Lightspeed Magazine - January 2017 Read online

  I don’t know why I do it. My arms move without me telling them to, and I watch myself like a movie as my hands grab the sides of his head and swing it against the brick wall. Four times, I bash Brendan’s skull against the bricks. I wonder if the Triangle is making me do it, somehow.

  There’s a horrible sound that I don’t recognize at first, but it’s me and I sound like the raccoon I found caught in the rusty jaws of trap out in the woods. I could hear it screaming almost all the way home when I went to get help from Mom. When we came back, it’d gnawed off its leg and limped away.

  In my disconnected state, I am slow to notice that everyone else is quiet and watching us. I can hear Brendan begging someone to help him, but he doesn’t seem too hurt. I guess I’m not very strong. Mrs. Carter waddles toward us through the crowd, shouting. I let go and stare at her. I can’t hear anything now over the ringing in my ears and the blood rushing through my head. I want to lie down.

  She marches us to the principal’s office, hands gripping hard around our upper arms. Past the secretaries, and straight into his office without a word to them. Mr. Howard stands up, frowning.

  I don’t know how tall Mr. Howard really is, but if I had to guess, I’d say he’s just shy of seven feet. His hair is silver, cropped short like my great-grandfather’s, another military man, although Grandpa Hawkins had fought in Dubya-Dubya-Two and Mr. Howard in Korea. An enormous wooden paddle hangs on the wall behind him, almost as big as an oar. I’m not even sure it isn’t an oar, but it doesn’t intimidate me much. Parents have to sign a consent form for him to use it on us and my mom thinks spanking is “barbaric.” Not Brendan’s mom, though. Inside the office, Brendan puts on a good show and cries a lot. It’s not his first time in here, or mine either, but every other time I’m the one who had his ass kicked.

  Brendan and I answer his questions about what happened. I’m honest, but I can’t really say why I fought back this time. I tell him about my wizard staff and Brendan’s taunts. Brendan doesn’t disagree.

  “Where’s this stick now?” Mr. Howard asks with a frown.

  “I hid it,” I say.

  “I want to see this thing,” he says. He puts on his coat and I lead them to my hiding spot. I hate him quietly for making me show Brendan my best hiding place. Hiding places for stuff you can’t take into the school are hard to come by.

  I take out the stick and Mr. Howard whistles. “Who do you think you are? Moses?” He reaches for the stick. I hesitate, but hand it over. I don’t have an ounce of anti-authoritarianism in me. My stepdad made sure of that a long time ago.

  “Are you going to call my mom?” Brendan asks, voice a high whine.

  “Jason, should I call his mother?” He asks me. I raise my eyebrows and look back and forth between them.

  “Why are you asking him? He beat me up!”

  “No, it’s okay,” I say.

  “Brendan, go to class,” Mr. Howard says.

  “You’re not going to call her?”

  Mr. Howard gives Brendan his “I killed Koreans for my country, so what do you think I’ll do to you if you don’t listen?” look and Brendan huffs off.

  “Merlin,” I say, after I’m sure Brendan can’t hear us.

  “What?”

  “Not Moses. Merlin,” I say. “I bet if I was a wizard like Merlin, nobody would try to take my staff or call me a faggot.”

  “Don’t be so sure of that,” he mutters, thinking I can’t hear him, but it’s the one upside of the big ears.

  We walk slowly back across the field toward the school. Mr. Howard doesn’t say anything for a while.

  “Can I get my stick back after school?” I ask.

  “I trust you not to misuse it, but I don’t think it’s a good idea for the others. I better keep it.” I nod. It makes sense. I’d probably do the same if I were him.

  “Are you going to call my dad?” It’s a little trick I read about in a book once. If he calls my mom, she’ll tell Bill, and I’ll have “hell to pay” (as Bill would say). But if Mr. Howard calls Dad, nothing will happen at all. Dad is always telling me to stand up for myself, and when he thinks I can’t hear him, wonder how he ended up with such a pussy for a son. Dad grew up with four brothers and three sisters in the country. He knows how to stand up for himself.

