God and the Other (working title) Chapter 1
This is the tight and neat form of this chapter, and I love it. Let me know what you think. I just recently sent this to Bruce Cambell's agent, and am hoping to get a favorable reply.
A day like any other day, complete with the pleasantly familiar sense of underachievement and a lack of direction. One would think that the simple confines of beginning, middle, and end, would make any day successful if one simply lived through it, but somehow that wasn’t true. Sebastian had a knack for making any day unsuccessful. Procrastination was his mantra, somewhat oxymoronic, but he loved the irony, because it made him feel complex.
The first noise he heard was the loud bang of a shoe being thrown at his door, by one of his sublimely identical sisters, irate that she had to wake him yet again, because not even his alarm clock liked communicating with him.
He opened his eyes as he did every morning, to stare at a ceiling that had once been blank, but was now covered in an entire calendar of the adorable kitten posters designed to make one feel better about life, to help them laugh out their misery. His mother had tired of the unfinished cave that was his basement hideaway and threatened to paint the walls. When his request for a mural of Dante’s Inferno was summarily dismissed, the disgruntled or horribly mistreated kittens were his revenge.
He frowned. Gee, that backfired.
Another bombardment of shoes hit the door with a staccato of bangs and the single crack of a stiletto. “Alright already, you sunk my battleship! Just fucking quit!”
From the top of the basement stairs, he heard a whine, “Mom, Sebi said the F-word!”
Pushing his head back into his pillow, he tried to drown out the hustle of yet another busy day.
It wasn’t as if he had anything monumental to achieve, he was just doing what was set out for him like every other person he knew with the strategic exception that he was purposely not finishing it. He was a conscientious objector to life. His moral codes and ethical policies would not allow him to live a lie, and if anything was a lie, life was, because it contradicted itself all too often. People were precious, unique, valuable, but God forbid they ever want special treatment at the DMV. Fate existed, but somehow a person could tap the illimitable energy of the universe and undo circumstance any time they wanted, and there were at least fifty infomercials to prove it.
Rolling out of bed, he sighed. Whoever, wherever, whenever, they existed in exactly the same way, and never even realized it. History was not a cycle; it was a state of perpetual being.
The world’s population picked sides and then spent half its time switching back and forth between them, so he ignored the world and remained on his own side. He was somewhere in the grey area, somewhere where shadow shook hands with daylight and said, “Hey, I can’t imagine one single vampire succumbing to such pleasant brightness.” He didn’t believe in uniqueness, as in “nothing else like it,” and he didn’t believe in loneliness, as in “no one shares your misery.” In fact, he believed everyone was alike and trying desperately to hide it, that everyone shared his misery and was in denial, but what could he do? He was basic, he was ordinary, he was mundane. Sebastian, plain and tall, and under no obligation to solve anyone’s problems.
His parents attacked the fissure between him and reality using the irrefutable duct tape of the parental handbook, claiming to have felt exactly the same as him at his age. They talked about lacking direction, finding identity, disillusionment, outrage, malaise, and instead of convincing him things would change, effectively destroyed all confidence he might have had in their emotional stability. To him, such inner turmoil was alien. What he experienced was repetition, a sense that at every turn he could see what was coming and really didn’t want to. He could have traveled the world, done anything, and it would follow him, so why bother?
Shawn had asked him once, in his characteristic scientific neutrality, why he didn’t just commit suicide, and the only thing he could say was “Don’t feel like it,” with a noncommittal shrug. Staring at the stack of comic books his only friend had given him, he wondered if it would feel weird to die and knew there was a “pearly gates” joke in there somewhere, probably on him.
His computer made a welcome noise that sounded like a doorbell under water.
“Wtf dude…where u @?”
He looked at the chat-speak for a few seconds, pulling on a pair of dirty jeans.
“Where r u, fuckmook?” he typed swiftly, then he grabbed his socks from the previous day and tugged them on, swearing he’d wash underwear as soon as he got home.
Shawn’s reply was a continuous stream of text, no doubt the perfect replica of his internal monologue. “Where the hell do u think I am? Got here early 2 work on that lame ass net project…would have done it at home, but my fucking brother was online chatting with his gf in San Fran…wish he’d go home….Man why the fuck do they assign us shit they know we can do in our sleep…I mean it’s like when our ‘rents tell us about gas prices and talk about the “good ole days,” know what I mean?”
“Not really,” he mumbled, around the Twix he’d forgotten the night before, because the only reminiscing his parents did was to recall the time just before he learned to talk.
“Will u get here already retardicon?”
“If u want it so bad, why u mssging me while I’m getting ready loverboy?”
“I was doing some pricing on the fourth edition Shadowrun…” Shawn answered, as if he’d begun typing long before the previous remark had been sent, choosing to ignore the aspersions cast like a wide net of folly.
“Screw fourth edition…it’s bullshit.”
“?”
“That’s when they substitute real swearwords for the ones they made up! I mean, what’s the point if we can’t say things like “frack” and shit like that? Nowhere else I know of where you can say “frack” and sound normal. I fracking love “frack”, god damn it! ”
“Battlestar Gallacitca says it all the damn time!”
“Man, if I wanted 2 c humanity spiral downward into inevitable destruction, I’d look out my window…I prefer to watch TV and feel good about myself, cuz otherwise, I never would!”
Most people shriveled up in their heads or medicated to get out of them, but that was because their heads were empty and lifeless. His would have been if not for Shawn, who had gone in, plastered up a few brightly colored posters, arranged some scattered bits of trivia, stockpiled several alphabetized boxes of Magic cards, and stacked the sarcasm and contempt for humanity that wouldn’t fit in his own head, what with all the action figures. Sebastian had to admit, he really wasn’t fit for anything else but storage space.
He just could not see fiction as a sign of things to come, or a model for how the world should or should not be. He saw it as one big joke that people could never quite get. Concealed in the paneled pages of comic books and tales of Elvin conquest were the tricks for escaping reality. For example, no one asked about how Batman got to the toilet or about the practicalities of a daily life in the universe of a mega-corporate post-apocalyptic dust-scape, they just accepted it and tried to pretend bad things didn’t really happen or that someone else would save them.
Finally, the rapid repeat of a fist on his basement door called him back to reality. “Yeah?” he yelled, exiting his messaging program and closing his laptop.
His mother opened the door, a piece of toast in her mouth, her usual crispness uncompromised, and her mint green suit in pristine order. “You’re not wearing that, Sebi. You look like you just rolled out of bed.”
He turned away from her and grabbed his books out of the pile on his desk. “I did.”
“So why do you have to look like you did?” she asked militantly.
“Because I’m honest?” he offered, tossing his things into his backpack, sitting atop his checkered Keds.
“Because you’re a slob,” she corrected. “You come home and sleep all afternoon, then you stay up all night, pull yourself out at a quarter past seven, and expect me to get you to school on time! How can you be so inconsiderate?” Her voice had gone high, and that was a bad sign, the very indication of a fight about to begin, the typical red flag that he was about to receive “the comparison.”
Somewhere along the way of child-rearing, when he’d missed three of the first five things on the checklist of a healthy adolescent, his parents had gone from asking why he didn’t play with the others, to asking when he would finish his Manifesto. They tried to be good parents and blame themselves, but it couldn’t be their fault, because they had two other children with perfect attendance, hobbies, and cheerful exuberance.
“It’s real easy, Mom,” Sebastian attempted while tying his shoes in a triple knot, “I just ignore you.”
Never disarmed, his mother glared at him. He knew she was glaring because he could feel the sting of her disapproval. “Why can’t you be more like Bella and Ella? Why can’t you just . . . deal?”
Standing up, he heaved his usual sigh, designed as a peace offering that never seemed to work. “Mom, just leave me alone, please.”
Her face wore the concern trimmed in cosmetic bronzer and petal pink lip gloss. “I just want you to be happy and successful! What do you want me to do?”
He brushed her hands away from his hair and tried to tame it with his long fingers, poking them into the knots, tearing at them unsympathetically. “Look at it this way, Mom, when I don’t do anything, I am a success at being a loser! You do this every damn morning, and it is driving me nuts!”
Her heart-shaped face somehow lost its attractive softness as she scowled. “I don’t know how you expect to get into college with what you are doing, young man!”
He pushed past her and snatched his jacket from the floor. “I’m not going to college, Mom, I already told you that. I hate school, why would I want to pay for it?”
She followed him up the stairs, lasting just long enough in his arctic apathy to tell him he could walk to school if he wanted to keep on ignoring her.
“It’s nine god damned blocks! I walk it every damn day!” he shouted, glaring at the sisters he could not tell apart, smiling spitefully from their breakfast bowls as he slammed the door.
Seriously, was his life like one giant cosmic joke? Was some alien staring at it on intergalactic reality TV somewhere, commiserating and eating a truckload of space-popcorn, while loudly espousing an overwhelming hatred for such programming to Blorthag their roommate who smoked too much? Shaking his head he slammed the electronically opened sliding door on the van, because it just didn’t seem like one door was enough.
The sky was finally overcast, and whatever gods ran it, he thanked them. If there was one thing he hated more than his perfect sisters with their shared reality, it was the sun. The sun was not warm or friendly; it was a giant ball of searing hydrogen, and a terraforming problem that should be addressed.
He was just considering cutting first and second period to take a detour downtown, when the minivan cruised up alongside and a window rolled down. “Don’t you even think about cutting, Sebi, or you’ll do more than lunch detention!”
