Bullettime (4 page)

“Yes, it’s good,” Dave says, “thank you for making it.”

“That’s love!” she says. She points at Dave’s dish. “That’s love in there. You see, anyone can make macaroni and cheese. I work hard, I want a good meal when I come home. We could go out every night, I could boil lobsters and make fantastic roasts, but I make that, for you, because I know you like it.”

Jeremy frowns at the end of his fork. Pasta painted safety orange glistens in the light of the fixture over the table.

Ann gapes. “What do you say about that?” She turns back to Jeremy. Dave wishes Mom would just slide her chair a bit farther back, so she could look at them both at once without having to swing her head like an annoyed snake. Maybe a smaller table would be nice—the long rectangular one the Holbrooks generally eat at reminds Dave of one of those hyperextended cartoon tables with a candelabra and a roasted turkey in the middle.

“He doesn’t even know what to say,” Jeremy agrees. “Unbelievable. Dave, why can’t you just say ‘Thank you’ to your mother? For dinner? For everything?” His tone is even, like the static between radio stations.

“Thanks, ma,” Dave chooses to say, knowing that there is no way to point out that he already thanked his mother without sounding petulant, and petulance is just blood in the water. It doesn’t matter. At least they’re not talking about his shirt anymore.

“Thanks, ma,” Ann repeated. “Well it’s too late for ‘Thanks, ma’ now. These things have to come from the heart, David, the heart.
My
heart is full. Your father’s,” she says, indicating Jeremy with a slosh of her wine glass, “his heart is full too. Of love. For you. Don’t snicker, don’t smirk, this is serious. This is the most important thing you’ll ever hear in your entire life. I
love
you, David. Your father
loves
you. We do everything for you. This meal, this house, your father’s job, every day, every minute, every thought in our lives, David, is oriented toward you because we love you. And all we want in return—no, not even in return because our love for you is unconditional and we’ll just keep on loving you no matter what you do or say—but all that we would appreciate is a little appreciation, from the heart. Heart appreciation,” she says, that last little bit with a giggle. Her chin sinks to her chest and with a final jerk she is done.

Jeremy sits stoically while Dave stabs repeatedly at the rest of his macaroni and cheese, piling it onto the tines of the fork to gulp it down in a single bite.

“So,” Jeremy says. “I want an ice cream sandwich. Would you like an ice cream sandwich, Dave? Ann? Ice cream sandwich?” Nobody answers—Ann’s unable to, Dave amuses himself by pretending not to hear—and Jeremy says, “Okay, that’s three ice cream sandwiches.” He pushes his chair from the table dramatically, takes three great strides into the kitchen, collects the ice cream sandwiches from the freezer and walks back. He slides one across the width of the table to a position near Ann, but she doesn’t stir, then he forcefully hands one to Dave, who takes it willingly enough.

Jeremy hovers over Dave, holding up the remaining ice cream sandwich and waiting.

“Thanks, Dad,” Dave says.

“Yes, yes. That’s right. You’re welcome, Dave, you’re very welcome.” Jeremy walks back to his seat, flattens out his crumpled dinner napkin, tears open the wrapper of his ice cream sandwich, and eats it in desperate bites, chewing loudly between them. He’s done by the time Dave has his wrapper off, but quickly moves on to Ann’s sandwich and polishes that off as well. He stands again suddenly and says good night, causing Ann to stir a bit.

“Clear the table, dear,” she mumbles, “clear it, clear it before you go.” Then she’s back on the sudden nod. Again Jeremy hovers for a moment, then he turns to Dave and says, “You heard your mother; clear the table and start the dishwasher. Carry your weight around here for once.”

Dave sits at the table for another two minutes, then leaves without clearing the table or helping his mother to the couch, which he sometimes does when he feels he has won dinner.

Whenever his mother passes by Dave’s bedroom and peers inside, whether during her soporific days or agitated evenings, she declares with a sigh: “Just another average teenage boy’s room.” Dave hears this in his head and cringes as he goes up to his room, though he knows there is very little average about it. No posters of bikini babes or cars, only teenage boys and middle-aged men take seriously hang from the light blue walls, and there’s not a football or baseball to be seen. It’s actually pretty neat, except for the ankle-deep sludge of dirty shirts and jeans, the legs all twisted around one another. He heads right to the computer and turns on the monitor with a punch of his finger.

Dave’s email client, the web browser, the chat program, the MP3 player, and a couple of the bullshit programs he can’t quite be bothered to adjust the preferences on, all compete for resources as they struggle to be the first to start. Dave’s scarcely more patient than the computer itself, though it occurs to him that he doesn’t actually have anything to do, and isn’t waiting on some important email or message. He tries to conceive of what an important email would even be in his case, but can’t think of anything. It doesn’t matter though; important messages suggest things like deadlines, deadlines imply commerce, commerce means want, and want means the world of the flesh. Not anything Dave is very interested in.

To Dave, the Web was the everywhere he kept everything in. He didn’t even feel his fingers hitting the keyboard or manipulating the mouse anymore, but rather felt his self flowing through the monitor, into the net. He laughs, remembering the time his mother dragged herself to the doorway, made her usual comment, and then pointed to the computer to ask if there was any way to get some tax form or another from “in there.”

“Not ‘In there’,” Dave had said. “Out there.”

