As their craft escaped into the darkness, Jude considered turning in his seat to watch their adopted home fade away. Once he would have certainly done so, watching reluctantly as his past forever drifted from sight. Yet he now felt no need to mourn the things he had left behind, celebrating instead the uncertainties the future held. All things perish in the sands of time, something Jude had always known quite well. And now he knew that when his time came, he would be there to greet it. Looking not behind, but forward.

As the secondary boosters kicked in, their tiny craft rocketing away from that unknown sector of space, Jude smiled. Ready for whatever might come.

Walking towards town I find a strange sense of worldly fascination settling over me, my every sense assaulted by the various environmental stimuli that I encounter on my journey. The sound of my hi-tops against pavement are to me the great percussion drumming of a symphony orchestra, beating their instruments in time with the pulse of blood coursing through my veins. The suburban flower gardens I pass appear like hallucinatory LSD light shows, a blur of terrific color and emotion, no meaning beyond the intangible. I feel much like a newborn child, every minor facet of existence catching my interest, the overwhelming pull of synthensynisia enough to tempt me to cry out. Until finally I find myself approaching the gates of yet another private living community, gazing over the fence as rows of identical white houses stand like proud sentries, forever watching over this kingdom of immaculately trimmed lawns and automatic sprinkler systems, of riding lawnmowers and hedge clippers and platonic Caucasian 3.5 member families. But what truly catches my eye are a group of preteen kids gathered in a driveway, my eyes trained on them as they take turns taking a running start on their skateboards, approaching a handmade wooden ramp with youthful determination. I watch as they emulate the tricks they’d seen in the ripped copies of half-century old skateboard tapes, launching into the air without hesitation, eager to emulate the aging and dead skateboard gods they worshipped.

To us outsiders it must’ve looked like a stupid endeavor, risking considerable injury in return for the faint shot of recognition as someone skilled in the art of riding atop a plank of unstable wood. And yet it had been this way for eons, each of us hoping to carve out a niche in whatever meaningless activity caught our fancy, so many of our dead having proudly dedicated their lives to alchemy or geo-centric astronomy or any of the thousands of now dead religions. We intellectuals tried to pretend we were somehow above the common entertainment the ignorant masses greedily consumed, committing ourselves to the “higher” artforms, holding our noses high as we swam through a thick sea of turgid pulp. Yet we all knew that Andre the Giant had died a god, his cheap stage theatrics overshadowing those billions of unpopular writers and artists who had died alone.

It’s part of growing up I suppose, to realize such fame is unattainable to most men, settling instead for minor glories: machine molded plastic trophies and framed certificates of award; the love of a good family. So though we grew older, discovered new ways to prove our worth to ourselves, in the end there would always be that fantasy, the desire for the inglorious fames. To be immortalized forever in glossy poster stock, hung on bedroom walls, inspiring countless other fools to chase their dreams.

Knowing that there were likely plenty of adolescents who sought to emulate my own school-destroying antics, a strange sense of pride floats around between my ears.

It’s mid-August now, and somehow the mere act of having survived through those first few summer months has been enough to recklessly convince me that I’m immortal. It’s a convenient illusion, the same illusion I’m sure countless kings and other men who’ve fashioned themselves gods foolishly leapt to their deaths still believing.  Truthfully though, my newfound confidence is less powered by the thrill of survival, than it was the knowing that I’ve done so without the various powders and potions my body was once polluted with. Purged of my toxins, reclaiming my humanity from the medicine men who sought to distort it. Reborn as a living breathing child of the universe. My memory problems remain largely at bay, something I still attribute to the blast. Though my long-forgotten moments have not returned, less often do I find my thoughts slipping away, nor do I find myself randomly skipping forward in time.

Unfortunately, this newly proclaimed self-awareness has done little to curb the dreams, the sweet hallucinations of my faceless lover and the screaming destruction of our perfect wasteland. I still awake most nights clutching at my chest, a vain attempt to hold my body together as the explosion rips me to pieces. Though I haven’t shared my dreams with him, Tom would likely label this destructive fantasies as the rational production of my latent nihilism, a sign that I’ve headed down the path of the destroyer. Considering this, I’m forced to wonder whether my supposed awakening is truly cause for celebration.

This is the question I find myself avoiding as I enter the corner store, eagerly making my way towards the soda coolers inlaid into the wall and scanning the looming glass cases with fascination. The selection is simply too much for any mortal man to process, endless rows of oddly designed plastic receptacles, each containing a different neon-colored elixir, incomprehensible flavors such as “Orange Rage,” or “Tropical Smash” blaring at me in their various dynamic typefonts. Thankfully I don’t have to bother with this haphazard selection process, already knowing full well the drink I desire. Spotting it at the end of the case I smile, pulling the freezer door open and welcoming the blast of stiff arctic air as it fights its way outward. Pulling the frosty bottle of American cola free, I feel the strangest sense of relief.

That’s another thing that was never wiped clear in the crash: brand loyalties. My inexplicable cravings for various sugary foodstuffs, assumedly programmed into me during my phantom childhood, having likely associated the tastes of such treats with the rush of endorphins released during whatever exciting Saturday-morning cartoon program the ads had run between. Despite being aware of the nutritional damage such products were likely wreaking on my already malnourished body, I’ve made no real strides towards overcoming these addictions. Considering the amount of effort these unknown advertisers had placed into designing advertisements effective enough to survive blunt-force trauma, I feel as though it would be rude of me to try and erase their subliminal programming.

As I search the cooler for the brand of lemon-lime that Greg has tasked me with picking up for him,  the bell by the door signals the entrance of another patron, and I instinctively turn to watch my fellow consumer enter. First catching sight of him I find myself a bit shocked at his impressive size. The tall African-American gentleman barely makes his way through the door frame, hulking his way towards the front counter, muscular arms swinging loosely from where they exit the armholes of his tight muscle-T. Realizing I’m staring I quickly return to my shopping, leisurely perusing the snacks and examining the nutrition facts on the back of a packet of chips. For some reason though, I can’t help but return to watching this intimidating man make his purchase, finding his face strangely familiar.

“Hey” I hear the giant booms to the elderly gentleman behind the counter, “Pack of Marlboro Reds.” The man slips a thick wallet out of his pants, grabbing a cash card and shoving it across the counter as the elderly Indian man behind the counter stoically rings up the sale. It’s as he replaces the wallet that I first note the pistol strapped to his hip, something which causes me to freeze in my tracks. With eyes wide I examine what I can see of the face turned away from me, tracing the man’s profile.

