Children of the New World: Stories (14 page)

Halfway down the stairs, I hear a thump. I freeze on the last carpeted step. There’s the strained silence of someone trying to be quiet, then a tentative squeak starts up, growing quicker. I’m thinking of instant messaging the police when I recognize the sound.

Max is crouched by the bicycles in our garage. He’s still in his flannel pajamas, and his hockey mask is up over his head. Above him, the frosted bulb casts a bleak light onto our car, which is buried beneath boxes labeled
CHRISTMAS ORNAMENTS
and
MAX’S BABY CLOTHES.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

There’s a clatter of handlebars as he gets to his feet, trying to hide the pump behind his back. “Nothing,” he says. He’s forgotten to pull his mask down, but now he remembers and lowers it.

“Show me what’s behind your back.”

Max brings out the pump. “I found it.”

“You were going bicycling at this hour?”

“No,” Max says. “Seriously, Dad, I wasn’t. I just wanted to get my bike ready. You know, like to go riding after school or something.”

I don’t know what to say. Seeing him standing there in his flannel pajamas, it sure doesn’t look like he’s planning on going anywhere. Still, none of this makes any sense. “Max, tell me what’s going on.”

“Nothing,” he says. “All I want to do is go biking.”

“Don’t lie to me.”

“I’m not lying.”

“Where were you going?”

“Nowhere!”

“To get drugs?”

“No!” he yells. “God, you never leave me alone!” He throws the aluminum pump to the ground, where it clatters hollowly.

“Hey!” I grab his arm. It’s the first time I’ve touched my son in months, and the shock of his skin beneath mine suddenly reminds me of what it was like to hold him as a child. My voice catches. I release my grip and he’s out the door, his footfalls echoing through the kitchen and up the stairs. His bicycle sits, ready for escape, next to my own deflated bicycle. It’s only as I take the bike pump and begin to inflate my own tires that I think to exhale.

*   *   *

THE NEXT MORNING
feels strange. We do our usual routine, get up, shower, eat cereal with Max, but I don’t feel connected to any of it. I stack the dishes in the dishwasher and think of Kira’s knee inside me. Max logs in to school and we close his door.

“Can we talk?” Ann says.

“Not now, I’ve got office hours.”

“You promised we’d talk in the morning. Something’s wrong, I can tell.”

“Nothing’s wrong.”

Ann doesn’t say anything; she just stands there, an arm’s reach from me, looking like a stranger. “I promise we’ll talk later,” I say and turn, leaving her in the hallway as I escape to my office.

The system logs me on without any Departmental Message pop-ups. My inbox is full of junk mail, a virtual greeting card from my mother, and a couple emails from students asking about the essay that’s due in two hours. I hang around my office, waiting for students to show up. I gaze out the window, flip through the Seven Wonders of the World, and think about Kira. There’s a reality wherein Kira and I are a couple, a world where I’m eternally thirty, without a wife who’s quickly aging or a son on drugs. I could move out, get my own apartment, live a new life, alone and happy with a thousand avatar lovers.

When it’s time for class, the students arrive, but I’m waiting to see Kira. Her seat is empty when the bell rings, so I wait a couple minutes longer, and then, with a sigh, begin teaching. I’m halfway into my lecture on Joyce’s “The Dead” when Ann starts shaking my body. I excuse myself and raise my goggles.

“I’m in the middle of class,” I say.

“The garage door just opened.”

“What?” I ask, pulling my goggles completely off.

“Max is outside!”

“Shit!” I dismiss class and log off to find my son.

*   *   *

MAX’S BIKE IS
gone. The garage is open on its hinges, letting in the blinding glare of the world and a cold blast of wind that cuts through my shirt.

“I’m going after him,” I say and cross the garage to my bicycle. I raise the kickstand and walk the bike to the edge of our garage.

“You need a jacket; it’s freezing out there.” Ann pulls boxes off our car and onto the ground. I hear something shatter in our Christmas box. She opens a large box that says
WINTER GIVE-AWAY
and yanks the puffy sleeve of an old coat I haven’t seen in years.

