Super Flat Times (18 page)

“What is this?” he asked again. No other words were possible. “Oh, you know what that is. How could you have just — what were you doing sneaking around?”

“Is this my father? Is this where I came from?”

“Gantry, you know where you came from. You know that Shelf and I” — and here she stopped to collect a long breath — “Shelf and I wanted a child. This was the only way. How was I supposed to know what would happen afterward?”

“What did happen afterward?” Gantry asked, but his mother only fell on the bed, covering herself with the floral sheets.

Gantry went back to his room and looked at the picture. Shelf had been gone for years, without so much as a stray hair left behind. He could barely bring her name up without his mother collapsing. But he thought about Shelf often, more often than he thought about his father, who he imagined as a rail-thin man, brimming with ejaculate, vibrating solemnly in a small, dim room somewhere in a nearby city.

There were Mr. Cushing and Mr. Felt, holding the remote control at the other end of the park, cackling, and there was the bird with its mouth open, giving Gantry the finger. He thought about crushing the bird, about how easy it would be to stomp on its leering little head and grind it into the blacktop until it was just a smear of plasma and wires. But then he thought about what would happen to him next, how they would fill a baseball cap with dog mess and make him put it on, or stuff him up with pebbles, or mummify him with tape — all things they had done to him at one time or another. He’d liked the mummification, actually, until his mom and Conrad had to peel the tape off one piece at a time. It hurt so much that he was sure they were taking the top layer of skin right off his body. But afterward they said they were sorry and painted him with new skin and put brand-new sheets on his bed, and he felt so nice and warm again in the darkness that he forgot about the dreadful camp and Mr. Cushing and Mr. Felt altogether.

But it was hard to forget about Mr. Cushing and Mr. Felt for long. They had a way of always coming back at him; they had a sense for where he would be at any given time, and they would be there first, prepared with tools. Once, Gantry decided to play in a massive leaf pile Conrad had blown to the curb with a blower thing, and they had been, like, hiding inside the leaf pile all afternoon, just waiting to strap Gantry into a rubber nude suit, a white one even though Gantry was mixed. They made him walk up and down the street in the stifling suit, past Katrina Boda’s house, twice, while they shouted things at him from behind through a megaphone. That episode had even made it into the local paper, with a large photo in which Gantry’s privates were blocked out by one of the radar sticks the police used to calm down Mr. Cushing and Mr. Felt. Colonel Roger was wicked pissed and made all three of them work the hygiene stand for the rest of the week.

The bird drew the small arm back into its mouth. It cocked its head and looked at Gantry with its other eye. He kicked out his foot gingerly to test the bird’s reaction. It dodged the foot, hopping backward, looking him up and down as it did so, taking a brief, humiliating survey of his body, as if to underscore that even it was capable of taking him down. In the distance Mr. Cushing gestured wildly with his elbows as he maneuvered the bird out of Gantry’s path, while Mr. Felt jumped up and down, cupping his mouth with awkward, oversize hands.

The bird, now several feet away from Gantry, bent down to the ground until its beak nearly touched the pavement, and spread its wings. Two slender tubes emerged from underneath, and Gantry knew he was about to be strafed with behavior medicine — Mr. Felt had copied the keys to the camp’s biochemical pantry, and daily he pilfered tiny vials of whatever he could get his hands on. Gantry drew his limbs in close to his body, hugging his long, spindly legs, both hands clasped over his mouth and nose in preparation. One thing he excelled in at the camp was the assumption of self-defense positions — no one could touch his Stop, Drop, and Roll, his Henderson Shroud, his Top Jimmy. He started to breathe slowly and deeply. Behavior medicine was supposed to sting a little. But there was a swooshing sound instead, a great rustling of leaves, and when he opened his eyes all Gantry saw was the swiftly retreating form of a colossal truancy robot, in whose chest cage Mr. Cushing and Mr. Felt sat cross-legged, fuming.

It was time to see the nurse. Or rather, it was time for the nurse to see Gantry, because it was she, after all, who came to him and did all the looking. Gantry just squatted over the machines and grimaced as warm jets of air were fired high into him, so high he swore they were massaging his heart.