He couldn’t be.

The seemingly stern man holds the pack of cigarettes in his fist and squeezes the box hard, causing the flimsy film to crack and break beneath his powerful grip. He pulls a cigarette from the newly destroyed package and goes to light it with one of the novelty lighters on display. The shopkeeper looks like he wants to protest, but seems to ultimately decide against it. “Listen…” the man explains, blowing a thick cloud of smoke into the air. “I’m looking for some kids.” I look on in horror, noticing the obvious hilt of a pistol ready at his side. Realizing exactly what’s happening and knowing I’m without an exit.

“I don’t know any kids” the shopkeeper offers.

“Yeah well, you’ve probably heard of these two before…” the armed man says with a chuckle, pulling out a creased piece of paper. Panicked, I take note of the door to the back room, and without any tactical grace I quickly stride towards it, disappearing around the corner, hoping to god the shopkeeper simply shrugs his shoulders and sends my pursuer elsewhere.

“Hey!” I hear from behind me, and a wave of adrenalin down my spine towards me legs, which explode forward through a stockroom, rampaging past crates stacked high to the ceiling, everywhere the smell of cigarette cartons and snackcakes sealed in plastic. Spotting the heavy metal delivery door I burst towards it, throwing it open with a shoulder as behind me the man’s heavy footsteps beat in pursuit. “Get back here!” He shouts, my heart beating out of my chest, lactic acid burning through muscle tissue as my feet slam against the ground, pace propelled by little other than sheer panic.

I turn behind me to see the pursuer gaining, his eyes wide with intensity, a wild grin cross his face as he relishes the thrill of the hunt. Even despite these uncharacteristically animalistic features, my brain instinctual confirms his identity. Unfortunately, before my brain receptors can process this recognition, a terrific red blur has already slammed into frame, throwing my pursuer to the ground with a satisfying crunch.

“Get in the fucking car!” Greg screams to me from the driver’s window, and without thinking I grab the door behind him and rip it open, barely inside before he speeds across a curb, narrowly missing the crowd of onlookers gathering to witness the accident. I pull the car door closed as Greg weaves back onto the street, turning in my seat to see the antagonist stumbling to his feet, pushing away the good Samaritans who try to assist. ”Fuck” he curses. “Fuck, fuck, fuck. I consider cursing as well, but can’t find the words, the shock of the incident too much for me to process. I now recognize the vehicle as the same ship we’d rode into town on, sporting the new red paint job and rebuilt engine Greg and Tom had made a summer project. It’s definitely faster than I remember it being.

“Somebody must’ve got our plates” I realize suddenly, panicking.

“Not likely. I didn’t have time to throw them on.”

“Well that’s not any better!” I protest.

“Well I guess you’d better cross your fingers we don’t see a cop” Greg tells me flippantly. “I’ll take the back roads, we’ll be fine. Besides, your friend back there isn’t going to stick around to talk to the cops anyway.”

“Why not?” Greg furiously turns off onto a hidden dirt road, flooring the accelerator as the tires kick up clouds of dust behind us.

“He had a gun, right?” Greg explains angrily. “He’s a bounty hunter. He doesn’t get the reward if he doesn’t catch us himself.”

“How did you know he was coming?” I ask, thinking of Greg’s lucky timing.

“This guy was at the school, asking questions.” Greg explains angrily. “Tom rushed home to warn us but you were already gone to the store.”

“Good timing” I remark, thinking of the man’s outstretched hands, seconds away from snatching me.

“Yeah well, it’s time to get out of town. Tom is grabbing our stuff, he’s going to meet us up the highway” Greg pauses his thought, trying to overcome the panic and process our sudden misfortune. “It doesn’t make any sense, Tom says this guy came to him specifically. He shouldn’t have even known about Tom. There’s plenty of my old teachers he could’ve gone to, all the one’s they interviewed on the news, but I scrubbed my records, nobody should know about Tom.” He thinks this over for a second, shaking his head in frustration. In my mind the man’s face flashes in and out of focus, the logic centers of my brain trying desperately to convince my subconscious that they’ve made a faulty I.D.. Unfortunately, the argument doesn’t stick, and I find myself staring deep into the eyes of this after image, still grinning at me like a mad dog on the prowl.

“Greg.”

“What the fuck–” he continues muttering. “How could he have–”

“Greg” I interject. “I know who he is.” Greg’s eyebrows fly upwards, as he suddenly slams on the breaks. The car comes to a halt alongside a dilapidated wooden fence, miles of abandoned farmland stretching out beyond it.

“Who?” He queries.

“The guidance counselor.”

Hearing the answer leaving my lips, I find I barely even believe myself.

—

“There you are” Tom exasperatedly declares, rushing forward to greet us. The meeting point is off an exit twenty miles up the highway, a small townie bar in the middle of nowhere. Even despite the terrible remoteness of our location, I still find myself looking over a shoulder  for our pursuer. The exhaustion of our harrowing escape has left little time with which to deeply consider the newly revealed identity of the man who’d attempted to snatch me, and it seems there’s a silent pact to put the issue aside until things are sorted out.  ”Christ” the teacher curses with relief. “I thought maybe you’d been grabbed.”

“We’re good” Greg lies. “You’ve got our stuff?”

“Right” Tom remembers, returning to his car. He retrieves an armful of documents from the backseat, Oswald jumping out as he gathers them.

“You brought the cat?” Greg asks, smirking.

“He wanted to say goodbye!” Tom explains while kicking the car door shut, awkwardly shuffling out a padded envelope and handing it to me. “Get those on” he instructs as I look inside, finding a pair of newly pressed license plates along with the tools to affix it. A phantom memory strikes me then, myself sitting in the dust, removing the former plates as Greg fought with his old mentor. Somehow it seems as though a century has passed since that moment, our eternal summer only now coming to an end. I take a seat there in the lot, screwing the stamped metal into place while Oswald watches curiously. Greg and Tom flip through the stack of papers together, making sure everything is in order as I finish the minor task.

“All done” I announce, brushing the gravel from my jeans.

“Good” Greg responds simply. “Let’s go.”

“What?” Tom exclaims. “You’re just going to leave?”

“Yeah” Greg says bitterly. I look at his face, noticing that his resolve is less than firm, some bitter emotion loaded into the gun which had fired that simple affirmation.

“C’mon. Let’s get a drink” Tom offers, a warm smile cross his face. “I’m buying.”

“We can’t…” Greg stalls. “It’s too risky.”

