough syrup, for now. He needs money and knows of two ways to get it. Along this branch of time, he chooses the safer way.

“Hey, guys,” he says, his voice dry and squeaky. “Wanna see something cool—that’s for sale?” He looks over his left shoulder, then right, and then unwraps the Uzi.

The guys are stunned. Dave is surprised too, when the smallest of the quartet steps up to speak. “What the fuck?” says the kid, who looks like someone carefully put a T-shirt on a mailbox.

“It’s real.”

“You want us to buy a machine gun from a stranger?” the kid says.

“You don’t want one?”

“What the fuck would we do with it?” one of the other guys says. He’s a tall one, and he speaks slowly like every word is invented just before it’s enunciated.

Dave just shrugs. He turns the gun’s barrel toward himself, offering the grip.

“You’re the kid from Newark who just killed everyone at his school, aren’t you? How the hell did you get out to Kearny?” the lead kid says. The others have gone from surprised to simmering, sneaking half steps around Dave, flanking him.

“Magic,” Dave says. “Don’t worry guys, the gun isn’t loaded. See, no magazine.” And he pulls the trigger. Nothing, but the kids jump back. “See, nothing,” Dave says.

“Then we can take the gun from you,” the lead kid says.

“You can try.” There’s steel in Dave’s voice now. “Better men than you lot have tried to fuck with me. Guess what happened to them?” The Kearny kids could guess, but I knew—nothing.

“I want that gun,” one of the kids says. He had been silent till now. His eyes met Dave’s, and Dave knew. This kid, with his shock of red hair and weird tooth and awkward limbs and slightly older clothes, had to be somebody’s cousin. He wouldn’t have been tolerated otherwise. They would have chewed him up in middle school and left him ruined and alone. “How much?” He licks his lips when he talks.

“I’m a motivated seller,” Dave says. Indeed, he’s half-ready to just hand over the Uzi and run. But he needs money to live. There’s a new life ahead of him—a life on the streets, of sleeping in garbage bins, of keeping an eye out for the cops, of pissing and shitting in alleyways and on street corners. He can’t wait to start, actually. “How much do you guys have?”

The tall slow guy opens his mouth again, like he’s inventing language. “But . . . this is an escalation. We got a gun, then what will happen if the Avenue Boys find out?”

“How many times a week do you think someone’s going to show up in town offering an Uzi for cheap?” the lead kid says. “They ain’t gonna get a gun like this. Tommy’s right. Let’s buy it. Turn out your pockets, dudes.” Together the kids have seventy bucks—the one who never said a word coughed up two twenty-dollar bills on his own. Dave hands the gun to the red-haired Tommy, tells them where the clip is, and the trade is made. Somewhere in his mind he giggles and thinks,
A Tommy gun for Tommy
! He takes off before being roped into an argument about where the gang is going to keep their gun, and how best to get the magazine out of the mailbox. That’s the thing about even numbers: lots of tie votes.

Dave thinks he’s one, but he’s really two, and I’m really many. There won’t be a tie vote with us anymore.
Mr. Holbrook!
I tell him.
Get out of this city.
Kearny is too small for a strange runaway with no connections to anyone in town, with no friends. I’m getting better, maybe thanks to the fact that Dave’s own mind is shutting down. All it can conceive of is a great red spot spreading over the guard’s belly, a tiny gurgling noise, the smell of metal and fire.

He heads over to a drugstore and buys a cheap hoodie, some Robitussin, and two small packages of Hostess Cupcakes. Calories and sugar is what he needed now. He tries out his Spanish on the cashier—
En dónde está la parada de autobús?
—and she answers at a fast clip Dave can’t understand. He shrugs and says, “Any English,” and she says, “You can get the cheap bus to the city one block down.” That’s what he wanted. The official NJ Transit buses are probably under surveillance. The semi-illicit minibuses that bring maids and manual workers to and from the city for a dollar or two were safer. Dave, with his filthy clothing and crumpled paper bag and chocolate on his lips, would stand out, but his fellow passengers were less likely to talk about it. That’s what Dave hopes anyway.

The bus comes quickly enough, and the driver collects Dave’s two dollars without looking up. Dave is sick to his stomach again. He wishes he had a radio, or at least that there would be a breaking news announcement on the station the bus driver is listening to. It would have to be about him, if there was one.
Right
?

Maybe
, I tell him, playing the executive function.
Just take it easy. Put your hood up.

The Meadowlands come into view, then Secaucus and Weehawken, which looks just like Jersey City except that Dave doesn’t recognize any of the buildings. There are cop cars at the Lincoln Tunnel, but aren’t there always, since 9/11? Dave tries to remember if there were any cameras in the hallways back at Hamilton. It hardly matters—there are roll calls and Delaney Cards, and two parents back at home ready to blabber about months of awkward behaviour and lone-wolfisms. There’s a plastic bag in the bedroom closet full of sticky empties from his cough syrup habit. He even wore a long coat to school. His computer has Limewire, and he’s downloaded not only songs, but porn from the Internet. It’s all on his hard drive.

Dave pukes into the paper bag on his lap, earning a glare from an older man two rows ahead of him. The bus slows as it curves around the long road to the Lincoln Tunnel and reaches the bottleneck at its mouth. A cop walks between lanes, but not purposefully. I tell Dave to look away but he can’t help but stare as the cop walks by. The cop stares back, but doesn’t raise an eyebrow or point or reach for his walkie-talkie. Dave wishes that the cop reached for his gun and put a bullet in his head. The big red bloom on his mind again, this time erupting out of his own skull, like cough syrup splattered against a bathroom wall.