“Nurse,” Gantry said between clenched teeth, “what is it called when someone puts something on you so that you can’t go near them anymore?”

“Like a preemptive hood?”

“No, not a garment or a magnet or anything. I mean like a document. Something that says that a person has to stay a certain distance away.”

“Restraining order,” the nurse said coolly, unfastening the nozzle from Gantry’s chest catheter.

“Exactly. So, what, like, conditions would someone have to be under for a person to have one of those put on him?”

“Abuse of some kind, I imagine,” she said. She had a deep, untraceable accent, and her black hair smelled like rich soil.

“Like if she had a partner who was beating the shit out of her?” Gantry asked.

“Who?”

“What?”

“Who?”

“Yeah, who what?”

“You said ‘she.’ ‘She had a partner who was . . .’ you know . . .” “Oh,” said Gantry, his face flushing bright red. He did not want the nurse to know that the person he had in mind was Shelf, that his mother had put a restraining order on Shelf when he was four. The term was incomprehensible to him at the time — it hovered over him, bearing down at all hours. “No, I just meant someone, anyone, who was being beat up in some way. That’s the reason people get restraining orders, right? They would need a restraining order to keep other people away from them?”

The nurse held a clear tube filled with Gantry’s vital juices up to the light and tapped it gently with her forefinger. There was something wrong with Gantry, but no one had yet figured out the specifics of the condition or the cause. “Seems to me,” she said, “there’s no way to keep a person away who feels it their right to stick around. It’s like keeping a wasp in a jar. Either they’ll find a way out, or they die.”

He did not understand the example. He felt as if
he
were the wasp in the jar, crashing against the aluminum lid, choking on the sweet, dead air.

Gantry stood in the wide foyer of the restaurant, waiting for Conrad and his mom to get out of the bathroom. The walls and ceiling of the restaurant were padded with light quilted material, so that children who were floaters would not be hurt. At least Gantry was not a floater. His generation had been the last to receive the inoculations, before it was determined that the inoculations tended to flatten out the forehead, putting pressure on the frontal lobe of the brain. Gantry’s forehead was broad, firm — it made him look angry even when he wasn’t, which was most of the time. But people thought he was angry, and that was all the excuse they needed to avoid him at any cost.

He pressed his fist into the fluffy wall. It sank into the fabric, right down to the elbow. In the corner there was a candy machine, half full of bright, multicolored lozenges. Gantry ran his finger over the smudged glass surface, taking careful inventory of each candy, naked and pulverized, fused into grotesque clumps from disuse.

“Them candies have been in there a year,” the hostess called out from behind a massive register. Gantry turned around, terribly embarrassed.

“Pardon?”

“Them candies. I think they put them candies in there, like, a year ago? Them same ones have been in there since I started working.” The girl was not pretty, even through the most generous, high-minded lens, but the sight of her made something heavy move inside him. In her plain, quilted one-piece uniform she seemed to zero out the whole history of beauty, render it irrelevant.

“I’m still hungry, though,” said Gantry. He could feel gobs of blood racing up through his neck to form in awkward splotches across his face.

“Have this,” the girl said, coming toward him, her left palm outstretched. Resting there was a tiny brown cake.

“Boy, it’s a small cake,” Gantry said. “Yes,” said the girl. “It’s a private cake.”

“How much would a cake like that cost me?”

“Normally it costs a lot, but I am giving it to you for free on account of I just stole it from the display counter.”

He looked. There was a single missing spot in the fanciful array of tiny cakes under the glass of the display case. “Won’t you get in trouble for that?”

“I don’t know. Usually we don’t get in trouble, we just get yelled at. Or put in the cold room.”

“Okay.” Gantry took the cake from the girl, lightly and inadvertently brushing the surface of her palm with his fingertips as he did so. Her hand was white and chalky, ridged as if she’d been immersed in bathwater. He put the cake into his mouth. Its texture was rich, meaty — it made the saliva glands at the back of his mouth tingle and spark.

“This is a robust cake,” he said.

“Yes.”