“One drink” Tom returns, holding up a finger. Greg looks to me, wanting me to act as his out. In a previous era I would’ve likely parroted his concerns, acting as the tipping point in this war of reason. However the thought of leaving our kind benefactor so quickly fills me with an unfathomable guilt, something which Greg must read quite obviously given the heavy sigh that follows.

“One drink” he agrees.

—

As we take our seats at the bar I realize it’s my first time performing such an action, and I find myself glancing around this quaint little scene with a strange sense of fascination  the wood-paneled walls looking like they sag heavy with years of stored memories, the combined weight of countless drunken revelries and long-forgotten friendships. Its midday, the only other patrons being the pair of elderly gentlemen silently watching the golf game playing out on the screen over the bar. The lighting is dim, splinters of it catching the edges the assorted bric-a-brac adorning the walls. I catalog these items in random order: old street signs; faded photos of  High School athletic teams and men in military fatigues; a wooden paddle inscribed with the word ‘Sandler’; and an ancient tin sign reminding me that it’s a “Lovely day for a Guinness,” a friendly parakeet flying by with a pint balanced atop his nose.

“Who’re the kids?” The stout bald man behind the bar asks Tom, an apparent acquaintance. As he looks us over he continues to rinse the inside of a glass with a dishtowel, his thick hairy paws seeming accustomed to the task.

“Just some students of mine, recent graduates” Tom explains.

“Drinking with the students!” The man lets out a hearty chuckle. “Tom you’re a hell of a teacher.” The man turns and reaches for three clean glasses, setting them down on the bar. “Miller good?” Tom nods as the man grabs one of the glasses and slowly fills it with the golden elixir. “And you two?” He asks, handing the full glass to Tom while he looks us over.

“Miller is fine” Greg offers.

“Guinness” I say. Greg looks at me.

“What?” I ask with a shrug. “It’s a lovely day.”

“Hope you don’t mind but can I see some IDs?” The barkeep asks apologetically. “State’s been coming down on offenses so I gotta be strict about it.” I freeze up, not sure what to do. My ID had been burned sometime towards the beginning of our adventure, knowing it made little sense for us to be carrying around materials which helped to identify us as the nationally wanted criminals we were. Not that it would’ve mattered, as only High School grads and army grunts were approved for A-18 liquor approval, and neither of us have ever held either a diploma or a firearm. Already I’m fumbling for an excuse, hoping he’ll let us leave without getting too suspicious.

“Here we are” Tom says, pulling two fresh pieces of laminated plastic from a pocket and sliding them across the bar. “You boys left these in my car earlier, remember?” I look down to find our faces adorning the two cards, the photos even updated to show my cropped hair and sunken features. The barkeeper holds up the IDs to make a visual inspection. When he grabs the electronic scanner by the register I become obviously concerned, though as he beeps each card through, he seems satisfied.

“Newly graduated eh? First time in a bar?” Greg remains stoic, while I apprehensively nod my head. “Well hell, here’s to the new drunk drivers!” he exclaims enthusiastically, filling a pint glass with the dark beer and sliding it towards me with a stiff laugh. “First drink’s on the house. Enjoy it.”

I turn to find Greg un-phased, glancing his new ID over briefly before pulling out his wallet and tucking it inside. I examine mine a bit more carefully. Name: Robert Paulson, Age: 18, Sex: M, Driver’s Class: 1, 2, M, Liquor Class: A. I hold it up to the light and examine it for flaws, gazing through the holographic foil at the Connecticut state emblem. It’s then that I realize it isn’t a forgery. What I’m holding is the real thing. “How did you–?” I try to question. Tom interrupts me, putting another of his manila folders atop the bar with an eager grin.

“That’s not all either. I’ve got passports for you too, new license plates and vehicle registration, hell—you’ve even got new social security numbers. Real ones even.” He grins, rather pleased with himself. “You’re new men gentlemen, do with it what you will.”

“Thanks” Greg offers carelessly, taking a long sip from his beer.

“But how?” I have to know.

“C’mon, give the old revolutionary some credit” Tom says with a smile. “I’ve still got some friends who haven’t been hung yet, all of whom are more than willing to assist the kids who might restart that old war of ours. C’mon–” he prompts, raising his pint glass high in the air. “What are we toasting?”

“World peace?” Greg jokes cheekily.

“Funny.”

“The end of summer vacation” I prompt, strangely sure of my words.

“Perfect” Tom responds, motioning for us to lift our glasses to his. “Well then, to the end of our summer vacation. May we live to see another.” Our glasses clink together.

“Amen” says Greg.

An hour later, with several more “one beers” staring back at us, Greg and Tom continue to get lost in the past, carrying on about their former misadventures with drunken abandon. I listen with a wistful inebriated smile on my face as they recall the glories of old, pointing fingers and spouting accusations and laughing all the while. Storytelling, maybe that was the one thing that truly defined humanity. Our ability to reach into the past and pull forth the tales worth telling. Mixing together the experiences of our life, the facts and fictions, passing them on to whoever was around to listen. I laugh with them when prompted, at the outlandish tales of Greg’s dangerous first experience with ammonium nitrate, and of Tom’s desperate attempt to maintain his sanity while managing his unwieldy protégé.

“Taught him everything I know” Tom declares confidentally. “Everything this guy thinks he knows about making bombs he learned from me.” He wraps an arm around his young ward, one which Greg shrugs off with a friendly sneer.

“You taught me crap” Greg tells me defensively. “He had me building pipe bombs at one point. Any kid with a dog-eared copy of the anarchists cookbook can make a goddamn pipebomb.”

“Yeah well most kids your age don’t have libraries of illegal bomb-building literature” Tom curses. “Didn’t I give you that book anyhow?”

“Maybe…” Greg admits. “I can’t remember.” Tom playfully smacks him on the back of the head at this admission.

“Pipes are your basics, your bread and butter. That’s your problem, you’re always so quick to move onto the next thing, never finish what you’ve started. What did you think, I was going to hand you a bundle of plastique and wish you luck?” Our talk of improvised explosives originally had me rather self-conscious, though with all the alcohol in my system I’m hardly worried about the ancient old men playing checkers in the corner catching wind of our conversation. The bartender meanwhile seems oblivious, drawn instead to the football game hanging in the air at the other end of the bar. So instead of worrying I spend my effort to keep up the level of inebriation attempted by my more experienced company, I still find myself downing each pint with a smile, knowing the bitter farewell is not too far off and doing my best to drown out that sad truth, the knowledge that death comes to all things. Trying to do the one thing I’d thought myself an expert at.