Dave makes it to the Port Authority. The buses are expensive. Everything is expensive in New York. Four dollars for a cup of soup at a restaurant, three bucks for a slice of pizza. He thinks about choosing some random chock-full-of-snore town: Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, or Danbury, Connecticut, and just vanishing, but it’s thirty or forty bucks. He has only sixty to last him. The McDonald’s dollar menu and the twenty-four hour toilets will be better bets for him. He could last a month out here in the city, and that’s if he never makes another dime.

We have a plan. Downtown, the Barnes & Noble stores on 23
rd
Street and Union Square. That’s the day shift. Read books, listen to music, check the couches for loose change, the trash bins by the Starbucks for scraps. Wash up in the restrooms. Night shift, St. Mark’s Place. Where the crusty punks hang out. Make some friends. Do some begging. Maybe find a dreadlocked girl with a pet pit bull who likes her guys skinny and smelly and tasting like synthetic grapes. Make friends. Sleep on couches if possible, in doorways if not. It’s unanimous. We have chosen to stay and fight.

W
hat is it about the number twenty-three? Nothing, really. It’s just that most world events are directly tied in with the number somehow. That was in a book I read once—one Tigger had pushed into my hands in school and said I just had to read. The enigma of twenty-three is well-known enough that Hollywood even made a shitty movie about it a few years after Dave fired his Uzi and ran.

Four years on the street was hard for Dave. He lost a tooth the hard way. East Village street life, as it turns out, wasn’t full of clever punk rock girls who delight in sucking off unshowered boys from New Jersey. Dave was on the news quite a bit, for a while. His awkward school ID photo loomed large in the public consciousness for nearly two months. None of the journalists, none of the reporters, ever made any mention of Erin, though she did spring him from the hospital, didn’t she? Though the second Uzi was eventually found in Hamilton High School’s basement, and that should have been easy enough to trace back to a certain employee at Washington Place Diner and Restaurant.

After a cold week on the streets, after nearly being arrested for sleeping at Barnes & Noble, after five days of literally not uttering a word to anyone, Dave tries the diner. Erin isn’t there. Uncle Bill isn’t there. Mr. Zevgolis is. He’d just rung up someone’s bill—twenty-three dollars—on the old analog cash register. Dave walks in, ignores the sign reading
PLEASE WAIT TO BE SEATED
and hops onto the stool right next to the register, in front of a dirty plate. Zevgolis eyes him. Dave takes a crescent-shaped bit of silver dollar pancake from the plate, takes a second to admire the jagged bite mark on its interior curve, and then puts it in his mouth. Killing someone changes you. We’re all different now, except for the Dave Holbrooks in cosmically parallel Middlesex County Juvenile Detention Centers—they’re the ones who never took their shot.

“No homeless,” Zevgolis says, and for a moment Dave doesn’t even realize that the man’s talking about him.

Dave doesn’t bother looking at his own reflection in the napkin holder, or in the mirror behind the soda machine. Instead he just says, “Yes homeless,” and scoops up some remnant syrup with two fingers, then sucks them clean. Zevgolis snatches the plate away and barks a command in Greek. A girl comes out. She’s young, plain, with dark hair and dead eyes. She takes the plate and hustles it to the back. She looks quite a bit like Erin, but not quite. A cousin. Maybe even a sister.

“Where’s Erin?” Dave asks.

“None of your business,” Zevgolis says. “I call the police.”

“Okay,” Dave says. “Call. You think they won’t want to talk to her when I start talking to them?”

“No police,” Zevgolis says. He leaves the register and walks down the length of the counter, and says something in Greek to the short-order cook at the pick-up window. Then he’s handed a cleaver and casually strolls back toward where Dave is sitting. “No police!” he says again, raising the cleaver. “Fine!” Dave scrambles off the stool and, hands up, runs backward out of the restaurant.

He spends a lot of time milling around the West Village after that, hoping to get a glimpse of Erin coming to or leaving from the restaurant. He doesn’t get one. That other girl, that strange and dim photocopy of Erin, yes, all the time. He dares not take the PATH train back to Jersey City, even after autumn turns to winter and his name falls from the pages of the newspapers he uses as blankets every night. The Jefferson Library is nearby, picturesque and quiet. Dave does his research, and even manages to get a library card by stealing someone’s electric bill from an apartment building vestibule and spending a few of his precious dollars on an unofficial ID for the name on the bill. Then he gets online for the first time in months.

Dave has fans. Not so many as he would have had he killed more people, surrendered to the police, ranted and drooled purple slobber in front of the TV cameras, but he has fans. People who find his actions understandable, who list some of the problems he had in bullet points, who write stories about him invading Hogwarts and killing all the Slytherin. Between fan websites, LiveJournal communities, and bulletin boards—two are dedicated to trying to “find” him, one features a photo of his head Photoshopped atop the body of a machine-gun wielding terrorist in all black—he has twenty-three different fan groups.

He knows not to check his own email. He’s so hungry that he creates a new Yahoo! email address and begins to type up a message demanding money, or food, from the people trafficking in his name. But he can’t prove himself to these people, and some of them might be cops. His ID is under a fake name, and even if he managed to set up a PayPal account, what could he do with it except slosh the money around the Internet? Send himself a fruit basket. Sign up to Cookie of the Month club and loiter around the vestibule of the address on his ID on delivery day.

Except . . . one of his fans is local. She lives in the Village. She’s in grad school at NYU, studying microcelebrity and camgirls. She does performance art and neoburlesque. Sometimes. Not that Dave can afford a seven-dollar cover charge, not that his fake ID or library card would pass muster at a door even on Ludlow Street. But this woman, her name is Anne B., is having a show on the, yes, twenty-third.
Bullettime.
Starts at 11 p.m., which is the twenty-third hour of the day. Not on 23rd Street, of course—no downtown kid ever crosses 14th Street, unless he or she is a secret trustafarian.