  “Do you think I should?” Mr. Howard asks. I’m pretty sure he’s trying to teach me a lesson here. I don’t say anything for a moment while I try to figure out the right answer, but he continues. “I don’t think you’re going to hurt anyone again, do you?”

  “I am not even sure why I did it this time.”

  Mr. Howard squats down in front of me, doing that thing tall adults do when they really want to make an important point. I have to force myself not to look down. They never like it when you look away. He says: “There is an animal in all of us, Jason. We’re all of us tainted with original sin since Eve ate the apple in the Garden of Eden.”

  I nod. I’ve read the Bible, or at least the good parts in the Old Testament. All the Jesus on the mound stuff in the New Testament was boring compared to the blood and sex and smiting in the early books.

  “Deep down, each one of us is capable of doing something monstrous. God-willing and a heap of prayer to help, we keep it inside.”

  We walk back to the school. I can see inside my classroom through the row of windows looking out onto the asphalt playground. Mrs. Dario stands at the front of the class leading the Pledge of Allegiance. My classmates stand beside their desks with their hands over the hearts, facing the flag and the poster of Ronald Reagan on the wall below it.

  I’d tried praying to Ronald Reagan once. He always seemed so friendly on television. Reagan didn’t have a better track record answering me than God did, but he did like to talk a lot about Star Wars, so he was still coming out ahead.

  “I said, do you understand?” Mr. Howard asks, steel edge to his voice. He’s been talking, but I didn’t heard him.

  “Yes, sir.” That is always a safe bet.

  My principal smiles. He has one of those smiles that made you feel a little uneasy. All teeth and no eyes. “Good. Get to class and don’t bring any more walking sticks to school.” He waves at my teacher, and she nods. I go inside and take my seat as Mrs. Dario starts going over today’s vocabulary words. They’re written on the chalkboard in neat block letters:

  ABANDON

  BLUNDER

  HOAX

  INVISIBLE

  MENACE

  I know them already.

  • • • •

  At lunch, I expect everyone to ask about my “outburst,” but as we wind through the line to collect our slices of pizza on plastic trays, all anyone’s talking about is Kim Davidson. She hasn’t come to school today and the police showed up in her fourth grade classroom.

  The news hits me like my own head smacking into the gym wall. Kim Davidson, missing too? Kim lives (lived?) a building down from ours in 1127 B. I have spent many nights laying on my top bunk and thinking about the color of her hair. Trying to describe it just right to myself. It’s like wheat in late summer. It’s like the sun at noon. It hurts to look at, in a good way.

  Kim is the first to go from Coyote Rise. She is a kink in my theory. It worries me.

  I collect my slice; it has exactly three slices of pepperoni on it. There is no way to arrange three points without them forming a triangle. An omen, I wonder? I sit at the far end of a table where Bobby Mavis is holding court. “The cop had a huuuuge gun on his belt. Anybody could just reach out and grab it. I totally could have.”

  “You dumbass,” says Becky Collette. “If you’d tried that, he woulda blown your head clear off and not gotten in trouble for it.” Becky should know, because her dad’s a cop. “When’s the last time anybody saw Kim, anyway?”

  “Yesterday at school,” Bobby says.

  “I saw her last night riding her bike,” I say. I’d been reading a Bobbsey Twins mystery by the window. She had pedaled by, the red and white tassels on her handleb
ars blowing in the breeze, and her hair tied over her shoulder in a ponytail. I wanted to call out to her, to say hello, but Bill called me to dinner. I didn’t see her ride back home.

  “Nobody’s talking to you, nerd,” Becky snaps. “Go sit somewhere else.”

  I know what happened to Kim. I know what’s happening to all the other kids that have disappeared. But even if I tell them, they won’t believe me. The Triangle won’t let them. So I don’t say anything. I stand up and take my tray to another table.

  Brendan sits down beside me with a greasy grunt. I look around for a teacher, but whoever has lunch duty has ducked out for a smoke. Brendan probably knows that. I grip my tray, ready for something. He’s probably spent the whole morning planning his retaliation.

  “Hey,” he says. “Did you get your stick back?”