Trying to forget.

Not long after this moment, we’re as drunk as we’ll ever be, any amount of toxins that we flush from ourselves during round-robin trips to the restroom quickly replaced with additional refills from the seemingly inexhaustible tap. Until finally I find myself finishing what I declare inwardly will be my final trip to to the urinal, glancing over at the single graffiti-covered bathroom stall as I wash my hands in the tiny porcelain sink bolted into the wall beside it. In my barely lucid state I find myself strangely fascinated by the years of memories etched and inked across the antiquated piece of industrial metal. I tracing these absent-minded scribblings with a finger, laughing slightly as I consider man’s inexplicable need to carve his name into the world.

The creator’s instinct I realize, still chuckling. Not a mocking laugh, or a desperate one, but simply one of understanding. Knowing that while all mortals eventually return to to dust, the man from Nantucket would live forever.

“So what now Greg?” Tom asks jokingly as I retake my seat. “Where will two fine young Turks like yourselves go?” I perk my ears up at the chance that, given his inebriation, Greg may actually tip his hand regarding his unseen motives.

“How quickly do you bend to torture?” Greg jokes.

“Afraid I’ll spill under duress? If I can fight a pack of feral cats out of my garage I’m sure I can withstand a bit of waterboarding” he jokes.

“First New York, pick up some supplies” Greg tells him.

“Plastique? Kalashnikovs?” Tom jokes.

“Just… supplies” Greg replies, still tight-lipped. “After that I have a contact in Ohio who’ll hopefully be helping me with phase two.”

“And just what, pray tell me, is phase two?”

“Instigate messiah operations, incite popular rebellion…” he spouts gibberish. “That sort of thing.”

“Ah yes” Tom agrees with a knowing chuckle. “The Modern Illusion of Immortality, I’m quite familiar with that one. I do believe I failed it once before.”

“You did.”

“Sloppy work, poor punctuation, an incomplete draft… and worst of all it was late!” Tom says, laughing.

“Yeah well, I was never one for being punctual I guess” Greg offers cockily, to which Tom just laughs slightly. “Still not satisfied?” Greg asks with an air of sarcasm. He reaches into the inside pocket of his jacket, pulling out a heavy manuscript. He tosses this pile of papers onto the bar with a thud, to the bemused surprise of Tom. The teachers takes the stapled pages in his hands and glances over them quickly, before stopping on the title page and chuckling slightly.

“So, it’s finished then?” Tom asks, picking his mug back up and raising it to Greg. “A hard copy even.”

“I figure it’s worth at least a C minus.” Greg says with a sly grin. Tom holds the heavy tome before him, its pages frayed and stained. Finally, he sets it down on the bar.

“A plus, Greg.”

“You haven’t even read it” Greg protests, laughing.

“There’s no need. I already know this story.”

“Do you know?” Greg returns, chuckling at the show of confidence from our benefactor. Tom looks at us, smiling, the drunken shine gone from his face. And he recites to us:

“And I saw heaven opened, and beheld a white horse; and the one who sat upon it was called faithful and true, and in righteousness he did judge and make war. His eyes were as fire, and on his head he wore many crowns; and he had a name written, that no man knew, but he himself. And I saw the beast, and the kings of the earth, and their armies, gathered together to make war against this man sitting on the horse, and against his army…” He stops suddenly, cutting the verse short.

“So what?” Greg pushes him. “Jesus wins? Yay God?” Tom shakes his head, chuckling at his protege’s brash assumption.

“I don’t know who wins” he admits with a sad shake of his head.

“We’ll win” Greg declares without thinking. Tom laughs.

“A bold declaration” he says with a smile, raising his drink to us. We respond in kind. “To victory.” The glasses clink together once more. Then never again.

—

Outside, I follow Greg towards our wagon out of Dodge, the car smiling back at us, ready to again hit the open road in search of yet another misadventure. Through my drunkenness I realize just how strange my giddy anticipation is, as if me and Greg were not involved in domestic terrorism but rather the kind of boyish shenanigans you’d expect of Tom Sawyer and  Huck Finn. Yet here we were, two kids in more trouble than anyone could ask for. Both of us filled with a strange optimism, the reckless haste of invincibility which had sent countless video game plumbers to the grave.

“It’s been fun” Greg remarks. Tom nods, confirming this. Oswald finally notices that we’ve emerged from the bar, running up from where he’s been rolling around in the dirt. I kneel down, a sad smile cross my face as I give him a good long scratch behind the ears to remember me by.

“Guess I’ll be putting the old bachelor pad back in order” he jokes. “Though I’ll admit, I was getting kind of used to having you kids around.”

“Less mouths to feed” I pipe up.

“Yeah well, you boys are actually less picky than those goddamn cats” Tom gripes. We try to laugh but its hollow, awkward, the cheap beer buzz fading from us. “It was fun” Tom agrees again, all of us too aware of the past tense.

“C’mon” Greg butts in, trying to lighten the mood. “We’ve done this before, me and you.”

“Indeed we have” Tom admits. “I guess that’s just part of being a teacher. Watching your pupils go on without you.” There’s an strange smile shared between them then, before all masculine bravado is cast aside, the two embracing in a parting hug. Both of them chuckling, realizing just how out of character this moment of genuine emotion is. Tom looks at me, waving me over. “You too you bastard!” He yells, and I reluctantly join in this blatant show of affection, Tom pulling us both close to his chest as if he could somehow take part of us with him.

“Good luck” Tom tells us as we finally break away. “Don’t get killed out there.”

“You be sure to read that thing” Greg demands, pointing at the manuscript in his mentor’s hand.

“I will, of course I will” he promises. Greg smiles sadly then, before turning away without another word and pacing towards the car. I turn to join him, before Tom grabs my arm.

“One last thing” he tells me, pulling from beneath his stack of papers a paperback novel, one I’d not seen on his bookshelf. He hands it to me, and I read the title aloud:

“Star Rebellion?” I look back up to find Tom smiling.

“Something to read on the trip. Keep it hidden from Greg though, that boy hates science fiction.”

“I’m not much of a sci-fi guy myself” I admit.

“Trust me” he assures. “You’ll like this one.”

“C’mon!” Greg yells, as I turn to see him already inside the car. He begins to blast the horn as I say my final word to Tom.

