Solaris Rising (9 page)

The two sweet spots which Arp had heretofore poked had resulted in a cascade of macroscopic events. But somehow, this time, he knew he was tapping into something more subtle.

Instead of casting off Blue’s hand, as he wanted to, he took it in both of his own and squeezed. He could feel her pulse accelerate and a hot blood rush beneath her skin. Metabolic and cellular processes began to churn within the girl. At the same time, Arp put his head closer to hers, but then forced a sneeze out directly at her, spraying her with his personal blend of microbes.

“Oh, dude, sorry,” Arp said unctuously.

Blueberry took no offense. “Don’t worry,” she whispered.

“Class, quiet, please!” Mrs Christelli admonished.

Arp continued to squeeze Blue’s hand, even massaging a pressure point on the underside of her wrist. Blue practically purred. He listened for a rustling of paper. Sure enough, under cover of darkness Ludmilla Duda was unwrapping a sandwich. The odor of a highly spiced Middle Eastern shawarma filled the room.

Blue began to fidget. She withdrew her hand. “I – I don’t feel so good. My stomach –” She began to retch and jumped awkwardly to her feet. Gagging wholeheartedly, she dashed from the room amidst unsympathetic laughter, and Arp sat back with a feeling of relief, accomplishment, and, if truth be told, a smidgen of guilt and remorse.

But overall, it felt sweet.

Jason and Arp came to call the sequence of events triggered by poking a sweet spot ‘okiegoes’or ‘rubes,’ after the elaborate Rube Goldberg device depicted in OK Go’s video for ‘This Too Shall Pass.’ Witnessing the perfectly sequenced cascades of improbable events – at least the parts that fell under their immediate point of view – began to assume an allure almost as great as obtaining the desired outcome.

Not that Arp turned his nose up at getting things he wanted for almost no effort.

The incident with Blueberry Chefafa had tipped Arp’s mind over into the ‘for profit’ side of the moral equation. After many months of trying to discourage Blue’s unwanted attentions, he had disposed of her in ninety seconds. The aftermath of contracting a flukey and short-lived stomach virus, coincidental with Arp responding to her overtures, had weirded Blueberry out. Although not actually repulsed by his presence when their paths crossed, Blue reacted like a startled fawn, jerking up short and leaping back an inch or so, while regarding Arp with puzzlement as to his intentions or exact nature. She seemed to regard him nowadays as something other than human.

Every time she jumped so, Arp winced a bit inside.

But on the whole, he was satisfied with what he had accomplished.

Rewarded instantly, his brain demanded more. Forgotten or buried were all thoughts of embarking on a do-gooder’s career.

For nearly a month now, Arp had indulged his every idle wish. Or at least those for which local sweet spots availed themselves. None of his desires reeked of megalomania, cruelty or excessive greed. But they were all self-centered. Except for those which he activated for Jason’s sake.

A partial catalogue of Arp’s conquests – or, viewed another way, presents from the obliging universe – included: a thousand-dollar gift card at the Dearborn branch of Marshall Field’s; the grade of A-plus on his latest civics paper, composed in half an hour with copious use of the internet; a promotion for his Mom in her job at the Detroit Metro Airport; the public humiliation of a crooked city councilman who had taken away a local park by eminent domain for his own profit; and the infusion of an unexpected federal grant into the cafeteria at Edward Lorenz High, ensuring that Arp’s favorite lunch of steak tips, asparagus and French fries appeared on the menu with increased frequency.

As for buddy Jason, the cynical slacker now sported a sick new Bump-brand deck, a closet full of Neff T-shirts and hats, and six new pairs of Vans kicks, all obtained at no cost to him, thanks to his unwarranted but uncontested inclusion on a list of professional skateboarders.

After tapping so many sweet spots, Arp had begun to understand them better and better on some deep, non-verbal level. He began to intuit where they could be found and what kind led where. He just hoped that his extra-normal senses were not developing along the lines experienced by the hyperacute hero of
The Man with the X-Ray Eyes
, a movie which had scared the pants off him a few years ago, when he had streamed it off his Mom’s Netflix. But so far as he could tell, his sanity remained solid.