That she professed to know him was bad enough, but when she accidentally got him right, it was horrible, because then she thought she knew him and felt the pride and entitlement from having guessed correctly.
Annoyed, he crossed his arms. "Mom, what the hell can you possibly do to me that means a damn thing?”
Her face was the warning, her shout, the blow. “Watch it!”
One of the carbon copies leaned forward and pushed her nosy face into the periphery.
“Tell him he can’t go to Comicon with Shawn, Mom. That’ll piss him off!”
The car jolted as the brake was tapped. “Elizabeth Anne, don’t you start talking like that! You heard her,” she growled, pitching her voice back at him, “no Comicon if you don’t knock it off!”
“Hey Ella, what rhymes with snitch?”
“Mom!”
And then the car sped forward, he barely had enough time to flip off her rearview as a matter of formality. Watching her drive away, he wanted to be angry, but whether it was the fumes or the fresh air, he found he just couldn’t blame them for not getting it.
They, whoever they were, said these were the best years, assuming of course that one had interesting things of which to take advantage. But how could anyone have a fulfilling life without some horrible period for comparison? If old age was the time to look back, and middle age was the time to make up for lost time, and childhood was the time of innocence, what was wrong with adolescence being the shit-time? Teenage-hood was a made up thing anyway, only invented in the last hundred years when the lifespan increased dramatically due to quality of life and the old-timers had to start coming up with places to put their descendants. Like high school.
So what if people like him were at the lower bound of the collective consciousness?
He was nearly to school when his better judgment intervened. How could he possibly go to school on such a nice, grey day, in his grey life, with his dirty grey T-shirt? He walked through back streets, avoiding the ever-vigilant truancy patrol, to the only safe haven he and his wayward companions knew, the only establishment that housed refugees without any prejudice: Hallowed Grounds, the neo/goth/punk hybrid hangout, edgier than Starbucks and the only business in the small downtown area with a black accent wall.
It wasn’t like he came to the coffee cliché to sample Columbia’s finest, or read Emily Bronte. He came to get away, and on days he ended up ditching completely, he would stay until he could walk home and go to sleep again before third period even began. No cops, no parents, no teachers, not even studious Shawn, just muffins and a chick with pink hair and horn-rimmed glasses.
“Yo,” she waved, “Usual?”
He gave a crooked nod, “’Sup bee-atch?”
She shrugged a tattooed shoulder, “I fucking hate first shift, but whatever. We get all kinds of assholes who want their double-shot-lattes double-quick so they can get to their double-retarded destinations in half the time. It’s the most boring ‘cuz they don’t talk.”
“It’s because Scrabble isn’t as popular as it once was; no one wants to dawdle. You get some of that magnetic poetry, and you’ll have loud, early morning parties up in here,” he remarked with a chuckle as she blended his frappaccino.
She popped her gum, “Christ no! I’m happy just tossing this shit at ‘em and givin’ ‘em the boot; I don’t want to have to read their crap on the magnet board and ask ‘what did they mean by “eat more melodies”?’ or ‘why is “to kiss a tome is worship,” poetic?’”
“Am I the only one who comes and stays?”
She frowned, looking up at the exposed ductwork, “You do come in the most, by far. How you gonna graduate with cuts like that?”
He snorted. “Do you have a diploma?”
“GED.”
“I rest my case,” he stated, handing her his cash in return for his frothy sweetfest. He snatched a muffin and waited for his change.
“I dunno,” she said with another shrug, “I think everyone will go to school when it’s their time, I just happen to think of myself as immortal.”
He laughed, “All the time in the world, huh?”
She shook her multicolored head, “And yet I try to obey Dr. Phil and live for the moment to cherish my God-given potential, or what the fuck ever.”
“God is a capitalist, that’s why cathedrals light their crucifixes. Your potential has dwindled in value, by the same simple fiscal rules that got you your job. We live in a service based economy, you know. Not everyone can be multi-millionaires with perfect grades. Who would serve coffee then, Stephen Hawking?”
Her eyes slid over him. “It would be hilarious listening to him count back change and repeat orders.”
He snorted, “You guys hiring, ‘cuz I could sure use an eternity of that shit.”
She laughed her cadenced hiss and finished by clicking her tongue ring across her teeth. “I’m just gonna join a cult, hack up my genitals, and get a bowl haircut; so, you can have my job, kay?”
He laughed, “Tell the truth, you’ve already hacked up your genitals, haven’t you?”
She gave him back his money, shutting the drawer of her till with an ample hip, and it was more than she should have returned. One eye winked, jiggling an eyebrow stud.
“Course! That’s foreplay these days. Muffin’s on the house, Seb.”
“Thanks, is the back room empty?”
“Yeah,” she pointed to the sofa room with her chin, “but you better not do anything lewd or lascivious.”
With a quiet snicker he cleared his throat, “What?”
“You know,” she giggled.
Sucking in air, he turned and walked toward the room, glad he’d decided to ditch school for the second time that week. “I think you put way too much Bailey’s in that coffee this morning, Leah.”
“I did not!” she called after him. “It’s Vodka today!”
He was still cringing when he rounded the corner and entered the room. It was as empty as promised, filled with the pleasant welcoming buzz of heated microchips. He found an empty computer terminal and put in the employee code.
“Where the fuck r u, goddamnit!”
“Grounds,” he replied.
“Dude…ur so gonna get nailed! They’ll find u!”
He could just picture Shawn, his glasses sliding down over his nose as he gave voice to his anxiety that only existed because he needed players for group RPG’s. “U gonna tell?”
He could see the reproach on Shawn’s face. “No!”
“Then what do u care, bitch? I’ll just drop out. I’m old enough!”
“Not 4 3 more weeks! I am so not covering 4 u!”
“Like you could live without me,” he murmured. He signed off AIM and checked his email. It was empty, unless he needed Viagra, which he didn’t.
Around him the room suddenly chilled, enough that his skin awoke with little bumps.
He shivered involuntarily.
“So it is,” came a pliable voice on the artificially circulated air. The tenor was strange, almost ethereal. It was the kind of voice anime characters had when they spoke important truths, all breath and whispers. He turned, expecting to find David Blaine, only to discover a young man in black.
Sebastian’s skin began to crawl. The man seemed to have a kind of self-ordained superiority that he wore like a coat, his appearance flawlessly managed, his posture erect, his lack of movement so calculated it forced Sebastian’s eyes to shift and look for strings. The stranger looked like he could do magic, if he only had the motivation. He was enthroned on the softest sofa in the room, a mottled stain-catcher of moss green chenille, his expression a subtle twist of humor.
Sebastian’s preplanned brush off died on his lips, and his mind smoothed over the edges of words until it gave a hollow ring. In the tiniest of recesses, he searched for some description his emotions could support, but shadows seemed to conceal everything. There was nothing unique, nothing that stood out, and yet that divine anonymity undid every sentence he could assemble.
This was the dude a person might bump into on Halloween, whose costume was so good that one might wonder if he was the real thing, though what that was, Sebastian found he couldn’t say. Perhaps a pale tear in the fabric of space, that sucked the light right into his eyes. He was everything graphic novels tried to capture but failed at sketching, and he made it painfully obvious that grasping for understandings and prior experience with someone like him only made him more powerful.
Sebastian swallowed.
An eerie stillness pressed down on his gut, until at last he couldn’t move at all. All he could do was stare and be vulnerable, a deer in headlights, a tiny, shivering rabbit being chased by something with blurry, dark fur and a hulking, amorphous shape. He was prey.
The stranger smiled then, and something in Sebastian’s chest stopped working in a stab of responsiveness.
“Wh . . . what?” he stuttered, knowing somehow that he looked as though he’d swallowed a frog.
The perfect face formed a perfect expression of engagement, marble liquefying and resolving itself. “Hello.”
“Uh . . . hi.”
“Is that all?”
Frowning, Sebastian tried to recognize the man, learn if there was more that should be said, but the stranger managed to undo even the steely grip of his memory. His next comment tasted like stale coffee, but it was the best he could do under the circumstances. “If you’re going to try and sell me God, I’ve already got one, and it ain’t nothin’ special.”
The flawless mouth smiled once again, and the earth shifted. Sebastian gripped the edge of the chair, expecting the ceiling to cave in on his head. “I thought you might be immune.” At his glazed expression that reflected the jammed gears of his mind, the man sighed in an almost bored way. “Forgive me, but things must be done a certain way.”
He shook his head. “What way is that?”
“Pleasantries I detest,” the man explained in disinterest, “but humans are all alike. The nature of the animal dictates the nature of approach.”
It was then that he heard the faint echoes of other black-clad coffee house refugees with their hands stapled eternally to their foreheads, and knew the man for an enemy. “Animals?” It was what he thought of humanity, but it did not seem an accurate description when it included him. “So not.”
The man blinked slowly. “I apologize.”
“Yeah, well, remember me the next time you think about saying shit like that.” He turned away swiftly, while that still remained a possibility, for in those few seconds, he’d approached an event horizon, and was nearly torn apart. “I’m not one of them. I’m the one who will eventually be put on Court TV for taking an axe to the face of the guy who invented pop culture.”
From behind him, something like a chuckle rattled from across the room like discarded husks rubbing against each other. “Celebrities, perhaps?”
“Oh, no man, I’ve got that shit all figured out,” he mumbled, half to himself, acutely aware that the cold eyes were pressed against his skinny back. Why he was still talking, he couldn’t say, but the words came before he could stop them, a natural defense against silent death.
“Really? Then who is to blame?” the man asked as if he already knew the real answer and was just catering a child.