“Thanks.” Tom nods, giving me my leave to make haste towards the vehicle. As I sliding into the passenger seat Greg is already reversing towards the road, giving us one last look at Tom, cradling Oswald and forcing the cat to wave to us. We both chuckle, returning the wave before the car pulls out onto pavement, Greg pushing it into gear before speeding off, neither of us looking back.

Above us the sun is setting, the harsh orange sunlight burning our eyes. I look over, expecting Greg to pull down the sun visor, but he doesn’t, instead squinting against the dawn. Unblinking, as if the glare could somehow keep his bottled emotions from spilling out. Our summer vacation was over now, the time had come to put away our idle distractions and return to war. Yet the memory of it would never leave us. The season which had strengthened our purpose, allowed us to examine the boyhood we had left behind, emerging not as reckless children but as purposed men. Though we could never return, a piece of us would always remain.

I think back a few moments to the restroom, emptying my urine into a long steel trough, giggling as I rock back and forth on unsteady legs. I had read the graffiti staring back at me, the proud declarations of who had come and gone, and I had seen it then. A simple message standing alone, black ink fresh and living, waiting for the dim fluorescent lighting to burn it into the wall. A message to stand for all time:

THE GHOSTS WERE HERE.

Pulling his rusting car around the backside of the school, Mr. Tom cautiously glances around at the areas newly illuminated by his headlights, as if to be sure the coast is clear. Apparently satisfied he puts the car in park and turns off the engine, motioning for me to exit. Stepping out of the air-conditioned vehicle into the paved schoolyard, I’m immediately embraced by the thin veil of summer humidity that blankets our hemisphere. “Is it alright for us to be here this late?” I ask as he presses the car remote, power windows rolling closed, door locks snapping downward.

“Yeah it’s fine. I’m a teacher after all” he tells me, bluffing the privileges of his employment. He waves me along towards the far side of the school building, us turning the corner to reveal a set of crumbling concrete steps leading up towards a long unused entranceway. I look over the double doors I find there, the worn and faded emblem of a once proud jungle cat snarling at me. Below, the formerly bold declaration of “Go Cougars!” now seems a weak and pitiful whisper, struggling to be heard over the various graffiti scrawls covering the neglected entrance. I watch as Mr. Tom takes his keyring in hand, slipping one of the toothed shards of metal into the rusty lock without a word, the clunking sound of the stubborn bolt sliding over strangely satisfying against the otherwise silent night.

I gaze beyond the doors at the darkness awaiting us, but before I can ask for any clarification as to our intentions, Mr. Tom has already disappeared beyond the veil Too late to protest, I take one last look at  the world behind me, before turning and following into the abyss. As the heavy doors slam behind us, the dim light disappears with it, leaving me flustered as I attempt to follow my guide through the empty blackness, the only sound being our footsteps as they hollowly echo off tile floors, bouncing around the unseen cavern. Finally I spot a thin sliver of blue light ahead of us, Mr. Tom’s silhouette approaching this glowing slash and pushing through it, the brilliant moonlight streaming in to greet him. I reach forward to hold the doors before they swing back into place, similarly pushing my way through, finding myself immediately awestruck by the magnificent sight afforded me.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” he asks, gesturing towards the barren expanse of scuffed wood-paneled flooring. “A relic from a distant age. A reminder of the leisure once afforded our youth.” I gaze over the magnificent Olympic-sized basketball court with a certain fascination, unable to fit the entire thing within view of my human-sized peripheral vision, the rotting wooden bleachers seeming to stretch onward towards eternity. Aside from the  assortment of cardboard boxes and other junk stacked up against a far corner, the room is an untouched time capsule, a reminder of what was once. Long unused basketball hoops stand sadly, each gazing forever towards their cousin, as if sharing the memory of the endless orange spheres they’d once devoured like impossible gluttons. Above us on the high walls hang a multitude of various banners of maroon and gold, declaring the school’s various achievements in athletic competitions and listing the years of their occurrence, some starting back as far as the 1960s.

Jesus…” I say in wonder. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a real school gymnasium before. I thought they were a myth.” Mr. Tom smiles seeing my wonder.

“I think my generation was the last to get any use out of these things, back before they started up all the private athletic schools. Used to be that athletes were expected to balance their sports prowess with some level of basic human intelligence. Now all it takes to be an American hero is a winning smile and a high steroid tolerance.”

“A different time” I admit.

“A sane time” Mr. Tom counters. “I don’t know how anyone can stand to watch sports anymore. Who cares? How can anyone find any enjoyment in rooting for a man who was bred and trained his entirely life to do nothing more than hit a baseball as hard as possible?” I nod at this, only half-listening to the rant. “Meanwhile the regular kids would rather boot up the newest virtual simulation than engage in any actual physical activity—“as Mr. Tom rambles on I find myself drifting away from his semantics, aware of the fallacy of the world but claiming no responsibility for any of it. Instead I find myself still entranced by this temple we’ve defiled, this sanctuary dedicated to a forgotten age of small-town athletic champions. I find myself suddenly in an alternate universe, one where the educational system never collapsed, forcing public school districts to cut gym class and after-school sports programs entirely. A universe where I am just another average jock, off to college on some manner of sports scholarship. Waiting for the day I will sit in my aging armchair with a can of beer, watching another meaningless mid-season game, again telling my son the same tired story of how I blew out my pitching arm. Gesturing to my scant collection of trophies and reminiscing about what could’ve been.

Though I normally disregarded these alternate realities without hesitation, this one put a strange smile on my face. One which quickly faded when I realized how ludicrous my ideal of normality was. Mr. Tom ends his rant around the same time, some nonsense about the cure for diabetes having perpetuated America’s unfortunate love-affair with child obesity. He must notice that I’ve taken in none of this, lost in the realm of schoolboy fantasy, and he smiles recognizing the drunken sense of grandeur that has overtaken me.

“This isn’t even the best part” he asserts, and I look to him almost disbelieving that there could ever be more. He gestures me along towards the opposite side of the gym, me enthralled by the unfamiliar sound of our rubber soled shoes treading across long untouched linoleum flooring.  I follow him through a break in the bleachers, through another mysterious doorway. Almost too late do I notice the small hand-carved wooden sign above my head, reading simply: Pool”

I enter into the porcelain tiled sanctum with my eyes wide, squares of white stone tile catching the moonlight which floods in through the large windows hung high on the wall, striking the edges of long metal benches and causing them to shine dimly, the entire room covered in that brilliant blue. Beside me on the wall I find a felt board contained behind cracked glass, one inset with various plastic letters now yellowed with age. Though many of the letters have fallen from their places, I can still make out some of the information, the proud athletic records set by now dead men. I trace the names with a finger. K. Bres__han, J Carey, D. G_nn. All of them gone from this place, whatever glories that had once been afforded them now long forgotten, buried in the deep end of the long empty concrete pit that stretches out before me.