One thing Arp had learned: not every goal was obtainable in every location. In computer networking terms, Arp realized, sweet spots featured only a ‘partially connected mesh topology.’ Some sweet spots persisted, while others were highly evanescent. And some required more physical input on his part than others. For instance, to obtain the thousand-dollar gift card, he had been forced to wade out into the yucky River Rouge, with Jason acting as spotter and lookout, dive to the bottom, and push a shopping cart exactly one foot deeper into the muck. Not exactly easy.

But taken all in all, the employment of sweet spots for personal gain offered immense payoffs for very little input.

Having gained confidence in his new talents, Arp decided he could proceed with his ultimate goal: to get Veronica Kingslake to fall in love with him. After that, what more could he possibly ask for?

Arp would have preferred to poke one of the multiple relevant sweet spots when he was alone with Ronnie. But since that never happened, he had to do it at school.

Under the lackadaisical and inattentive guidance of Mr. Mollusk, who as a former youthful track star had no real interest in any sporting activity other than sprints, mixed phys-ed classes generally devolved into groups of girls standing around gossiping and bunches of guys horsing around the equipment. Today was no different.

Arp was chilling with Jason and a few other dudes, while they shot baskets in a half-assed fashion. He participated with one eye on Ronnie where she stood across the gym with her friends, near an exterior wall. He hardly heard the banter of his pals until something Armando Zavala said made him take notice.

“Hey, who’s ready to die?”

Arp got nervous. His formless intuition regarding the effects of the sweet spot he was about to employ revealed potential for some collateral danger. But he felt he had to risk it.

“Whatta ya mean?” Arp asked.

“Aren’t you following news about that Percy asteroid? Seems like it might’ve hit something out in space and gotten aimed our way. The scientists aren’t so sure it’s gonna miss us anymore.”

Jason commented dryly, “The margin for error in their predictions is plus or minus fifteen per cent. Not exactly betting odds.”

Arp was going to reply, but then the basketball was passed to him, and his moment to poke the sweet spot had arrived.

Arp heaved the ball high and wide of the basket. It soared through the air and struck a small frosted window fifteen feet up the wall near where Veronica stood.

Held in place only loosely by an invisibly deteriorated seal, the glass popped outward. The rest of the okiegoes cascade was not immediately visible, but Arp heard the unmistakeable indignant yawp of a disturbed crow, the frantic cursing of what was presumably a passing pedestrian, and the screech of car tires. Even while everyone was laughing at him for his failed throw, he was running toward Veronica and the other girls.

With a tremendous crash, accompanied by female screams and shrieks, the forequarters of a huge SUV thrust through the wall, blasting bricks everywhere even as it lost momentum amidst the wreckage. Several girls, including Ronnie, had fallen to the floor, but no one seemed really hurt. Arp spared a microsecond to give thanks, but kept racing forward.

Once securely attached to the destroyed wall, an accordion-style folding room divider tall as the gym began to peel off and fall directly toward Ronnie. Wailing, she made a scrabbling attempt to rise, but seemed to have forgotten how to work her limbs.

Almost without seeing it, Arp encountered the pommel horse he had been aiming for, braced his hands against the device, and began to push. Only some hundred and twenty pounds, the device slid easily, especially under Arp’s adrenalin-powered urgency.

The pommel horse stopped precisely alongside Ronnie, and Arp dropped down to further shield her fetally recumbent form just as the detached assemblage of aluminum and vinyl crashed down onto the sturdy support – and no further.

An eerie silence reigned for a moment, before shouts erupted. But Arp hardly heard anything.

Ronnie’s beautiful tear-streaked face loomed inches from his, her lips parted invitingly, albeit unromantically slicked with snot, and a look of absolute adoration bloomed across her features, betokening her heart as forever his.

At his moment of triumph, doubt suddenly besieged Arp.

He sure hoped Veronica was worth it.