“Guttenberg, homie. He’s the one who made it easy to speak your mind and get it spread around accurately, which would be great if only wise people could write. If I ever catch that asshole, I’ll rip out his liver and beat him to death with it.”
Sebastian flushed, feeling embarrassed, uncertain, like Shawn got in front of Tracy Halbot. In his thoughts a new mantra came forth, repeating “shut up” with overwhelming ferocity. He had faced bullies his entire life. They, however, were nothing like the man behind him. This man could make anyone say anything, because he became every weakness a person might have.
To his surprise, another chuckle came to his ears, and though he’d been desperately trying to avoid looking at the man, he felt the irresistible urge and spun the office chair around. The light grey eyes were shining beneath dark brows.
“So you have a grudge against the printed word? I would not have thought to hear something like that from you. It seems my timing was impeccable.”
He shrugged, wondering if the man was looking for someone made impressionable by the kind of intellectual averaging that took place in a world where everyone had a say. “I don’t hate it on general principle, but he printed the first mass-produced Bible, and hey, I have to start somewhere. If God wanted that shit to get around, he’d have made us telepathic.”
“Come here,” demanded the man, seeming to hear Sebastian’s hesitance, and gestured with the most graceful hand he had ever seen to the other side of the sofa, as if by stroking the air, he’d produce a current that forced the other occupant to his side.
Where the hand rested, his eyes lit. The hand was too long, too narrow, too . . . something else. The fingers were like bones and the skin, like rice paper. Blue veins crept around them, leaving lines like interstates on a road map. The bone at the wrist was too sharp, the wrist itself, much too thin.
Sebastian blinked, several times. His mind was suddenly a barren and stinging environment and as he looked at the man, a merciless serpentine cord began to twist up through his vertebrae. Dizziness set in, and his eyes began to play tricks on him, telling him the room was flapping in the wind like a mirage. His breathing sped up, his thoughts seemed to scramble, and in a moment of dislocation he knew that even without the drug-like effects of that stare, he would have said yes eventually, even though the guy was obviously a child-molesting con artist with his creepy, villainous intimidation down to a pure art form. He felt a benign peace, almost like he didn’t mind, and that the fall from grace would be a welcomed one, even if it ended in duct tape and a living internment.
The image stirred him and he realized exactly how close he’d come to death in that moment. It was a cold jolt to his system, and it woke him.
He shook his head, “I’m way too smart for you buddy, you should try sitting at Miriam’s down by the grade school. Those kids are fucking mental.”
The eyes did not back down, but maintained the voltage, as one dark eyebrow rose ever so slightly. “You should not assume you know the reasons for everything, Sebastian. It is much too soon for that, I think. You still have not quite grasped that I am here and that you have yet to meet my challenge. We will see how things progress.”
Caught off guard, Sebastian stiffened. “How the fuck . . . what the hell does that mean? Who are you?”
There was a moment of pause, as if the room was breathing a little more shallowly. He picked at the leather on the back of his chair, certain that by fidgeting, he was showing weakness. Somehow though, he had to withstand. He couldn’t just let the man overshadow his cloudy peace with a blanket of a confrontational dilemma. Especially if he didn’t let his own mother do that. But the words were little darts of agony, and the silver eyes only pushed them deeper.
“There was a time that you and I were . . .” trailed the soft voice. “You have always been so quick to react. Ask yourself why.”
He knew the man’s words had to be some kind trap, but the socially ingrained urge to apologize overpowered him, and it was all he could do to stop himself. “It’s real simple, you’re creepy,” he said flatly.
The thin lip curled, ever so nicely. “Perhaps I am meant to ask why you think so. Do I intimidate you?”
“Would it kill you to wear a little color?”
“You chose the color, I simply wear it.”
“I chose to make you look like an undead mime?”
The man sneered. “Am I ugly?”
Frowning, he tried to say yes, but found that he could not.
“Then perhaps to you, there is some secret love for grotesquery. You are the one who cannot seem to look away.”
The words had the smell of bleach to them, and stung him. He wasn’t sure if the man was intentionally trying to sound cruel, or if he was doing what the other Lestat wannabe’s did, playing at being evil. Whatever the game, the man knew him and the resentment in his voice said there was an unspoken outrage brewing.
“How do you know my name?”
The man didn’t answer, but his smile changed, from unyielding, to inviting. It was almost an undetectable shift, but palpable none the less.
“Fine, whatever, don’t say anything,” he hissed and turned back to his useless monitor. He could see the man’s reflection in it, blurred yet somehow as clear as the real thing, and he realized he could not get away, because it was just as painful with the stranger staring over his shoulder.
“I think the more appropriate scenario, is that you are drawn to me. It all comes down to how you see me, not what I actually am,” came a light reply, subtly rendered to resemble mild ennui. "You're bored here, aren’t you? Surely there is still something of value that has not been weakened by this horrible place."
Ignoring the urge to turn and fall into the snare, Sebastian clenched the edge of the table and whispered “Get lost,” under his breath. It was like ignoring sleep after days of vigilance; it took all he had to make it happen.
There was a condescending laugh. “Today began as any other day, with one exception: me. Here I am, like a messenger from on high, sent to tell you something essential. Here I am, a visitor from another dimension, here to make contact. Yet here you are, trying to get rid of me for the sake of your ridiculous quest. It is predictable, because now you are one of them, and they are predictable. But you do not really want me to leave you alone, and deep inside, you hope that I will stay even though you tell me to go. There is still something between us and it could turn into whatever you want.”
Sebastian did not say anything. In his mind he had been, without conscious effort, rummaging through useful plot devices, trying to predict what would come to pass, trying to figure out why this intrusion felt so right even as it chilled him. It was true; he wanted the stimulus, but not this person, not ever this person.
“Do your kind dream in clichés too? Do you go about stealing images from human minds like leaches, creating imitations to make you feel a part of this reality? Pitiful.”
He could no longer resist the urge to give the man satisfaction and respond. “What’s that mean? I don’t even know you!”
“You do, but it seems I was right about all of it. You will never see it, because you are blinded by it.”
Spinning in his chair, his youthful temper came out in full force, “Look jerk, you can kiss my ass.”
The laughter was quiet, but somehow it felt as though this muted antagonist was shouting at full volume. There was something else happening, some weird alteration of his normal routine, carved out of the black of the stranger’s clothing and the white of his skin, and the stranger knew it.
“I suppose it cannot be helped,” he murmured.
“Fuck you!” Sebastian shouted at the unanswered question.
Before he realized it, the man was walking toward him. His sure strides and determined face felt mildly threatening, and having had several brawls at Hallowed Grounds, Sebastian was sure the man was about to punch him. He leaned back into his chair, trying to force the wheels back, but the stranger was much faster than he looked, and took hold of the arms before momentum could be gained.
Leaning over him, the man examined him with narrowed gray eyes. His face looked like a smooth Venetian Carnival mask, inhabited by the soul of an ancient Crusader or snake demon, trapped in limbo so long, that even detachment was difficult. The perfection was glaring, almost a flaw in and of itself. It hurt to look, unfocused Sebastian’s eyes, turned his stomach inside out. He felt the pull he’d tried to escape by remaining distant, and failed to avoid it.
His mouth sagged open.
“To you, some scenario is playing itself out, and in your mind are a million possibilities to how it will end,” the stranger whispered, and it felt like tendrils of ice had parasitically attached themselves to his nerves, leaving him paralyzed. “You see, you have been conditioned for this, brainwashed, but that must be torture to someone with the potential to shrug off such conditioning and see the lies being told. I thought when I found you, you would have learned I was right, but,” suddenly his face hardened, and cruel, silver mercury poisoned the air between their eyes, “you are a waste of my time.”
The acid rose like vapor and Sebastian felt mortified. He felt less than human. It was the same comment everyone had, so why did it hurt? It was what he’d fashioned for himself, so why did it sound so disgusting?
“Who are you?” he asked, confident he sounded unconfident.
“Someone who has been waiting for a very,” his voice seemed enraged, so completely hateful, “very long time. I find you now, and you’ve slipped this far. You sicken me. I wanted to save you, but now I cannot imagine it. There is nothing left to save.”
And without another word, the man dematerialized like a reverse tesseract folding into a lesser dimension.
Sebastian realized several minutes later, that he was sitting exactly as he had been, staring so hard at the doorway, that his eyes had tunnel vision. When he tried to shake it off, he nearly fell over, as his entire body suffered from adrenalin poisoning, and every miniscule movement felt like jumping off a cliff. His hands shook violently for perhaps the first time in his life, and he was breathing very heavily. It seemed he’d been there for hours, as if years had gone by and he, like some modern Rip van Winkle was waking to find that dust had settled but nothing else had changed. There were no traces of the man, however, and as he thought upon it, he could not remember having watched him walk away, though he must have, because people didn’t just evaporate and leave their companions staring at a door.
“What the hell?” he croaked.
The event played and replayed in his thoughts, and somehow he couldn’t halt the loop, couldn’t unhear the words said in that horribly even, mechanically perfect voice.
When he could walk, he fled the coffee house, ignoring Leah’s friendly question about the wolves chasing him. He just took off running, not knowing where he was going, any way as long as it wasn’t something predetermined. After a moment, he halted, suddenly understanding that what was chasing him was already inside and he could not escape.
An empty lot that progress had forgotten, the favorite shortcut to school for so many east-siders, home to abandoned refrigerators and couches was where he’d arrived. He collapsed onto one of them, shaking his head. “Fuck.”