“I’ve always loved these sorts of places” Mr. Tom tells me. “Abandoned buildings and all… forgotten rooms like these. There’s just something about a closed door that unnerves me. The thought that I have only one life to lead, and that I’m supposed to accept that there are some doors I’ll never open, never be able to see beyond. I don’t know what it is, O.C.D. maybe, but I hate that. I just have this strange compulsion to go where I’m not supposed to, to see these things that most have forgotten. They locked this place up because they didn’t want us to see it, to remember the way things used to be.”

“And yet, here we are” I finish for him. Mr. Tom smiles softly.

“It’s something isn’t it? When I was a kid all my fantasies involved secret clubhouses or something of that sort. Places only I’d ever know about, long forgotten structures filled with mysterious treasures. Now I’m a middle aged man who breaks into abandoned High School gymnasiums.” We laugh at this, our chuckles bouncing awkwardly about the hollow cavern. ”C’mon, there’s a ladder back here” Mr. Tom says, turning towards the corner of the room and and moving towards the metal bars bolted into the wall. After he gets a few rungs up I move to follow, climbing right on Mr. Tom’s heels as I gaze up at the worn rubber treads of his cheap sneakers, Watching as he shoves aside the loose skylight ahead of us, revealing a waiting canvas of stars.

“God, I haven’t been up here in ages” Mr. Tom muses, looking around with a sense of childish wonder as we resurface into the summer air. I can see the appeal, gazing out from our high perch towards the town center downwind of us, distant streetlights burning a harsh orange. Weighing the odd wistful feeling in my gut I almost don’t notice the a pack of green cigarettes offered to me. “Here, you smoke pot?” Mr. Tom asks. I shake my head no, him shrugging as he lights the end of the joint and takes a long drag, holding the smoke in long as he can to give the THC time to latch itself to his brain receptors. He coughs lightly, laughing as the first beginnings of mild euphoria start to set in.

“All that… the gym and all–” I wonder aloud. “They just abandoned it?”

“It’s something ain’t it?” He confirms.

“It’s tragic. Why would they just lock something like that away?”"

“It’s all about priorities” he tells me, sighing. “Uncle Sam is always too busy playing war to ever consider cutting the defense budget, so he goes and cuts education instead. I was still in middle school when they started cutting the ‘non-essential classes,’ things like P.E., art, and so on. Then they started cutting from the core classes, bringing the overall standards down. Used to be you needed two years of algebra to graduate, now if you can add and subtract without a reader you’re considered above average. So we ended up with the strongest military in the world, and a private sector too stupid to ever compete with India or China. Maybe we won the war on terror, but we lost everything else.”

“Are we really so much dumber than the rest of the world?” I wonder earnestly, having never encountered an adult willing to be so frank. I knew my coursework had never seemed terribly challenging, but never considered the ramifications of it. Mr. Tom pulls the burning joint from his lips, seeking to quickly reassure me.

“If you’re worried about yourself, don’t fret. You have a naturally inquisitive mind, you ask questions. That’s the best thing you can do in this world, is ask questions of it. Even the weakest education system in the world can’t stand against that.”

“Thanks.” I blush.

“The rest of your generation though, being fed that standard curriculum, they’re in trouble. Standardized learning stresses facts, not questions. And of course, with the government writing the textbooks, even if you did have a question you wouldn’t get the real answer. For instance, you ever do a class unit on non-violent resistance? Ghandi, Martin Luther King, that sort of thing?”

“Yeah…” I say, unable to place the exact scenario, but sure that the memory exists. Mr. Tom coughs, again taking a hit from the joint.

“You ever ask why?” He forces out through another cough. “Why the government would be so quick to promote these heroes? Why American kids need to learn about the fight for Indian independence?”

“Non-violent protest is… an important tool” I parrot, a line likely stolen directly from my texts. He laughs at this.

“C’mon!” He challenges my weak answer. “Don’t you think that when the government is educating the populace on how to protest properly, something is wrong?” I frown, considering this unique thought. ”Don’t get me wrong, non-violent protest works in certain circumstances, usually when the opposition is stupid enough to use violence themselves, an inciting incident. Problem is, our government figured that out a long time ago, you’ll never see another Kent State because they know that sort of thing gets people riled up. So they push non-violent resistance knowing it’s ineffectual, placating the masses, convince them not to fight back. Governments are supposed to live in fear of their people. Who’s afraid of a bunch of chanting hippies with cardboard signs?”

“We can’t all build bombs?” I joke.

“Forget bombs. Questions” he reiterates. “Education is the best weapon we’ll ever have, but we let it grow dull. We let the anti-intellectual crusaders take over, let the simpletons have their say on matters meant for the educated.”

“That seems harsh” I rebut. “Everyone is entitled to their opinion.” Mr. Tom jumps on this criticism.

“You ask me the right way plow a field, I’ll point you to the farmer. But you ask the farmer how to run a country, he’ll point to the heavens. Of course he knows that god isn’t much of a legislator, so he settles to vote for whoever claims to love his imaginary friend more!” I laugh at this strawman as Mr. Tom shakes his head. “There’s just not enough smart people, and we’re losing more every year. Women’s liberation is great, don’t get me wrong, but our educated independent women just don’t pump out babies at the same rate as those god-fearing bible-thumpers in Arkansas. ‘Barren intellectual syndrome’ I call it.”

“You think smart people should make more babies.”

“I think smart people should fuck like animals” he strengthens, taking another quick drag off the dwindling joint. ”But they won’t, and that’s the major flaw of democracy. As much as we’d like to consider all men equal, their opinions aren’t. Yet despite this, the unintelligent will always steer the country downwards. It’s just simple mathematics.”

“Dumb people have comprised the population throughout all of time” I argue. “You can’t talk as though they’re a race. If we reformed education–”

“It’s too late for that now!” He returns. “Maybe once, when the educated man was held up as an ideal. When people actually aspired to send their children to college, when we listened to scientists instead of labeling them as frauds and heretics. Instead we let the red states fetishize their ignorance, believing that everything they need to know is in their bible. That’s the problem, people growing up never asking those important questions, being told every answer is in a book they’ll never actually read themselves, and that anyone who tells them otherwise is Satan’s minion. We had a chance to defeat the church once, before the economic collapse. Unfortunately, poor and starving people seem to like the idea that there’s somebody looking out for them…” Mr. Tom sighs, taking a long hard drag on his cigarette before tossing the roach away. “So the bible lovers keep electing their red politicians, setting the education standards for the rest of us, sending their kids off to die in the endless war against Eastasia.”