“Aw, c’mon, Arp, just one little rube, please! Winter’ll be here soon, and I really need that new snowboard and a plane ticket to Aspen.”

“No! I told you, no more sweet spots!”

This Saturday morning the two friends were hanging out on the old Thornhill Place Bridge, where Jason had been practicing his moves on the crumbling bridge railing, despite risking a fifteen-foot drop to the greenway below. Some three weeks had passed since Arp’s staged heroics in the gym, and this was the first time he and Jason had been able to chill together.

Veronica had fallen for her factitious savior more deeply than Arp could have predicted. She was inseparable from him, and much of their time together was spent in lusty clinches that stopped just short of sex. (Ambitious Mom and Pop Kingslake had plans for Veronica that did not include any chances at teenage pregnancy, and she had internalized their goals completely.) Arp found himself chafing under his new role and responsibilities. He felt like a total fake. He had gotten precisely what he wanted, but it was proving less – or rather, more – than he had envisioned. In short, Ronnie was cramping his style and freedom, and making him feel continuously guilty of fraud.

And besides, the disturbing fallout from that last sweet spot still bothered him. People had gotten hurt! Several of the other girls had suffered contusions and even a fracture or three. All as the result of Arp’s selfish actions. The thought of unintended consequences accompanying future use of sweet spots plagued him. Sure, he got what he wanted every time, but at what ancillary cost, seen or unseen?

And now douchebag Jason was bugging him for a frigging snowboard and plane ticket, of all things!

Arp got ready to tell his friend off, but Jason spoke first.

“Aw, fuck it! What’s the point of pretending we’ll ever even see another winter anyhow? This planet is totally doomed.”

The two teens automatically cast their eyes heavenward, though of course no sign of the killer asteroid, dubbed Perses, showed in the bright daytime sky.

“You really figure it’s gonna hit us, Jay?”

“I don’t think anybody figures otherwise anymore. Even Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly caved in. But everybody’s just too stunned to argue or give a fuck anymore.”

Arp recognized this much to be true. Under the imminent threat of inescapable planetary catastrophe, the global population was proving remarkably calm. Maybe because no one could really envision the catastrophe. Oh, sure, there had been isolated riots and protests. The loss of the Taj Mahal, the Kremlin, the Vatican, and Lubbock, Texas, still stung. But on the whole, there had been no scenes of contagious mass hysteria. Something about the certitude of the non-human-engineered destruction and its mutual nature, as well as a tiny smidgen of hope, had forestalled utter panic. There was no place to run or hide, no one exempt or special. Everyone was in it together, and so a sense of ostrich-head-in-the-sand resignation and willful cognitive dissonance prevailed.

Arp had reacted much the same as everyone else. With one small difference.

He had a nagging, half-unadmitted intuition that he could save the world.

Being alone now with Jason for the first time in weeks, he finally felt compelled to spill his guts.

“Jay, what would you say if I told you I saw a sweet spot that could stop the asteroid?”

Jason grabbed Arp by both shoulders, his face beaming, and shook his friend. “I knew it! I knew it! I told Blueberry you could do it!”

Arp jerked away. “What! You told Blueberry! How does she even know anything about sweet spots?”

Jason had the grace to look sheepish for once. “Aw, Arp, you didn’t have to see her and listen to her these past few weeks. You know I like to hang with Blue, but she was getting to be a royal pain. She was so bummed about you and Ronnie hooking up. But at the same time she was all like, ‘Oh, what a hero he is! How could I have ever doubted him? He’s so good and noble. Yada yada yada!’ I just couldn’t take it anymore. So I had to set her straight.”

Arp pondered this development. “So now what does she think of me?”

“She thinks you’re a total jerkwad, and she loves you more than ever.” Jason snorted. “Girls!”

A strange, hot sensation suffused Arp. He knew that if Ronnie ever found out the truth about him, she would turn on him in an instant and despise him forever. As she probably well should. Yet Blueberry Chefafa knew the whole story, and still loved him.