Closing his eyes, he tried to see anything but those eyes, and couldn’t. What was he feeling? Everyone said he was a waste of air, time, or some other natural resource, so why did it hurt? His skin had been abraded off, he’d been stripped of the titles of old in one single maneuver. The loss was sickening.
Something had happened, something grave and inevitable though he’d tried to fight it. A thousand years of planning and patterns set into motion had terminated. Whatever that meant, he couldn’t say, but the feeling was the same and it bottomed out his stomach. Sebastian knew those things more certainly than he did anything else.
But those eyes and the way they’d looked at him . . . The rage was not at him, it was selfish. There was pain behind it, there was hundreds of years of misery, there was anticipation quashed in a wave of disillusionment. Sebastian had been something great, but he wasn’t anymore.
He stared at his hands. They were pale, but not like that man’s. He was unequivocally human. He was not a monster. He was not a ghost. He was not false, not an illusion. He was not . . . what?
Unchanging.
Hope broke free, but it was the worst feeling, because he did not understand why the thought had made him so happy, so safe. The death of pessimism was painful enough to inspire pessimism to return, and as he sat there, he felt the pleasant and familiar warmth of it fogging up his soul, beckoning to him like a warm bath.
Rising shakily to his feet, he trudged on, looking at them as he went. It was only after he felt the push of people all around him and heard the shrill of conversation in strained voices, that he realized he’d gone to school, and that he’d arrived between periods. Someone bumped into him from behind, hard enough to make him cough, but he remained still, a rock in the salmon spawn, shocked to hell he’d found his way there instead of to his comfortable, protected little cave of cliché kittens.
“Sebi? Dude, what’s wrong with you?” Shawn shouted from his back. “I thought you weren’t coming! You alright?”
“I don’t know,” he said dimly.
Shawn pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and gave his friend an assessing look. Though a tiny, fair-haired, nerd of a friend in a perpetual state of awkwardness, Shawn did, at times, demonstrate vast wisdom he was happy to hand out like Halloween candy.
“You look distressed. Were you in some kind of car accident? You look like my mom did that time she got whiplash.”
The fact that he had even thought to compare a minor fender-bender to the crippling experience he’d just had, pissed him off. Evidently, the rules of fiction had no place; life was where one expected the expected and nothing more. He was disappointed in Shawn for the first time and it must have showed.
“Ok . . . you get mugged?” The boy looked him up and down, noted the schoolbag, untouched, and lifted both eyebrows.
“There was this guy . . .” he found himself saying, but halted, partly because Shawn was looking at him with wide eyes that said, “I wonder if people can play Magic while having a psychotic break,” and partly because he did not think he could explain even if he tried. “Never mind,” he finished stupidly.
“You came to school because ‘there was this guy’?”
He shook his head. What had happened? What in those lost seconds had occurred, when the room had seemed to deform around them, creating another dimension where only the man and he existed? What had he felt? What had been said and why? Why had it felt like dying or the beginning of an end?
He gripped at his chest just as Shawn grabbed his arm and steered him to the wall of lockers. “So a guy said something to you and you freaked, so you came here?” The boy nodded, “Good thinking, except that now that you’re here, you have to stay here, genius.”
“Yeah,” he mumbled, uncertain whether or not he could stand going home alone anyway. He reached for his forehead. His mind was blank.
“You ok?”
Sebastian looked at the boy and couldn’t remember . . . who he was. Searching for the name, knowing he should know it, he found only the silver eyes. Suddenly he couldn’t remember who he was, or where he was, and it was the most bizarre impression. He retained all logic, all reasoning. He looked at the lockers and thought, “I am at school; therefore, I am a child.” He stared at the young man in front of him, saw the concern, and knew he must be a friend. Then suddenly, in a pulse of dizziness, everything was set to rights.
“Hey, Sebi! Answer me.”
It all came back, rushing in his ears like a giant Niagara falls of solitude-inducing bullshit: the loud hallways, the teachers who pursued only expectations, the class work that would not teach character to anyone but the kids who already understood the concept. He was at his high school, the place where kids in his small town went to be safe, and he was with Shawn, the person with whom he had the most in common, his friend and coconspirator.
The image of the silver eyes flashed again, and he felt slightly sick.
“Sebi, if you don’t answer me I am going to go get the pig,” he said of their campus security officer, a man also a part of the gang task force.
“Don’t call him that,” he answered dully, calming his stomach, “it makes you sound like you’re trying too hard. If a cop ever came to chat with you, you’d shit yourself.”
Obviously relieved, Shawn scowled, “I’ve talked to cops loads of times.”
“Was it every time you were hopelessly constipated, you coward?”
“Shut up.”
They moved around through the hallways like any wall-crawling insects that had learned to be cautious of predators, slipping between people who just waited to bump into them.
“So?”
The feeling of it all was oddly comforting. It brought back the rhythm of his assumed life. It brought back the normalcy of unattained perfection. He could do this, he could live now. “Yeah, some nut job tried to get physical with me.”
Shawn ducked beneath the outstretched arm of a football player and tossed over his shoulder, a catch-me-next-time glance, “No shit? Gee, that never happens.”
“He was . . .”
“Didn’t anyone ever tell you to wash clothes, hippie?” asked an overzealous voice in the familiar brogue of a Californian mallrat. “You wore the same thing yesterday! Fashion Victim,” she finished, twirling a blonde strand of artificially colored hair.
Usually indifferent, Sebastian began to feel his normally sluggish blood boiling. There they were, enacting their little life-plays, making him into the fool. He’d read news reports about studies on the number of teenagers with elevated amounts of stress hormones, existing in what amounted to a permanent state of post-traumatic stress, and suddenly it just clicked. He felt the blood in his veins, the chemicals in his blood, the electrons, everything churning and swirling, powering him with ticklish perfection, and all of it told him to incinerate her where she stood for presuming to speak to him.
He spun and faced the villain, a cheerleader and emblem of everything he loathed, because children could be so cruel when they knew they were legally minors without biological culpability. In their hands, the superiority of any kind was a weapon.
“I prefer the term, ‘fashion martyr’, and I am sure you prefer to be called ‘heinous bitch’ instead of ‘shallow, uninspired, idiotic, cock-sucking, conspicuously consuming whore’? Too long isn’t it?” Then he turned and fled, dragging Shawn after him, before she could call her boyfriend.
But something happened. He felt it like a burning sensation between his shoulder blades, like the bite of a radioactive spider that had suddenly depended to his collar. With a hiss, he folded, instinctively putting his hand over the pain. In that instant, something flew over his head and collided with Shawn’s backpack. It had the hard sound of metal as it landed on the tiled floor. Shawn gave an injured shout and turned, and Sebastian watched his sneakers rotate and kick something that gleamed.
It was a wrench marked, “Auto shop room 302.”
“What the hell?” Shawn screamed, in a voice that crossed the border between shock and concern. “You could have killed him!”
The pain in his neck was gone, but he stayed doubled over, uncertain if what he thought had happened, had indeed happened.
There was laughter and a chorus of jeers, and then he knew someone was coming up behind him, as if he were looking in a mirror and could see it plain as day. He recognized the face, knew he had avoided it, but he didn’t want to anymore.
Like the tingle of life returning to dead nerves, he understood proximity and waited, accepting the new sense as the Flash had. When the figure got close enough, he stepped backward, hard. Then he brought his elbow up, even harder. Finally, he reached out, picked up the wrench, and turned. The body was doubled up on its knees coughing and sputtering. There was the back of the skull, within striking distance. The wrench was lifting in his hand as if buoyant. He would pay for ever daring to...
“Sebi, stop!”
Shawn’s desperation caught him by the wrist. The wrench slipped from his grasp. The face looked up at him, and in those beady, usually smug eyes he saw fear.
Something rolled over in his hindbrain. It felt like cold contentment. He felt his face twist, felt the satisfaction, felt the homicidal urge, for they were just walking dust and never knew it. But the football player’s face seemed to pull back, recoil from what he saw in Sebastian’s eyes. Then pleading flickered in the irises, and made him feel that much more powerful for being merciful. The hallway had gone silent, the faces turned to him like those of horror-stricken rabbits, and he sucked up the panic like fuel. His heart skipped a beat in that timeless rhythm and in the instant of pause, he thought he might break loose of his own body.
He heard his voice, but it had a clarity and purpose that sounded unquestionable, commanding, invincible. It poured out like smoke from dry ice to turn the teenager’s skin to freeze-dried earth. “If you ever do anything to me ever again, I will cut your family into tiny pieces. If you ever look at me, I will dig your eyes out with my bare hands. You are nothing to me.”
He meant it. He could feel that he did. He felt a strength in his character that had never existed when simply ignoring the problem would suffice.
The moment of triumph was short-lived. Before he could gloat, the hall seemed to darken so swiftly the swell of shadow looked unending. He wanted to throw out a hand and catch himself, but there was nothing to pass his fingers through, but black, and nothing to tell him where he was, but abyss. A glow began to form then, beside him. Barely visible, it was covered in soot, clutching something half-burned. He could smell the smoke rising off the little person, the scent of singed hair and cooking flesh nearly choking him. It was tiny, sexless, weeping, nothing but a child. He wanted to ask what had happened, if he was hallucinating, when it was right beside him in a moment of unreasonable speed, tugging at his hand.
In his horror, he knew this was not a dream, not a hallucination. It was a memory.
Its hand blackened in his, the last thing to disintegrate before his very eyes. A voice like a half-uttered chant in another room approached him, drowned out by Shawn’s insistent cry, but even with the intrusion of the real, the words echoed within him. He knew what had been said.
