Where you go, are you there?
Out in the lot, where the hum of a Saturday night rushed around like a flash flood, Sam took off her sweater and threw it in the hedges at the curb. Her tank top had a big White Claw logo on the front that made Luke laugh and say something lost in the wind. Gradie watched her pale arms swing in the air, watched them reach back and pull the top down over the small of her back, heard her laugh echo across the cement plain, bounce off the store fronts and windows all around them. God dammit.
He feared his new crush more than the gunfire. When they left here, the bullet wounds and attackers would evaporate, but the other thing would remain, wouldn’t it? In an existence of near total freedom, it stuck out like the dumb weight and cold metal of a collar and chain. Would he feel its hold if he moved against it? She bounced across the lot and another idea moved in on him. If it was all hallucination and mental breakdown, he’d surely imagine someone like her in it.
There was a grey Camry waiting for them in the middle of the lot, just at the edge of where the cars started to thin out. Sam tossed her keys under a truck and pulled the new ones out of the wheel well. In the trunk, they found a tool bag filled with pistol mags and a fake id for Luke. There was a short AR in a paper grocery bag on the floorboard of the passenger seat and Mossberg shockwave under a jacket in the back. Lindsey leaned it on her knee and held the handle like a cane. Gradie got behind the driver’s side and stared at the baby hairs on the back of Sam’s neck as she swerved out of the row. Luke cracked his window and lit a cigarette.
“Can you not?” Lindsey said behind him. They got into it. A compromise was made. Lindsey blew smoke out her window. Sam joined in and Gradie declined like the good kid in a shitty after-school ad. His Self had no tolerance for nicotine, and he wanted to watch it all with a clear head.
Saturday barflies and club hoppers swarmed at the light, bouncing with anticipation. A car inched forward under the red light as if to summon the green with its boldness. A horn was held then tapped repeatedly. Music thumped on windows, rattled frames, fluttered through cracked windows, swam out with clouds of smoke.
Lights swirled above in the soft warm night, then flowed away in streaks of amber, red and green. A whole realm of brightness and noise, gone, vanished behind the car frame, sinking away below the windows, falling back into some point of blended light far behind them, leaving only the highway, long and singular, everything else just a haze. The dark was no longer playful, but waiting in great sheets like the mouths of caves.
A truck revved past them, spraying white light everywhere, and Gradie remembered the gunfight. Needles of paranoia prodded him, thrown out by eyes he couldn’t see. Hollow echoes of gunfire bloomed off every sound. He felt his flesh like a new thing. His body weighed by food, now tired, groaning for sleep. The most solid stuff on earth. How could he escape it? How could he believe that what he was had ever been outside of it, that even in that whirling dreamworld, it hadn’t been right there with him?
A question that had been sleeping in the back of his mind dislodged itself from some upper crevice like a bat and came down, diving, hunting.
If that bullet had gone into my head, but not killed me, would my Spirit have left, or just stayed around to experience me being a vegetable? Would I have felt all that pain, or would my Spirit have escaped it?
He tried to picture it, his Spirit separate from his body, from this fleshy version of himself, but it wouldn’t work. Like trying to imagine the sun stripped of its light.
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“Pretty good shooting out there. Especially for your first big one,” Luke said, his voice rising over the simmer of talk he had been holding with Lindsey. He raised his eyebrows at Gradie. Lindsey nodded out the window. Sam flicked her ashes.
“Thanks. Not bad for a desk monkey, huh.” He caught Sam’s eyes in the rearview. She gaped at him.
“What?”
“You called me a desk monkey, remember? Before the—”
“What? Oh my God, that wasn’t an insult, you baby! You were talking about going to Vegas and shit! You always act like everything’s gonna be so easy!”
“Got a little Max in training here,” Luke said to Lindsey.
“God, I hope not.”
“Don’t gas him up!” Sam said.
“How is that gassing me up?”
“Saying you’re gonna be like Max?”
“I meant cause he wants to go Hardworlding by himself,” Luke said. Lindsey looked at Gradie like he was planning a grave robbery.
“Do not.”
“Why?”
“Do you know how we get people out of here when they get stuck? When they forget and think this is their real life? We try and make them remember, which almost never works, so usually, we have to kill them.”
Gradie looked at the others then back at Lindsey. “But we die all the—”
“Dying when you know the Otherworld is waiting for you is different. Dying when you’ve been lost in a Hardworld is a terrible experience. And so is having to do it to someone else, so if I have to be a part of that, I’ll never work with you again.” She sat back and turned her eyes on Luke.
“Max goes solo all the time—” He started.
“He’s a moron, and a veteran. When Alan has been doing this ten years, then he can fuck off in the Hardworlds alone all he wants, on someone else’s team.”
Highway sounds flooded into the awkward silence. Gradie listened to himself blink.
“Some music—” Luke reached for the knob.
“No, Alan, I’m sorry,” Lindsey turned to him as an amber sheet passed through the car lighting her up for a moment, her curves all lined in shadow, her eyes like a wolf watching in the grass, her skin soft and glowing like streetlight given texture. Gradie leaned into the door as he looked at her. Could she see him blush in the dark?
“You are a valued member of the team, but—”
Luke laughed.
“Ol’ corporate ass.”
“Shut up! Really, Alan, you’ve done a lot more than most beginners do, I mean it,” Sam’s grey eyes cut towards him in the rearview mirror, steel jacketed bullets on pillows of soft fondant cheeks. Like an angry baby.
“—But you have to remember that this place is dangerous,” Lindsey continued. “I’ve seen so many good operators get cocky in the Hardworlds, think they’re untouchable, then something goes wrong and it breaks them. You have to take it slow. You have to respect this place.”
This place. Slices of shadow and light rolled past the window like great swords drawing and sheathing themselves. A memory climbed into the car. Late, still half drunk, the stupidest thing he ever did. Driving home from the conference in Las Colinas, squeezing his eyes closed for half-seconds at a time, trying to fight the tug of sleep, thinking how funny it would be to die on the way home from something he didn’t even care about. Flying from the idea of spending the night in a hotel in a strange place, missing home and all the people, best friend, cousin, that had slipped away from him after high school, somehow, like pool balls playing out the physics of a final contact, stubbornly refusing to just stop still so they could be factored into the next play. That was the night he decided—
He sat up straight. That wasn’t him. He thought of the Otherworld, the clubhouse, the Real, Lucy, even tried to remember what it had felt like picking the gunk out from the crevices of his mouse in the Real. They all felt like dreams, and the last memory was swapped out for a similar one, with this other closer him.
“Alan,” Lindsey put a hand on his shoulder.
“Gradie.” EP’s voice, a whisper, rang in his ears like a scream. A soft sympathy in his name. Is she real? He saw her in the raft, flying through the air, frowning at him during a break at the clubhouse. The other him shifted, and he flew past it, dodged it, like walking around the side of a cardboard cutout, or a reflection that perfectly mimics a hand wave, revealing its trickery.
“Yeah, I’m fine. Thanks.” He turned and looked out the window.
“Some tunes—” Luke coughed and flipped on the radio. Gradie felt Lindsey’s hand pat his shoulder again, then slip away. He wiped the tears from his eyes as stealthily as he could and sat forward.
Out the window, amber lights floated in the night, and he tried to believe the darkness was trees and earth, and not an endless empty void.