  I look down at my food. “No. Mr. Howard kept it.”

  “That sucks. It was really cool.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I wish I had found it.”

  I try to listen to the conversation about Kim at the other table, but it’s too noisy in the lunchroom. Then Brendan does the first thing he’s ever done that has surprised me.

  “Um. Sorry I pushed you around,” he says, voice practically a whisper.

  “What?”

  “You heard me, dickcheese,” he snaps.

  “It’s … okay?” I’m not really sure what else to say. Most of my days follow a pretty basic script; people make fun of me, I pretend not to hear them. I’m off the script now. I’m surprised to at how good it feels. My heart is racing again and my palms are sweaty against the sides of my lunch tray.

  “Do you play Nintendo?” Brendan asks. “I’ve got Super Mario 2. ”

  “That’s cool.” I didn’t even know there was a Super Mario 1.

  “You can come over today and we’ll play it. If you want. But I get to be player one.”

  I nod to myself. Now I see. Brendan wants to get me on his territory. He’ll probably lock me in a closet or something, figure out some way to torture me without someone being there to intervene.

  “Okay. Sure.”

  “Cool. See you after school,” he says. He gets up and buses his tray, then heads out to the playground. I watch him go, wondering when the Triangle replaced him.

  • • • •

  After lunch, two blue-uniformed officers come talk to our class about the missing kids. Nobody knows anything, has any good answers for their questions, so they give us our third safety lecture of the year. Travel in groups, always tell your parents where you’re going to be, and never get in the cars of strangers. We’ve heard it all, internalized it. Lived it. My cousin Chris got in a car with a stranger two years before and he’s still going to therapy because of what happened. He got off lucky, though, compared the others. He got to go home.

  I spend the afternoon ignoring Mrs. Dario. She has a Cuban accent and a lot of kids make fun of her for it. I like the sound of it. And she loves America more than anybody I know. She especially loves Ronald Reagan—almost as much as she hates the Communists. I don’t really understand all the details, but I guess the Communists invaded Cuba and made her come to Kansas. One time, she was reading us a story about the Revolutionary War and she started to cry. The whole class gave her a hug, even me.

  Instead of listening, I think about why the Triangle would want Kim. I go through my “what” theories about aliens and Atlanteans, body harvesting, organ farming. Mind slaves to the slug overlords of Neptune. When the bell rings at the end of the day, I rubber-band-snap back into my body from wherever my mind drifts when I’m thinking hard. I feel like I go into a forest far away when I’m thinking about important things. The trees are enormous, so tall that the leaves disappear into a mist. The air is cool and wet. I don’t recognize the place, but I’ve searched books for pictures that match it. It probably doesn’t exist except inside my head. Or maybe it’s inside the Triangle, on the other side. Wherever it is, it’s the safest place I know.

  I work on the new wrinkle with my main “why” theory on the walk home. Everybody else is long gone, so I don’t have to hurry or pay too much attention or worry about bullies. I can’t seem to piece together how the Triangle picks who it takes. My best idea until now is that it’s the opposite of a bully.

  I understand bullies. Bullies look for things that stand out. Kind of like how white blood cells will attack bacteria and viruses and stuff—bullies are the human response to things that are weird and threaten the safety of the group. Bullies enforce something I’d read about in a public library book called “social cohesion.” There was a lot of other stuff about the core family group and monkey social structures that was over my head, but I understand “social cohesion” because my entire life, I’ve known that I’m not part of it.

  “The nail that sticks up gets the hammer,” Bill likes to say whenever I forget myself and complain about bullies in front of him. Mom frowns but she never corrects him.

  Unlike a bully, the Triangle always takes away the conformists. Until Kim, none of the poor, latchkey Coyote Rise kids have disappeared. It’s always the normal kids in normal “rich” neighborhoods whose parents are still married, the ones who don’t have siblings locked up in juvie, whose parents aren’t drunks or druggies. But Kim lives (lived?) with her uncle, who everybody knows sells weed, and her parents were both in the state pen.

  I’ve never really been afraid of the Triangle because I’m not what it wants. But now I’m not sure. Should I be afraid? It’s another thing to my list of worries.