“The Angels came.”
A day like any other day, complete with the pleasantly familiar sense of underachievement and a lack of direction. One would think that the simple confines of beginning, middle, and end, would make any day successful if one simply lived through it, but somehow that wasn’t true. Sebastian had a knack for making any day unsuccessful. Procrastination was his mantra, somewhat oxymoronic, but he loved the irony, because it made him feel complex.
The first noise he heard was the loud bang of a shoe being thrown at his door, by one of his sublimely identical sisters, irate that she had to wake him yet again, because not even his alarm clock liked communicating with him.
He opened his eyes as he did every morning, to stare at a ceiling that had once been blank, but was now covered in an entire calendar of the adorable kitten posters designed to make one feel better about life, to help them laugh out their misery. His mother had tired of the unfinished cave that was his basement hideaway and threatened to paint the walls. When his request for a mural of Dante’s Inferno was summarily dismissed, the disgruntled or horribly mistreated kittens were his revenge.
He frowned. Gee, that backfired.
Another bombardment of shoes hit the door with a staccato of bangs and the single crack of a stiletto. “Alright already, you sunk my battleship! Just fucking quit!”
From the top of the basement stairs, he heard a whine, “Mom, Sebi said the F-word!”
Pushing his head back into his pillow, he tried to drown out the hustle of yet another busy day.
It wasn’t as if he had anything monumental to achieve, he was just doing what was set out for him like every other person he knew with the strategic exception that he was purposely not finishing it. He was a conscientious objector to life. His moral codes and ethical policies would not allow him to live a lie, and if anything was a lie, life was, because it contradicted itself all too often. People were precious, unique, valuable, but God forbid they ever want special treatment at the DMV. Fate existed, but somehow a person could tap the illimitable energy of the universe and undo circumstance any time they wanted, and there were at least fifty infomercials to prove it.
Rolling out of bed, he sighed. Whoever, wherever, whenever, they existed in exactly the same way, and never even realized it. History was not a cycle; it was a state of perpetual being.
The world’s population picked sides and then spent half its time switching back and forth between them, so he ignored the world and remained on his own side. He was somewhere in the grey area, somewhere where shadow shook hands with daylight and said, “Hey, I can’t imagine one single vampire succumbing to such pleasant brightness.” He didn’t believe in uniqueness, as in “nothing else like it,” and he didn’t believe in loneliness, as in “no one shares your misery.” In fact, he believed everyone was alike and trying desperately to hide it, that everyone shared his misery and was in denial, but what could he do? He was basic, he was ordinary, he was mundane. Sebastian, plain and tall, and under no obligation to solve anyone’s problems.
His parents attacked the fissure between him and reality using the irrefutable duct tape of the parental handbook, claiming to have felt exactly the same as him at his age. They talked about lacking direction, finding identity, disillusionment, outrage, malaise, and instead of convincing him things would change, effectively destroyed all confidence he might have had in their emotional stability. To him, such inner turmoil was alien. What he experienced was repetition, a sense that at every turn he could see what was coming and really didn’t want to. He could have traveled the world, done anything, and it would follow him, so why bother?
Shawn had asked him once, in his characteristic scientific neutrality, why he didn’t just commit suicide, and the only thing he could say was “Don’t feel like it,” with a noncommittal shrug. Staring at the stack of comic books his only friend had given him, he wondered if it would feel weird to die and knew there was a “pearly gates” joke in there somewhere, probably on him.
His computer made a welcome noise that sounded like a doorbell under water.
“Wtf dude…where u @?”
He looked at the chat-speak for a few seconds, pulling on a pair of dirty jeans.
“Where r u, fuckmook?” he typed swiftly, then he grabbed his socks from the previous day and tugged them on, swearing he’d wash underwear as soon as he got home.
Shawn’s reply was a continuous stream of text, no doubt the perfect replica of his internal monologue. “Where the hell do u think I am? Got here early 2 work on that lame ass net project…would have done it at home, but my fucking brother was online chatting with his gf in San Fran…wish he’d go home….Man why the fuck do they assign us shit they know we can do in our sleep…I mean it’s like when our ‘rents tell us about gas prices and talk about the “good ole days,” know what I mean?”
“Not really,” he mumbled, around the Twix he’d forgotten the night before, because the only reminiscing his parents did was to recall the time just before he learned to talk.
“Will u get here already retardicon?”
“If u want it so bad, why u mssging me while I’m getting ready loverboy?”
“I was doing some pricing on the fourth edition Shadowrun…” Shawn answered, as if he’d begun typing long before the previous remark had been sent, choosing to ignore the aspersions cast like a wide net of folly.
“Screw fourth edition…it’s bullshit.”
“?”
“That’s when they substitute real swearwords for the ones they made up! I mean, what’s the point if we can’t say things like “frack” and shit like that? Nowhere else I know of where you can say “frack” and sound normal. I fracking love “frack”, god damn it! ”
“Battlestar Gallacitca says it all the damn time!”
“Man, if I wanted 2 c humanity spiral downward into inevitable destruction, I’d look out my window…I prefer to watch TV and feel good about myself, cuz otherwise, I never would!”
Most people shriveled up in their heads or medicated to get out of them, but that was because their heads were empty and lifeless. His would have been if not for Shawn, who had gone in, plastered up a few brightly colored posters, arranged some scattered bits of trivia, stockpiled several alphabetized boxes of Magic cards, and stacked the sarcasm and contempt for humanity that wouldn’t fit in his own head, what with all the action figures. Sebastian had to admit, he really wasn’t fit for anything else but storage space.
He just could not see fiction as a sign of things to come, or a model for how the world should or should not be. He saw it as one big joke that people could never quite get. Concealed in the paneled pages of comic books and tales of Elvin conquest were the tricks for escaping reality. For example, no one asked about how Batman got to the toilet or about the practicalities of a daily life in the universe of a mega-corporate post-apocalyptic dust-scape, they just accepted it and tried to pretend bad things didn’t really happen or that someone else would save them.
Finally, the rapid repeat of a fist on his basement door called him back to reality. “Yeah?” he yelled, exiting his messaging program and closing his laptop.
His mother opened the door, a piece of toast in her mouth, her usual crispness uncompromised, and her mint green suit in pristine order. “You’re not wearing that, Sebi. You look like you just rolled out of bed.”
He turned away from her and grabbed his books out of the pile on his desk. “I did.”
“So why do you have to look like you did?” she asked militantly.
“Because I’m honest?” he offered, tossing his things into his backpack, sitting atop his checkered Keds.
“Because you’re a slob,” she corrected. “You come home and sleep all afternoon, then you stay up all night, pull yourself out at a quarter past seven, and expect me to get you to school on time! How can you be so inconsiderate?” Her voice had gone high, and that was a bad sign, the very indication of a fight about to begin, the typical red flag that he was about to receive “the comparison.”
Somewhere along the way of child-rearing, when he’d missed three of the first five things on the checklist of a healthy adolescent, his parents had gone from asking why he didn’t play with the others, to asking when he would finish his Manifesto. They tried to be good parents and blame themselves, but it couldn’t be their fault, because they had two other children with perfect attendance, hobbies, and cheerful exuberance.
“It’s real easy, Mom,” Sebastian attempted while tying his shoes in a triple knot, “I just ignore you.”
Never disarmed, his mother glared at him. He knew she was glaring because he could feel the sting of her disapproval. “Why can’t you be more like Bella and Ella? Why can’t you just . . . deal?”
Standing up, he heaved his usual sigh, designed as a peace offering that never seemed to work. “Mom, just leave me alone, please.”
Her face wore the concern trimmed in cosmetic bronzer and petal pink lip gloss. “I just want you to be happy and successful! What do you want me to do?”
He brushed her hands away from his hair and tried to tame it with his long fingers, poking them into the knots, tearing at them unsympathetically. “Look at it this way, Mom, when I don’t do anything, I am a success at being a loser! You do this every damn morning, and it is driving me nuts!”
Her heart-shaped face somehow lost its attractive softness as she scowled. “I don’t know how you expect to get into college with what you are doing, young man!”
He pushed past her and snatched his jacket from the floor. “I’m not going to college, Mom, I already told you that. I hate school, why would I want to pay for it?”
She followed him up the stairs, lasting just long enough in his arctic apathy to tell him he could walk to school if he wanted to keep on ignoring her.
“It’s nine god damned blocks! I walk it every damn day!” he shouted, glaring at the sisters he could not tell apart, smiling spitefully from their breakfast bowls as he slammed the door.
Seriously, was his life like one giant cosmic joke? Was some alien staring at it on intergalactic reality TV somewhere, commiserating and eating a truckload of space-popcorn, while loudly espousing an overwhelming hatred for such programming to Blorthag their roommate who smoked too much? Shaking his head he slammed the electronically opened sliding door on the van, because it just didn’t seem like one door was enough.
The sky was finally overcast, and whatever gods ran it, he thanked them. If there was one thing he hated more than his perfect sisters with their shared reality, it was the sun. The sun was not warm or friendly; it was a giant ball of searing hydrogen, and a terraforming problem that should be addressed.
He was just considering cutting first and second period to take a detour downtown, when the minivan cruised up alongside and a window rolled down. “Don’t you even think about cutting, Sebi, or you’ll do more than lunch detention!”
That she professed to know him was bad enough, but when she accidentally got him right, it was horrible, because then she thought she knew him and felt the pride and entitlement from having guessed correctly.