“Eurasia” I correct. He laughs at this. “I guess I never knew how bad things were” I admit.

“How could you?” He posits. “You grew up after the fall. Heck, you’re almost lucky in that regard. Me, I had  to grow up watching this country fall apart. The worst part when the corporations started buying up everything. I used to love football, but it’s kind of hard to give a shit about the Pepsi Patriots. Hell I remember visiting a few of the national parks before the corporations got sponsoring rights for all of them. Bridgestone National Park, that used to be called Yellowstone. You ever been?”

“No…” I start awkwardly. “At least I don’t think so… I mean–”

“Memory problems, right?” Mr. Tom finishes for me.

“How’d you know?”

“Greg mentioned something about it.” I recognize this as the obvious answer. “What happened, you sniff a lot of glue as a kid or what?”

“Car accident.”

“Yeah? Must’ve been pretty bad.”

“Killed my parents” I mention with a shrug. Mr. Tom grimaces at this, apparently worried he’s breached a rather sensitive subject. “Don’t worry” I assure him. “I didn’t really know them that well. Or… well, maybe I did. I mean, I probably knew them really well, but seeing as I don’t remember–”

“I get it” Mr. Tom interrupts with a laugh. “Well that’s a bum hand to be dealt. And now on the run from the law… you just attract bad luck I guess.”

“Greg you mean?” I joke. He smiles.

“That old stray cat of mine…” He pauses, looking out at the landscape before us. “This is where Greg and I became friends you know.”

“The school? I figured as much.”

“No” he clarifies, gesturing below us to the expanse of barren concrete, painted orange by light of industrial lampposts. “Here, this lot.” I look at him quizzically. “What? Greg never told you this story?”

“Well–” Mr. Tom comically slaps his forehead, almost channeling his former pupil.

“The memory thing, right?” he asks again. I shrug helplessly. “Don’t worry, I’m sure I’ll get used to it eventually.” I know he won’t, but I accept the unnecessary apology anyhow.

“So you and Greg–” I start.

“Right. How we met… well, we actually met well before the particular incident. He was enrolled in my English composition class. I remember I disliked Greg from just about the first moment I met him. He was a cocky little bastard even then, didn’t participate in the class at all, never raised his hand or anything. Even if I called on him to respond to a passage he’d just sullenly offer the lowest common denominator of an answer. His papers will awful too, real generic stuff, but when you’re constantly being pressured to pass as many kids as possible you can’t really ask for more. So I gave Greg average marks on the crap he handed in, not wanting to deal with his attitude in summer school.  Then he finally hands in his final assignment, and I was pissed.”

“It was that bad?”

“The opposite! It was brilliant. I’d assigned some fluff to finish up the year, five pages minimum on a topic of your choice. Most of the kids just wrote about their favorite band or worse, spent time elaborating on some unique personal tragedy, knowing any kid who writes about their mom’s cancer or their dad’s alcoholism gets an automatic A.”

“I should’ve tried that” I joke.

“But not Greg, no” Mr. Tom continues on. “Greg hands me the first fifty pages of a manifesto. ‘The Modern Illusion of Immortality’ he calls it. I mean, my god, I must’ve spent a good hour on the internet trying to figure out where he’d plagiarized it from. But no, it was all original, a brilliant analysis of contemporary society, technology and the death of god and all that. It was a little crude sure, but I could hardly believe some goddamn teenager had written it.” Mr. Tom laughs thinking about it, coughing his way through another cloud of hazy marijuana smoke. “That stupid bastard…”

“So what then?”

“I flunked him! Told him I couldn’t accept the paper because was a week past the due date. Truth is I was just looking for any good reason to fail the bastard. I was furious with him. After all, he’d been playing me all along. Made himself look the fool knowing that I wouldn’t challenge him. That he could just coast by.”

“I’ve seen that act before.”

“He has quite the knack for it… to be honest I did the same thing at my age. I think that was what really pissed me off, how much he reminded me of myself.”

“Yeah?” I confirm with a grin.

“Oh yeah, I was just like Greg when I was in High School. I was a sneering intellectual punk, thought everything was ‘below’ me, you know? I was lucky, the army strips a lot of that arrogance out of you. But it was clear Greg needed a wakeup call, so I failed his ass.”

“He must’ve been pissed.” Mr. Tom laughs at this.

“Yeah…  he was. He slashed my tires.” I laugh hard at this.

“Really?” He nods, grinning himself.

“Yeah! I caught him in the act” he explains. “It was during class time, nobody else around. I had a free period so I went to grab some stuff out of my car, and there he was, with a switchblade buried in my tire. You should’ve seen his face, like a deer in headlights. He must’ve expected me to keep playing teacher, like I was going to have him expelled or something. And instead… I just lost it. I basically bull-charged the kid, tackled him to the ground.”

“What!?”

“I know!” He says, laughing again. “I don’t know what the hell I was thinking, there I was on top of him, and I just started pounding his face in, literally out of my mind with rage. Somehow he gets out from under me and the next thing I know, we’re rolling around the pavement just… slugging the crap out of each other….”

“Jesus Christ—“ Mr. Tom starts laughing riotously, barely able to continue.

“Christ, it must’ve gone on for at least, I don’t know, ten minutes? I still can’t believe no one else was witness to this. A grown man and a teenage kid beating the shit out of each other in a parking lot, would’ve been viral for sure. We both had bruises for about a month afterwards.”

“So what then—“

“Well hell, somehow… I don’t remember how but we both ended up back on our feet. We were a mess, clothes torn to bits, bleeding everywhere, just kind of trying to catch our breath I guess. And then suddenly, we’re laughing. I don’t remember who started laughing first, but the both of us are just hysterical at the ridiculousness of the situation, like it was the funniest goddamn thing in the world.” he smirks, thinking about how odd it all must’ve sounded. “Next thing I know we’re the best of friends… funny how things work themselves out.” Mr. Tom reaches again for the green package in his breast pocket, lighting a fresh joint with his tarnished Zippo. “You sure you don’t want any?” he asks. I go to decline, but thinking of my earlier baptism I reach for the drug in question. “Good man” he encourages as I take a quick puff. Moments later I’m coughing and sputtering, my body screaming out in protest of the acrid smoke from my lungs. Mr. Tom laughs kindly, patting me on the back. “Don’t worry, you’ll feel the reward soon.” I nod, wiping the tears from my eyes as he takes the joint for himself.