Dave was out there, in the place of all places where music always played, where women splayed their cunts and turned to look over their shoulder, where everyone knew everything about the President and free market and
Star Wars
and “real magic“ (with a k!), and where everyone was his friend except for assholes he could blink out of existence with the click of his mouse. Sometimes it took two clicks.

Click. Click.

T
here were a number of leaflets, photocopies of handwritten material, and print-outs from webpages, blogs, Twitter feeds, Facebook threads, and Bboards in the dossier. One of them read as follows:

This is our symbol, this is our hope. All you need to know and all you need to do can be found within its mysteries. Those jagged lines, what are they but a slash and a backslash and a slash and yet another backslash. What is our life, our cause, but an attack followed by our counterattacks, which begets yet another attack, and thus again we counterattack. But the battle ends with us, with our victory!

And what is that symbol but that of a resistor as depicted in a schematic? What do resistors do but sap the power of a circuit, to slow it down and bend it toward new ends? That too is our path and that too is our goal. The power of the system must flow through YOU—prepare yourself (and your Self) and choose your career, your location, your lifestyle. Maximize your impact (the pact between the “I” that is you and the “me” that is all).

And what is the symbol but a set of fangs displayed in a grimace? You must learn to bare your fangs before the system, to intimidate, to threaten, and ultimately to take a bite! Tap into your animal nature, live in the flow of a natural world where freedom is neither means nor ends, but simply the water in which we swim, like a shark in the ocean amidst minnows. We tear through the nets others are trapped in.

To find out more—you know where to look. With-IN.

I put the flyer back down on the table after I finished reading it. My cuffs jingled. My shrink, who sat across from me, asked, “Would you like to talk about what you were trying to say with this, uh, leaflet?”

I laughed. “I wasn’t
trying
to say anything. It’s said. It’s a completed action, a moment in time.”

She nodded, pretending to get me.

“And besides, I didn’t write it.”

“Oh no?”

“I simply inspired it.”

“It’s signed by you at the bottom, isn’t it?”

I laughed—she was such a stupid cunt. “Psychologists are wealthy, aren’t they?”

She pursed her lips and played with the eyeglasses that hung from the long necklace of plastic pearls around her neck. She couldn’t figure out a way to move the discussion away from where I had decided to lead it, as she knew I’d just “act out” as she liked to call it.

“Some are, some aren’t. I’m not, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

“Not very wealthy, but wealthy enough, right? Wealthy enough to get some letter from the President or a Senator, someone who wants your vote and some money, right?”

“Yes, of course. Junk mail.”

“Are these letters from the President signed?”

She nodded. What I liked about my shrink, why I didn’t just have her taken, to be found three days later in a Wal-Mart parking lot down the shore, the hands of her charred corpse melted to what would be left of her steering wheel. “No, of course not,” she said. “A machine signs them, and it’s probably some publicist or expert who drafts the letter. They’re designed to persuade, even down to the realistic-looking signature.”

“Do you consider my signature realistic-looking?” The resistance sigil was repeated at the bottom, in a scraggy, bloody font.

“It is important to you, Mr. Holbrook—”

“Call me
I
!” Snapping gets her attention. I wondered if her father ever hit her. Lots of my girls respond well to snapping because of that. Lots of shrinks enter the field because they want to fix themselves.

“Is it important to you, I, that I think your signature is realistic-looking?” she asked, toneless.

“I do think my signature is realistic-looking,” I said, and I chuckled.

“By I, I meant me, you know.”

“Yes, exactly.”

T
he next time Dave sees Erin, he is leaning against a billboard on the platform of the cavernous Journal Square PATH station. It really was a cavern cut into the side of a hill—Dave wasn’t above thinking of it as “The Batcave,” which, to be fair, was what nearly everyone thought the first time they saw it. Dave is daydreaming about that old show from the 1960s (the flame from the Batmobile’s rocket engine being used as a weapon somehow, the front wheels smoking and screeching as the car struggled to stay in place while the fire engulfed the side of a criminal hideout) when Erin walks up to the billboard, leans against it next to Dave, winces as her hair is caught between her shoulders and the loud red ad for Hot 97, then steps away to move her long curls over her shoulders, and leans back again. She’s wearing a tank top, white, with the words
I MOCK YOUR VALUE SYSTEM
in black block letters, and denim shorts held up by a brownish belt. Her ass looks a little too big in the shorts, Dave thinks.

“So,” Erin asks. “Where are you going?” She hasn’t noticed him staring, or, Dave thinks somehow excited by the thought,
She doesn’t care if I stare
.

Dave is so smooth. “M-me?”

Erin nods.

He jerks his head away to look down at the platform. It’s a newer kind of cement with glittery somethingorothers embedded into the mix. Keeps the cave bright. “The city.”

“Yeah, what’s in the city?”

He shrugs. “I dunno, everything.” Dave glances away.

“But what are you going to do the
r
e,” she says, her voice developing an edge as she growls the
r
in “there”, as she reaches for his hair.

“Ow!”

Erin’s eyes flash and she shows her teeth with a wild, jagged smile. Her teeth aren’t fixed. “You look at me when I’m talking to you! What the hell is wrong with you?” Dave has never seen such an angry smile.

“Nothing, I’m just going to go—you know, hang out.”

“Where?”

“I dunno,” Dave says with a shrug. “Around.” Her smile is getting even wider—is she cheering up or getting angrier?