Annoyed, he crossed his arms. "Mom, what the hell can you possibly do to me that means a damn thing?”
Her face was the warning, her shout, the blow. “Watch it!”
One of the carbon copies leaned forward and pushed her nosy face into the periphery.
“Tell him he can’t go to Comicon with Shawn, Mom. That’ll piss him off!”
The car jolted as the brake was tapped. “Elizabeth Anne, don’t you start talking like that! You heard her,” she growled, pitching her voice back at him, “no Comicon if you don’t knock it off!”
“Hey Ella, what rhymes with snitch?”
“Mom!”
And then the car sped forward, he barely had enough time to flip off her rearview as a matter of formality. Watching her drive away, he wanted to be angry, but whether it was the fumes or the fresh air, he found he just couldn’t blame them for not getting it.
They, whoever they were, said these were the best years, assuming of course that one had interesting things of which to take advantage. But how could anyone have a fulfilling life without some horrible period for comparison? If old age was the time to look back, and middle age was the time to make up for lost time, and childhood was the time of innocence, what was wrong with adolescence being the shit-time? Teenage-hood was a made up thing anyway, only invented in the last hundred years when the lifespan increased dramatically due to quality of life and the old-timers had to start coming up with places to put their descendants. Like high school.
So what if people like him were at the lower bound of the collective consciousness?
He was nearly to school when his better judgment intervened. How could he possibly go to school on such a nice, grey day, in his grey life, with his dirty grey T-shirt? He walked through back streets, avoiding the ever-vigilant truancy patrol, to the only safe haven he and his wayward companions knew, the only establishment that housed refugees without any prejudice: Hallowed Grounds, the neo/goth/punk hybrid hangout, edgier than Starbucks and the only business in the small downtown area with a black accent wall.
It wasn’t like he came to the coffee cliché to sample Columbia’s finest, or read Emily Bronte. He came to get away, and on days he ended up ditching completely, he would stay until he could walk home and go to sleep again before third period even began. No cops, no parents, no teachers, not even studious Shawn, just muffins and a chick with pink hair and horn-rimmed glasses.
“Yo,” she waved, “Usual?”
He gave a crooked nod, “’Sup bee-atch?”
She shrugged a tattooed shoulder, “I fucking hate first shift, but whatever. We get all kinds of assholes who want their double-shot-lattes double-quick so they can get to their double-retarded destinations in half the time. It’s the most boring ‘cuz they don’t talk.”
“It’s because Scrabble isn’t as popular as it once was; no one wants to dawdle. You get some of that magnetic poetry, and you’ll have loud, early morning parties up in here,” he remarked with a chuckle as she blended his frappaccino.
She popped her gum, “Christ no! I’m happy just tossing this shit at ‘em and givin’ ‘em the boot; I don’t want to have to read their crap on the magnet board and ask ‘what did they mean by “eat more melodies”?’ or ‘why is “to kiss a tome is worship,” poetic?’”
“Am I the only one who comes and stays?”
She frowned, looking up at the exposed ductwork, “You do come in the most, by far. How you gonna graduate with cuts like that?”
He snorted. “Do you have a diploma?”
“GED.”
“I rest my case,” he stated, handing her his cash in return for his frothy sweetfest. He snatched a muffin and waited for his change.
“I dunno,” she said with another shrug, “I think everyone will go to school when it’s their time, I just happen to think of myself as immortal.”
He laughed, “All the time in the world, huh?”
She shook her multicolored head, “And yet I try to obey Dr. Phil and live for the moment to cherish my God-given potential, or what the fuck ever.”
“God is a capitalist, that’s why cathedrals light their crucifixes. Your potential has dwindled in value, by the same simple fiscal rules that got you your job. We live in a service based economy, you know. Not everyone can be multi-millionaires with perfect grades. Who would serve coffee then, Stephen Hawking?”
Her eyes slid over him. “It would be hilarious listening to him count back change and repeat orders.”
He snorted, “You guys hiring, ‘cuz I could sure use an eternity of that shit.”
She laughed her cadenced hiss and finished by clicking her tongue ring across her teeth. “I’m just gonna join a cult, hack up my genitals, and get a bowl haircut; so, you can have my job, kay?”
He laughed, “Tell the truth, you’ve already hacked up your genitals, haven’t you?”
She gave him back his money, shutting the drawer of her till with an ample hip, and it was more than she should have returned. One eye winked, jiggling an eyebrow stud.
“Course! That’s foreplay these days. Muffin’s on the house, Seb.”
“Thanks, is the back room empty?”
“Yeah,” she pointed to the sofa room with her chin, “but you better not do anything lewd or lascivious.”
With a quiet snicker he cleared his throat, “What?”
“You know,” she giggled.
Sucking in air, he turned and walked toward the room, glad he’d decided to ditch school for the second time that week. “I think you put way too much Bailey’s in that coffee this morning, Leah.”
“I did not!” she called after him. “It’s Vodka today!”
He was still cringing when he rounded the corner and entered the room. It was as empty as promised, filled with the pleasant welcoming buzz of heated microchips. He found an empty computer terminal and put in the employee code.
“Where the fuck r u, goddamnit!”
“Grounds,” he replied.
“Dude…ur so gonna get nailed! They’ll find u!”
He could just picture Shawn, his glasses sliding down over his nose as he gave voice to his anxiety that only existed because he needed players for group RPG’s. “U gonna tell?”
He could see the reproach on Shawn’s face. “No!”
“Then what do u care, bitch? I’ll just drop out. I’m old enough!”
“Not 4 3 more weeks! I am so not covering 4 u!”
“Like you could live without me,” he murmured. He signed off AIM and checked his email. It was empty, unless he needed Viagra, which he didn’t.
Around him the room suddenly chilled, enough that his skin awoke with little bumps.
He shivered involuntarily.
“So it is,” came a pliable voice on the artificially circulated air. The tenor was strange, almost ethereal. It was the kind of voice anime characters had when they spoke important truths, all breath and whispers. He turned, expecting to find David Blaine, only to discover a young man in black.
Sebastian’s skin began to crawl. The man seemed to have a kind of self-ordained superiority that he wore like a coat, his appearance flawlessly managed, his posture erect, his lack of movement so calculated it forced Sebastian’s eyes to shift and look for strings. The stranger looked like he could do magic, if he only had the motivation. He was enthroned on the softest sofa in the room, a mottled stain-catcher of moss green chenille, his expression a subtle twist of humor.
Sebastian’s preplanned brush off died on his lips, and his mind smoothed over the edges of words until it gave a hollow ring. In the tiniest of recesses, he searched for some description his emotions could support, but shadows seemed to conceal everything. There was nothing unique, nothing that stood out, and yet that divine anonymity undid every sentence he could assemble.
This was the dude a person might bump into on Halloween, whose costume was so good that one might wonder if he was the real thing, though what that was, Sebastian found he couldn’t say. Perhaps a pale tear in the fabric of space, that sucked the light right into his eyes. He was everything graphic novels tried to capture but failed at sketching, and he made it painfully obvious that grasping for understandings and prior experience with someone like him only made him more powerful.
Sebastian swallowed.
An eerie stillness pressed down on his gut, until at last he couldn’t move at all. All he could do was stare and be vulnerable, a deer in headlights, a tiny, shivering rabbit being chased by something with blurry, dark fur and a hulking, amorphous shape. He was prey.
The stranger smiled then, and something in Sebastian’s chest stopped working in a stab of responsiveness.
“Wh . . . what?” he stuttered, knowing somehow that he looked as though he’d swallowed a frog.
The perfect face formed a perfect expression of engagement, marble liquefying and resolving itself. “Hello.”
“Uh . . . hi.”
“Is that all?”
Frowning, Sebastian tried to recognize the man, learn if there was more that should be said, but the stranger managed to undo even the steely grip of his memory. His next comment tasted like stale coffee, but it was the best he could do under the circumstances. “If you’re going to try and sell me God, I’ve already got one, and it ain’t nothin’ special.”
The flawless mouth smiled once again, and the earth shifted. Sebastian gripped the edge of the chair, expecting the ceiling to cave in on his head. “I thought you might be immune.” At his glazed expression that reflected the jammed gears of his mind, the man sighed in an almost bored way. “Forgive me, but things must be done a certain way.”
He shook his head. “What way is that?”
“Pleasantries I detest,” the man explained in disinterest, “but humans are all alike. The nature of the animal dictates the nature of approach.”
It was then that he heard the faint echoes of other black-clad coffee house refugees with their hands stapled eternally to their foreheads, and knew the man for an enemy. “Animals?” It was what he thought of humanity, but it did not seem an accurate description when it included him. “So not.”
The man blinked slowly. “I apologize.”
“Yeah, well, remember me the next time you think about saying shit like that.” He turned away swiftly, while that still remained a possibility, for in those few seconds, he’d approached an event horizon, and was nearly torn apart. “I’m not one of them. I’m the one who will eventually be put on Court TV for taking an axe to the face of the guy who invented pop culture.”
From behind him, something like a chuckle rattled from across the room like discarded husks rubbing against each other. “Celebrities, perhaps?”
“Oh, no man, I’ve got that shit all figured out,” he mumbled, half to himself, acutely aware that the cold eyes were pressed against his skinny back. Why he was still talking, he couldn’t say, but the words came before he could stop them, a natural defense against silent death.
“Really? Then who is to blame?” the man asked as if he already knew the real answer and was just catering a child.