  I snap back into my body to find that I’m in front of Brendan’s place. He’s sitting on the stoop waiting for me and eating a Snickers. He leads me inside without a word from either of us.

  I know Brendan is an only child when I see his bedroom. He has a Nintendo and a Sega hooked up to a TV bigger than the one in our living room. He even has a computer in the corner, but it has a dust cover on it and doesn’t look like it gets much use. Instead of books on shelves, he has little Lego constructions that look just like the things on the box. Real Lego, too, not the Construx knock-offs like I have. I think maybe they’re even super-glued together. I try not to let my offense show.

  We talk about impersonal stuff like school and TV shows. He loves Saved by the Bell but I’m more of a Duck Tales fan. We don’t talk about the fight at all.

  It turns out that Brendan doesn’t want to lock me in a closet or do anything weird. He really wants to play video games. We play some Mario 2 for a while. It’s fun, but kind of dumb. While we play, Brendan tells me all about his games and all the cheat codes he knows.

  “You sure know a lot about video games,” I say, then feel stupid for it.

  “I’ve read every single Nintendo Power they’ve ever printed. That’s, like, all I read.” He takes a sip from his second can of Mountain Dew. “You know a lot about everything else, though.”

  It’s hard for me to take the compliment. I list for him the things I actually know instead of saying thank you.

  Brendan pauses the game. “The Bermuda Triangle? What’s that?”

  “Stuff disappears in the Bermuda Triangle all the time. You can see where it is by drawing a triangle on a map. The corners are in Miami, Puerto Rico, and Bermuda. All kinds of planes and ships have gone missing for years.”

  “Missing?”

  “They vanish. Like, in 1945, these five bombers were on a training exercise out of Fort Lauderdale. Flight 19. Even though they had compasses and stuff, they radioed that they had gotten lost in a mysterious fog. The military searched for them for days. Nobody ever found the planes or bodies or anything, but people picked up their radio transmissions for days afterward. Can you even imagine what that must have been like?”

  “Where do they go?”

  I frown. This is the unknowable part. “Another dimension, probably. Maybe Atlantis. Aliens abducted them. Nobody knows, but there are all kinds of theories. Some of it ties into this thing called the Philadelphia Experiment, but
I don’t know as much about that.”

  “Okay, what’s that, though?”

  And so I tell him all about how the US Navy experimented with cloaking technology, about the men who become stuck out of phase with our reality, half here, half not, and even stories of time travel and teleportation. And of course they’d done it all in the Bermuda Triangle. I talk for an hour, unloading all these stories I’ve collected from library books and weird late night TV shows. I can’t remember the last time I’ve talked for so long. Brendan listens, asking good questions here and there, like he really cares.

  “Woah. That’s fucking crazy stuff.” Brendan lays back on his bed and stares at the ceiling. “I never knew any of that.” In that moment, I feel very strange to realize where I am and how I got here. How Brendan doesn’t make me to want to run the other direction anymore. I remind myself that maybe this isn’t the real Brendan; he’s been replaced by the Triangle with a duplicate so of course he’ll believe me. I can probably tell him anything I want now.

  “I think Topeka has a Triangle, too,” I say, almost whispering. I have to tell him, even if he is a pod person. The D&D kids never listen. They just call me a dumb kid and threaten to stop letting me hang around them.

  “The disappearances,” he says, sitting upright suddenly. “That makes sense.”

  “It does?” Not sure what else to say. I didn’t expect his reaction.

  “Hell yes. The cops haven’t found jack-shit, everybody knows that. That’s probably because they’re vanished, just like those planes in your story. So where’s our Triangle?”

  “Do you have a phone book?” We go downstairs and find one in a drawer beside the phone. There’s always a map of town in the front of phone books. I take a pen from a mug beside the phone and draw out the sides. “One corner is Hillsdale Park. Another is Topeka West High School. The last one is the Kmart.”

  “How do you know this?”

  I draw a star for where each one of the seven missing kids lived. They all fall inside the bounds of the Triangle. I’m kind of guessing about the exact location of the corners, but it works.