“I go to camp during the day. To fight terrorists.”

“If you come to the back room, I could take off your pants and do things to you,” she said, but as she said this Conrad and Gantry’s mother emerged from their respective rest rooms with alarming symmetry, and the girl disappeared.

The next day the instructors wore black masks and attacked the campers, throwing nets over them while shouting in a foreign language. They bound them with nylon cord to stout posts in the basement of the facility and hung a plastic medallion containing a sugar marble around their necks. If they got into a situation they could no longer control, the instructors advised them in halting English, they were to eat the sugar marble. This meant suicide, and for the rest of the day the students who ate their sugar marbles had to sit in the guidance counselor’s office.

Gantry ate his marble as soon as it was issued to him.

“So, can you find things out about people with that computer?” he asked the guidance counselor, Admiral Sedge, who was navigating his way through a database in order to pull up Gantry’s record.

The admiral only huffed, moving his hand over the smeared, hazy touch screen. He was nothing but a grainy, oversize pencil of a man, slumped at the other end of the long desk.

“I need to find some stuff out,” Gantry said to the admiral. “Huh.”

“I need to find out where my mom is.”

“Your mother is at home, son.” The admiral bit his lip, tapping repeatedly at the screen.

“No, this is my other mom. She went away a long time ago.” The admiral stopped tapping. He looked at Gantry. “The hell do you want me to do about it?”

“Where is she?”

“Gantry. You know I can’t give you that information.”

“So that means you do have the information. Good, now what would it take —”

“Gantry.”

“I just want to get this straight. You have an address or something over there?”

“I have nothing, Gantry. I don’t even have my own address here.”

“You couldn’t, like, give me a hint? A street name?” “Please don’t do this.” The admiral bent over, possibly adjusting a shoe.

“I wouldn’t be asking you about this unless it was really, profoundly important. Everything about the person I am is inside her head.”

The admiral did not respond. He was bent completely in his chair, so that all Gantry could see over the desk was the rippled aperture of his pants opening out on the small of his back, cinched by a flimsy belt.

“Is there any way I could be allowed to have her street address, a speech bead number, something?”

“Gantry,” the admiral said from beneath the desk, “this is not the first time we have been through something like this.”

“Those other times, okay, I will admit I was a bit frivolous. I admit that I wasted your time with the petitions, the demonstrations.”

“You faked your own death.”

“I faked my death and if it were something I could take back, you know, I would be holding it here in my arms right now as I speak to you. But what I’m telling you is that this is an emergency. This is the kind of thing they’ll be making a documentary of later, after the dust settles, after the bodies are recovered. The camera crew will want your perspective. Do you want to be a part of that documentary?”

“No.”

“Great. So if I could get a phone number.”

“I can give you a made-up phone number. Would that help?” “Yes. Thanks. Also, I think Mr. Cushing is going to kill me when he gets out of jail again.”

Shelf was not in the phone book. There were seven different entries for “Shelf,” but none of them was the right Shelf. Gantry knew this because he called each one, asking, “Are you alone?” before hanging up. It was late. Conrad and his mother were in her bedroom, talking softly and moving furniture. They were trying to make a child together. “The real way,” Conrad had said once, and when Gantry’s mother had given Conrad a shocked, hurt look he put his hand up over his mouth and never said anything about it again, but there it was, hanging in the air in their living room, casting out a rude, penetrating light.

He sat down on the living room couch, taking slow, contemplative bites from a withered stick of beef. On the television, two men were beating each other with clubs in slow motion. The thing to do, thought Gantry to himself, the only other option that he could drum up, was to ride around town on his three-wheeler, going up and down every street until he found her.

It was hot out. The sky was low and wide, scalding everything with furious white rays. Gantry sweat through his face mask. He yanked it off and stuffed it in his pants pocket, pedaling hard. The houses were aggressively identical. He would know her house when he saw it, though. It would resonate somehow — didn’t elephants return to the place they were born in order to die? It would be something like that, Gantry thought. A knowledge beyond knowledge.

He turned onto the street with the restaurant. Maybe the girl was there — maybe she would give him another cake.