“Be careful,” Ann says, and then I’m off, pedaling away from our house, my tires crunching the salted road and echoing across the concrete of our subdivision. Out here all the houses look abandoned. The vinyl sides are yellowed and the blinds are drawn. Their front yards, like ours, are completely overgrown: high grasses, stalky and dry, rustle in the wind that blows down from the rooftops. The cold sucks the blue from the sky, deadens sound, and makes the streets desolate. I pedal wobbly along our road, turn down the first intersection, then the next, a right, followed by a left, surrounded by nothing but darkened windows and sidewalks. I push harder against the pedals, sweeping the empty streets for my son. My breathing becomes a labored rasp, my legs ache, and it’s only when I stop the bicycle to catch my breath that I hear the muted sound of tires between the houses. I follow the sound down the street, turning on another street, another, and then out past the houses, leaving our subdivision for the long flatlands between the suburbs and the abandoned shopping plaza on the horizon. Far ahead, I can see Max’s outline.

Vacant car dealerships lie fallow by the long stretch of the four-lane road as I huff to keep up with him, my knuckles purple from the cold. A truck rumbles past, delivering groceries. Ten minutes, fifteen. I am far behind my son by the time he reaches the abandoned plaza. I pull off the road, behind an overgrown pine by the entrance, and scan the lot for Max’s drug dealer.

Max slaloms between the metal lampposts, stopping by the tinted doors of the entrance to the mall. He cups his hands against the glass and looks inside. Then he gets back on his bike and swoops around the side of the building. By the jagged shards of a smashed Toys“R”Us window, Max dismounts and leans his bicycle against the brick wall. He removes his goalie mask and hangs it on the handlebars, then digs around in his coat pocket and pulls out a green orb. From this distance I can’t make out what the object is, consider that it may be some sort of new drug, until he throws it.

The tennis ball rebounds on the concrete with a delayed echo. Max catches it, then throws it again. He doesn’t seem to be looking for anyone; he’s simply throwing the ball and catching it, throwing it and catching it. A couple of times the ball hits a cracked patch of concrete and rebounds crookedly, rolling across the blacktop, but otherwise it’s the same monotony for five minutes, ten minutes, a quarter of an hour.

The day is dying around us. Soon the sun will be gone, the roads dark. I roll my bike from behind the pine and enter the open expanse of Parking Lot B, where Max is playing. He doesn’t see me until I’m halfway toward him, and when he does, he jumps.

“Max,” I call. He stands frozen, holding the ball, and it’s only when I’m within three parking lot rows from him that he retreats to his bicycle to get his mask on.

“What are you doing here?” I ask.

“Nothing.”

“I saw you throwing the ball. What was that for?”

“Just for fun,” he says, stuffing the ball into his jacket pocket.

“Take your mask off.”

He lifts the mask up like a visor.

“All the way. I want to see your face.”

He glares at me, tries to look angry, but the oddity of being out here together in the cold has affected him and I can see his fear. He reluctantly lifts off his mask. “There, you happy?”

All the time I was following him, I imagined myself yelling when we got to this point. I envisioned a fistfight with a slasher-punk drug dealer. Now all I feel is the smallness of our bodies and a palpable loneliness—the two of us lost in this enormous plaza. “No, I’m not happy,” I say, and lean my bike against his. “You know it’s dangerous coming out here like this, don’t you?”

“What’s dangerous about it?”

“You don’t know who could be out here.”

Max gives an ugly laugh. “Right,” he says. “Look at all the people.”

“Don’t be sarcastic. There
could
be people out here. Their tents could be anywhere. Please … I just want to know what you’re doing here.”

Max doesn’t respond. He looks down at the ground and kicks a loose chunk of blacktop with his combat boot, breaking it in half with his heel. “Don’t you ever feel like things are boring?” he finally says. He looks at me. “Like colors get boring?”

I understand him better than he knows. In those brief moments when I’d been watching the flickering dot, I, too, had seen long-forgotten colors: the muted yellows of winter grass, the brown of tree bark, the rich black of earth. “What about
Deathworld
?” I ask.

“
Deathworld
is boring. You beat a hundred zombies, get a golden skeleton bone, and save the girl that the zombies kidnapped. I used to be excited about that, but now it’s just like, great, I get to save this girl and make out with her for the hundredth time.”

“They let you make out with those girls?”

“If you know the codes.”

I look at my son. The sunlight highlights the few pale freckles on his cheekbones. His hair is in bangs around his face. He looks much more like a young man than the boy I remember. “You know, you’re a good-looking kid.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Without the mask, you’d have a lot of girls interested in you.”