“Guttenberg, homie. He’s the one who made it easy to speak your mind and get it spread around accurately, which would be great if only wise people could write. If I ever catch that asshole, I’ll rip out his liver and beat him to death with it.”
Sebastian flushed, feeling embarrassed, uncertain, like Shawn got in front of Tracy Halbot. In his thoughts a new mantra came forth, repeating “shut up” with overwhelming ferocity. He had faced bullies his entire life. They, however, were nothing like the man behind him. This man could make anyone say anything, because he became every weakness a person might have.
To his surprise, another chuckle came to his ears, and though he’d been desperately trying to avoid looking at the man, he felt the irresistible urge and spun the office chair around. The light grey eyes were shining beneath dark brows.
“So you have a grudge against the printed word? I would not have thought to hear something like that from you. It seems my timing was impeccable.”
He shrugged, wondering if the man was looking for someone made impressionable by the kind of intellectual averaging that took place in a world where everyone had a say. “I don’t hate it on general principle, but he printed the first mass-produced Bible, and hey, I have to start somewhere. If God wanted that shit to get around, he’d have made us telepathic.”
“Come here,” demanded the man, seeming to hear Sebastian’s hesitance, and gestured with the most graceful hand he had ever seen to the other side of the sofa, as if by stroking the air, he’d produce a current that forced the other occupant to his side.
Where the hand rested, his eyes lit. The hand was too long, too narrow, too . . . something else. The fingers were like bones and the skin, like rice paper. Blue veins crept around them, leaving lines like interstates on a road map. The bone at the wrist was too sharp, the wrist itself, much too thin.
Sebastian blinked, several times. His mind was suddenly a barren and stinging environment and as he looked at the man, a merciless serpentine cord began to twist up through his vertebrae. Dizziness set in, and his eyes began to play tricks on him, telling him the room was flapping in the wind like a mirage. His breathing sped up, his thoughts seemed to scramble, and in a moment of dislocation he knew that even without the drug-like effects of that stare, he would have said yes eventually, even though the guy was obviously a child-molesting con artist with his creepy, villainous intimidation down to a pure art form. He felt a benign peace, almost like he didn’t mind, and that the fall from grace would be a welcomed one, even if it ended in duct tape and a living internment.
The image stirred him and he realized exactly how close he’d come to death in that moment. It was a cold jolt to his system, and it woke him.
He shook his head, “I’m way too smart for you buddy, you should try sitting at Miriam’s down by the grade school. Those kids are fucking mental.”
The eyes did not back down, but maintained the voltage, as one dark eyebrow rose ever so slightly. “You should not assume you know the reasons for everything, Sebastian. It is much too soon for that, I think. You still have not quite grasped that I am here and that you have yet to meet my challenge. We will see how things progress.”
Caught off guard, Sebastian stiffened. “How the fuck . . . what the hell does that mean? Who are you?”
There was a moment of pause, as if the room was breathing a little more shallowly. He picked at the leather on the back of his chair, certain that by fidgeting, he was showing weakness. Somehow though, he had to withstand. He couldn’t just let the man overshadow his cloudy peace with a blanket of a confrontational dilemma. Especially if he didn’t let his own mother do that. But the words were little darts of agony, and the silver eyes only pushed them deeper.
“There was a time that you and I were . . .” trailed the soft voice. “You have always been so quick to react. Ask yourself why.”
He knew the man’s words had to be some kind trap, but the socially ingrained urge to apologize overpowered him, and it was all he could do to stop himself. “It’s real simple, you’re creepy,” he said flatly.
The thin lip curled, ever so nicely. “Perhaps I am meant to ask why you think so. Do I intimidate you?”
“Would it kill you to wear a little color?”
“You chose the color, I simply wear it.”
“I chose to make you look like an undead mime?”
The man sneered. “Am I ugly?”
Frowning, he tried to say yes, but found that he could not.
“Then perhaps to you, there is some secret love for grotesquery. You are the one who cannot seem to look away.”
The words had the smell of bleach to them, and stung him. He wasn’t sure if the man was intentionally trying to sound cruel, or if he was doing what the other Lestat wannabe’s did, playing at being evil. Whatever the game, the man knew him and the resentment in his voice said there was an unspoken outrage brewing.
“How do you know my name?”
The man didn’t answer, but his smile changed, from unyielding, to inviting. It was almost an undetectable shift, but palpable none the less.
“Fine, whatever, don’t say anything,” he hissed and turned back to his useless monitor. He could see the man’s reflection in it, blurred yet somehow as clear as the real thing, and he realized he could not get away, because it was just as painful with the stranger staring over his shoulder.
“I think the more appropriate scenario, is that you are drawn to me. It all comes down to how you see me, not what I actually am,” came a light reply, subtly rendered to resemble mild ennui. "You're bored here, aren’t you? Surely there is still something of value that has not been weakened by this horrible place."
Ignoring the urge to turn and fall into the snare, Sebastian clenched the edge of the table and whispered “Get lost,” under his breath. It was like ignoring sleep after days of vigilance; it took all he had to make it happen.
There was a condescending laugh. “Today began as any other day, with one exception: me. Here I am, like a messenger from on high, sent to tell you something essential. Here I am, a visitor from another dimension, here to make contact. Yet here you are, trying to get rid of me for the sake of your ridiculous quest. It is predictable, because now you are one of them, and they are predictable. But you do not really want me to leave you alone, and deep inside, you hope that I will stay even though you tell me to go. There is still something between us and it could turn into whatever you want.”
Sebastian did not say anything. In his mind he had been, without conscious effort, rummaging through useful plot devices, trying to predict what would come to pass, trying to figure out why this intrusion felt so right even as it chilled him. It was true; he wanted the stimulus, but not this person, not ever this person.
“Do your kind dream in clichés too? Do you go about stealing images from human minds like leaches, creating imitations to make you feel a part of this reality? Pitiful.”
He could no longer resist the urge to give the man satisfaction and respond. “What’s that mean? I don’t even know you!”
“You do, but it seems I was right about all of it. You will never see it, because you are blinded by it.”
Spinning in his chair, his youthful temper came out in full force, “Look jerk, you can kiss my ass.”
The laughter was quiet, but somehow it felt as though this muted antagonist was shouting at full volume. There was something else happening, some weird alteration of his normal routine, carved out of the black of the stranger’s clothing and the white of his skin, and the stranger knew it.
“I suppose it cannot be helped,” he murmured.
“Fuck you!” Sebastian shouted at the unanswered question.
Before he realized it, the man was walking toward him. His sure strides and determined face felt mildly threatening, and having had several brawls at Hallowed Grounds, Sebastian was sure the man was about to punch him. He leaned back into his chair, trying to force the wheels back, but the stranger was much faster than he looked, and took hold of the arms before momentum could be gained.
Leaning over him, the man examined him with narrowed gray eyes. His face looked like a smooth Venetian Carnival mask, inhabited by the soul of an ancient Crusader or snake demon, trapped in limbo so long, that even detachment was difficult. The perfection was glaring, almost a flaw in and of itself. It hurt to look, unfocused Sebastian’s eyes, turned his stomach inside out. He felt the pull he’d tried to escape by remaining distant, and failed to avoid it.
His mouth sagged open.
“To you, some scenario is playing itself out, and in your mind are a million possibilities to how it will end,” the stranger whispered, and it felt like tendrils of ice had parasitically attached themselves to his nerves, leaving him paralyzed. “You see, you have been conditioned for this, brainwashed, but that must be torture to someone with the potential to shrug off such conditioning and see the lies being told. I thought when I found you, you would have learned I was right, but,” suddenly his face hardened, and cruel, silver mercury poisoned the air between their eyes, “you are a waste of my time.”
The acid rose like vapor and Sebastian felt mortified. He felt less than human. It was the same comment everyone had, so why did it hurt? It was what he’d fashioned for himself, so why did it sound so disgusting?
“Who are you?” he asked, confident he sounded unconfident.
“Someone who has been waiting for a very,” his voice seemed enraged, so completely hateful, “very long time. I find you now, and you’ve slipped this far. You sicken me. I wanted to save you, but now I cannot imagine it. There is nothing left to save.”
And without another word, the man dematerialized like a reverse tesseract folding into a lesser dimension.
Sebastian realized several minutes later, that he was sitting exactly as he had been, staring so hard at the doorway, that his eyes had tunnel vision. When he tried to shake it off, he nearly fell over, as his entire body suffered from adrenalin poisoning, and every miniscule movement felt like jumping off a cliff. His hands shook violently for perhaps the first time in his life, and he was breathing very heavily. It seemed he’d been there for hours, as if years had gone by and he, like some modern Rip van Winkle was waking to find that dust had settled but nothing else had changed. There were no traces of the man, however, and as he thought upon it, he could not remember having watched him walk away, though he must have, because people didn’t just evaporate and leave their companions staring at a door.
“What the hell?” he croaked.
The event played and replayed in his thoughts, and somehow he couldn’t halt the loop, couldn’t unhear the words said in that horribly even, mechanically perfect voice.
When he could walk, he fled the coffee house, ignoring Leah’s friendly question about the wolves chasing him. He just took off running, not knowing where he was going, any way as long as it wasn’t something predetermined. After a moment, he halted, suddenly understanding that what was chasing him was already inside and he could not escape.
An empty lot that progress had forgotten, the favorite shortcut to school for so many east-siders, home to abandoned refrigerators and couches was where he’d arrived. He collapsed onto one of them, shaking his head. “Fuck.”
Closing his eyes, he tried to see anything but those eyes, and couldn’t. What was he feeling? Everyone said he was a waste of air, time, or some other natural resource, so why did it hurt? His skin had been abraded off, he’d been stripped of the titles of old in one single maneuver. The loss was sickening.
Something had happened, something grave and inevitable though he’d tried to fight it. A thousand years of planning and patterns set into motion had terminated. Whatever that meant, he couldn’t say, but the feeling was the same and it bottomed out his stomach. Sebastian knew those things more certainly than he did anything else.
But those eyes and the way they’d looked at him . . . The rage was not at him, it was selfish. There was pain behind it, there was hundreds of years of misery, there was anticipation quashed in a wave of disillusionment. Sebastian had been something great, but he wasn’t anymore.
He stared at his hands. They were pale, but not like that man’s. He was unequivocally human. He was not a monster. He was not a ghost. He was not false, not an illusion. He was not . . . what?
Unchanging.
Hope broke free, but it was the worst feeling, because he did not understand why the thought had made him so happy, so safe. The death of pessimism was painful enough to inspire pessimism to return, and as he sat there, he felt the pleasant and familiar warmth of it fogging up his soul, beckoning to him like a warm bath.
Rising shakily to his feet, he trudged on, looking at them as he went. It was only after he felt the push of people all around him and heard the shrill of conversation in strained voices, that he realized he’d gone to school, and that he’d arrived between periods. Someone bumped into him from behind, hard enough to make him cough, but he remained still, a rock in the salmon spawn, shocked to hell he’d found his way there instead of to his comfortable, protected little cave of cliché kittens.
“Sebi? Dude, what’s wrong with you?” Shawn shouted from his back. “I thought you weren’t coming! You alright?”
“I don’t know,” he said dimly.
Shawn pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and gave his friend an assessing look. Though a tiny, fair-haired, nerd of a friend in a perpetual state of awkwardness, Shawn did, at times, demonstrate vast wisdom he was happy to hand out like Halloween candy.
“You look distressed. Were you in some kind of car accident? You look like my mom did that time she got whiplash.”
The fact that he had even thought to compare a minor fender-bender to the crippling experience he’d just had, pissed him off. Evidently, the rules of fiction had no place; life was where one expected the expected and nothing more. He was disappointed in Shawn for the first time and it must have showed.
“Ok . . . you get mugged?” The boy looked him up and down, noted the schoolbag, untouched, and lifted both eyebrows.
“There was this guy . . .” he found himself saying, but halted, partly because Shawn was looking at him with wide eyes that said, “I wonder if people can play Magic while having a psychotic break,” and partly because he did not think he could explain even if he tried. “Never mind,” he finished stupidly.
“You came to school because ‘there was this guy’?”
He shook his head. What had happened? What in those lost seconds had occurred, when the room had seemed to deform around them, creating another dimension where only the man and he existed? What had he felt? What had been said and why? Why had it felt like dying or the beginning of an end?
He gripped at his chest just as Shawn grabbed his arm and steered him to the wall of lockers. “So a guy said something to you and you freaked, so you came here?” The boy nodded, “Good thinking, except that now that you’re here, you have to stay here, genius.”
“Yeah,” he mumbled, uncertain whether or not he could stand going home alone anyway. He reached for his forehead. His mind was blank.
“You ok?”
Sebastian looked at the boy and couldn’t remember . . . who he was. Searching for the name, knowing he should know it, he found only the silver eyes. Suddenly he couldn’t remember who he was, or where he was, and it was the most bizarre impression. He retained all logic, all reasoning. He looked at the lockers and thought, “I am at school; therefore, I am a child.” He stared at the young man in front of him, saw the concern, and knew he must be a friend. Then suddenly, in a pulse of dizziness, everything was set to rights.
“Hey, Sebi! Answer me.”
It all came back, rushing in his ears like a giant Niagara falls of solitude-inducing bullshit: the loud hallways, the teachers who pursued only expectations, the class work that would not teach character to anyone but the kids who already understood the concept. He was at his high school, the place where kids in his small town went to be safe, and he was with Shawn, the person with whom he had the most in common, his friend and coconspirator.
The image of the silver eyes flashed again, and he felt slightly sick.
“Sebi, if you don’t answer me I am going to go get the pig,” he said of their campus security officer, a man also a part of the gang task force.
“Don’t call him that,” he answered dully, calming his stomach, “it makes you sound like you’re trying too hard. If a cop ever came to chat with you, you’d shit yourself.”
Obviously relieved, Shawn scowled, “I’ve talked to cops loads of times.”
“Was it every time you were hopelessly constipated, you coward?”
“Shut up.”
They moved around through the hallways like any wall-crawling insects that had learned to be cautious of predators, slipping between people who just waited to bump into them.
“So?”
The feeling of it all was oddly comforting. It brought back the rhythm of his assumed life. It brought back the normalcy of unattained perfection. He could do this, he could live now. “Yeah, some nut job tried to get physical with me.”
Shawn ducked beneath the outstretched arm of a football player and tossed over his shoulder, a catch-me-next-time glance, “No shit? Gee, that never happens.”
“He was . . .”
“Didn’t anyone ever tell you to wash clothes, hippie?” asked an overzealous voice in the familiar brogue of a Californian mallrat. “You wore the same thing yesterday! Fashion Victim,” she finished, twirling a blonde strand of artificially colored hair.
Usually indifferent, Sebastian began to feel his normally sluggish blood boiling. There they were, enacting their little life-plays, making him into the fool. He’d read news reports about studies on the number of teenagers with elevated amounts of stress hormones, existing in what amounted to a permanent state of post-traumatic stress, and suddenly it just clicked. He felt the blood in his veins, the chemicals in his blood, the electrons, everything churning and swirling, powering him with ticklish perfection, and all of it told him to incinerate her where she stood for presuming to speak to him.
He spun and faced the villain, a cheerleader and emblem of everything he loathed, because children could be so cruel when they knew they were legally minors without biological culpability. In their hands, the superiority of any kind was a weapon.
“I prefer the term, ‘fashion martyr’, and I am sure you prefer to be called ‘heinous bitch’ instead of ‘shallow, uninspired, idiotic, cock-sucking, conspicuously consuming whore’? Too long isn’t it?” Then he turned and fled, dragging Shawn after him, before she could call her boyfriend.
But something happened. He felt it like a burning sensation between his shoulder blades, like the bite of a radioactive spider that had suddenly depended to his collar. With a hiss, he folded, instinctively putting his hand over the pain. In that instant, something flew over his head and collided with Shawn’s backpack. It had the hard sound of metal as it landed on the tiled floor. Shawn gave an injured shout and turned, and Sebastian watched his sneakers rotate and kick something that gleamed.
It was a wrench marked, “Auto shop room 302.”
“What the hell?” Shawn screamed, in a voice that crossed the border between shock and concern. “You could have killed him!”
The pain in his neck was gone, but he stayed doubled over, uncertain if what he thought had happened, had indeed happened.
There was laughter and a chorus of jeers, and then he knew someone was coming up behind him, as if he were looking in a mirror and could see it plain as day. He recognized the face, knew he had avoided it, but he didn’t want to anymore.
Like the tingle of life returning to dead nerves, he understood proximity and waited, accepting the new sense as the Flash had. When the figure got close enough, he stepped backward, hard. Then he brought his elbow up, even harder. Finally, he reached out, picked up the wrench, and turned. The body was doubled up on its knees coughing and sputtering. There was the back of the skull, within striking distance. The wrench was lifting in his hand as if buoyant. He would pay for ever daring to...
“Sebi, stop!”
Shawn’s desperation caught him by the wrist. The wrench slipped from his grasp. The face looked up at him, and in those beady, usually smug eyes he saw fear.
Something rolled over in his hindbrain. It felt like cold contentment. He felt his face twist, felt the satisfaction, felt the homicidal urge, for they were just walking dust and never knew it. But the football player’s face seemed to pull back, recoil from what he saw in Sebastian’s eyes. Then pleading flickered in the irises, and made him feel that much more powerful for being merciful. The hallway had gone silent, the faces turned to him like those of horror-stricken rabbits, and he sucked up the panic like fuel. His heart skipped a beat in that timeless rhythm and in the instant of pause, he thought he might break loose of his own body.
He heard his voice, but it had a clarity and purpose that sounded unquestionable, commanding, invincible. It poured out like smoke from dry ice to turn the teenager’s skin to freeze-dried earth. “If you ever do anything to me ever again, I will cut your family into tiny pieces. If you ever look at me, I will dig your eyes out with my bare hands. You are nothing to me.”
He meant it. He could feel that he did. He felt a strength in his character that had never existed when simply ignoring the problem would suffice.
The moment of triumph was short-lived. Before he could gloat, the hall seemed to darken so swiftly the swell of shadow looked unending. He wanted to throw out a hand and catch himself, but there was nothing to pass his fingers through, but black, and nothing to tell him where he was, but abyss. A glow began to form then, beside him. Barely visible, it was covered in soot, clutching something half-burned. He could smell the smoke rising off the little person, the scent of singed hair and cooking flesh nearly choking him. It was tiny, sexless, weeping, nothing but a child. He wanted to ask what had happened, if he was hallucinating, when it was right beside him in a moment of unreasonable speed, tugging at his hand.
In his horror, he knew this was not a dream, not a hallucination. It was a memory.
Its hand blackened in his, the last thing to disintegrate before his very eyes. A voice like a half-uttered chant in another room approached him, drowned out by Shawn’s insistent cry, but even with the intrusion of the real, the words echoed within him. He knew what had been said.
“The Angels came.”