“Nobody wants me with or without the mask. All they want is some fake avatar dude with a six-pack and three dicks.”

I have no idea how to respond; Max just described my own avatar. I let out a long slow breath. “I guess I don’t know how you meet girls nowadays,” I say.

“You don’t
meet
girls, just their avatars. It’s stupid. Soon everybody’s going to stop having kids and we’ll all just die. Did you ever think about that?”

The truth is, I’ve ignored this fact. I’ve wanted to think that Max will go to college online, that we’ll help him find a room for rent somewhere nearby, that he’ll meet someone in one of his courses, fall in love, have kids one day. I’ve envisioned myself as a grandparent from time to time. For the first time I realize how far that vision is from reality. I look at the smashed Toys“R”Us window. “Max, you’re not in trouble, but I don’t get it. Why are you here?”

Max is quiet, debating what to tell me. He breaks up more of the blacktop, kicking it into the parking lot. Finally he looks up. “What is this place, anyway?”

“You used to have to come here to get stuff, shop for groceries, buy clothing.”

“
Really?
Was it fun?”

I look at the empty toy store, where the rusted racks stand like skeletons in the windows, and I have a brief flash of what the place once looked like: the aisles of stuffed animals, dirt bikes, and video games, glossy beneath the lights. We watched these stores wither away, the shelves empty, the customers vanish, until the mall became a wasteland of dollar stores and Indian grocers. It’s easy to forget what things were like. “It was nice in its own way,” I say.

Max looks up at me. “You know, whenever I play Tennis, the ball always bounces smoothly and makes the same sound. But that’s not what happens in real life. It bounces differently.”

“But this isn’t playing Tennis. You need another person.”

“Yeah, I know that, but what else am I supposed to do?”

“I don’t know, but this isn’t the way to—”

“I want to be outside. I want to ride my bike.”

“Okay,” I say, putting up my hands. “I get it.”

Positioned as we are, looking at one another, we don’t notice the man until he moves. He’s at the far end of Lot C, a dark, skinny shadow of a man clearly facing us. It looks as if he’s wearing some sort of jacket.

“Dad, who is that?”

“I don’t know.” The man makes a movement in our direction. “Come on,” I say, “let’s get out of here.”

Max and I hurry onto our bicycles, looking over our shoulders. Behind us, the man has stopped and is deathly still. He raises a hand as he watches us go, as though waving. Then the buildings swallow him and we’re back on the roads, where a couple trucks are still making deliveries. We pull far into the shoulder and they roar past. We both keep looking behind us as we ride, but the man from the mall is long gone. The sun has disappeared, and high above, purple spreads across the light blue, and the first stars push their way through the sky. There are a few wisps of clouds, and snowflakes have started to fall, laying themselves softly on the roads and sidewalks. My hands feel frozen on the handlebars. I bring one at a time up to my lips and blow hot air across the knuckles to warm them, my fingers burning with the blood beneath.

We’re a couple blocks from home when we see them. Max’s brakes screech and his tires scratch against the salt as he comes to a stop. I, too, am caught by surprise and break quickly, coming to a whining halt. There must be at least a hundred of them, the herd stretching all the way from the front lawn on the east to the kitty-cornered marsh across the street. The deer stand at attention, their necks raised, their ears extended, every muscle rigid beneath their fur. A couple in the back step quietly to gain a better view of us, their long brown snouts breathing small clouds into the falling darkness.

Max puts his foot down onto the ground and steps off his bicycle. “Wow,” he whispers.

“I know,” I whisper back.

The world is quiet except for the hooves on the concrete and Max’s breathing. Between the jigsaw of houses, another herd is migrating past the rotten swing set of an English Tudor. Above us, a V of birds crosses the sky, their honking close. I shut my eyes and imagine the grid of streets where my son and I stand, visualize beyond to our house where Ann is waiting for us, alone and worried, and farther still, far beyond our subdivision, to where the geese head toward warmth and herds make their way beneath the arc of evening sky. I want to tell Max that I love him; that he’ll always be my son; that somehow everything will be okay again. But maybe that’s too far from the truth. So, instead, I put my arm around him, and we stand together in the falling snow, watching the deer return to their migration.