“Greg pay to fix your tires?” I ask, still coughing.

“Nah, he was just a kid, he didn’t have any money” Mr. Tom defends. “I figured after failing him we were about even. Worked out for the best anyhow. That summer I taught him English during the day and bomb making at night. Everything he knows he learned from me, helped shape him into the classically-trained domestic terrorist you know today.”

“Did you know you were training your progeny?”

“Not at first… at first I figured he was just a bored kid who wanted to build pipe bombs. He was smart though, figured out who I was long before I told him. It was nice you know? To have someone I could talk to without the mask on.” I nod at this. “Thing is, I eventually realized those things he’d been written in his manifesto weren’t just words. Greg really does want to save the world… in his own twisted way.”

“You approve of all this then?” I ask. “The bombing? The terrorism?”

“You don’t?” he asks, almost surprised.

“I don’t know…” I admit, with a shake of my head. “I’m still coming to terms with it myself. I mean, what is it that Greg wants? Really?”

“The motivations of a bombmaker are never an easy thing to grasp” Tom tells me. “We’re a notoriously complicated bunch.”

“What about you?” I ask pointedly.

“What about me?”

“Well… I mean why’d you do it?” I ask, not naming the specific act. Mr. Tom is quiet for a moment, thinking the question over before answering.

“I was pretty messed up after the war, not exactly emotionally stable”  he admits, placing unseen quotes around ‘emotionally stable.’ “That was a big part of it.”

“Is this your insanity defense?”

“I’ve been practicing” he retorts, a nervous chuckle reminding us both of the potential death penalty we faced if ever captured. “Still though, even despite my state of mind, I knew things had to change. The country was going downhill, but nobody had the courage to do anything about it. Problem is, I was a soldier. I wasn’t fit for protest, or politics. I didn’t know how to fix things, so I decided to blow them up.” He chuckles again at his own joke. “I was never much of a problem solver I guess. Still, it seemed to be working. Together with my little militia group we started doing bombings up and down the east coast. The atmosphere for it was perfect, with the economic protests in full swing. While the cops clashed with hipsters in Central Park we’d plant our ordinance somewhere across town. Banks were a popular target, we’d blow up the silly public art displays outside their buildings, or the executive Ferrarris parked outside. We were sending a message, reminding the people in power what their people were capable of. Problem is though, it wasn’t enough. Again it’s the non-violent protest mentality, though we encouraged some to join the fight, most people still believed that terrorism wasn’t an option, that their hippie drum circles were going to dethrone the capitalist machine. I realized then that we were past the point of convincing them otherwise, that we needed to bring it all down while we still could. That’s when I met ALF.”

“Who?”

“ALF. The Anonymous Liberation Front. You’ve heard of them I’m sure.”

“A bit” I mention, thinking back to the minuscule textbook blurb which had been afforded the revolution in my school texts.

“So there were lots of different militia groups back then, each with their own reasons for wanting to bring things down. The group I started with were army guys, wanted to stop the endless war. Then there were the guys down in the South, mostly waiting for the new gun control regulations to pass so they could justify armed rebellion. Anonymous though… you know their history at all?”

“Not really.”

“Started as a hacker group, back before anybody realized hackers could be a force for anything other than mischief. Only when they started releasing confidential bank communications did they get branded as terrorists. And they were, they did more real damage to the establishment than I could ever hope to do with a couple bombs. Evidence of war crimes, of programs to scam minorities into bad mortgages. One of the funniest ones was when they hacked this one senator’s email, spread around pictures of him in a dress until he resigned.” I smirk at this particular revelation, Mr. Tom sighing wistfully. “Unfortunately, then came NetSafe, the government’s program to lock down the net. Recorded everything you did, every purchase you made. Used to be I could buy my explosive materials at the hardware store, but if I tried to do that with NetSafe they’d flag my account for a police visit for sure. The biggest problem though is that with free information now a thing of the past, there was no way for these hacker kids to operate. That’s why their leader came to me. He had the building schematics for the NetSafe buildings, wanted enough explosives to level them both.” He laughs, considering this as he takes another hit. “I was a fool. I know that now. Just a boy playing at being a soldier, it was like a game to me.”

“You regret it?”

“Fighting for the revolution?” He defines. “No, that I don’t regret. But Bakersfield… that’s another story.” He stops, considering his words. “There were daycares you know, in the NetSafe building.” I nod, knowing this.

“That’s one of the few facts they mentioned in my textbook.”

“It’s a dirty tactic” he hurriedly justifies. “They put an employee daycare in just about every government building now. It’s a propaganda thing, makes it easier to villainize anyone who might attack it…” he sighs. “Still, I knew about it and I built the bombs anyway. I knew there were people in that building, regular people just doing their jobs, innocent kids. And I killed them, all of them. I pressed the button.” He mentions the button and I find myself again standing at the edge of the schoolyard, gazing out at that dark black building. In my mind’s eye I can see only abstracts, myself bathed in a dark all-encompassing shadow, the sun’s light obscured by that towering black structure. I feel the weight of the button beneath my thumb, the spring loaded pressures-sensitive mechanism quivering beneath my grasp.

“You were actually there?” I ask, intrigued. “I thought you just built the bomb?”

“Trust me, the ALF guys didn’t want me there. They had plans for future targets, didn’t want to risk their bombmaker. I told them the job required technical precision, that they’d need an expert like myself along  just in case something went wrong. It was all a lie.  Truth is the bombs were my babies, the most advanced explosives I’d ever built. It felt only right I be there to send my children off. Unfortunately, the other team failed. Only half of NetSafe went down, far from the total blackout we’d wanted. It was enough to prevent the militias from wresting any real control, and after a month of fighting it was over. Our only chance, and we blew it.”

“You couldn’t try again?”

“Impossible” he tells me bitterly. “They know the flaws of the system now, they’ve got fifteen NetSafe centers around the country, and even if you took out fourteen of them the system could all be routed through that single remaining node. Not to mention we were operating before the PROTECT act got pushed through congress. Even if you did have the resources to launch simultaneous attacks on fifteen different targets, they’d sniff out your plan the second you came up with it.”

“Does Greg know this?” I ask, hopeful of my cohort’s intelligence regarding future terrorist plans.

“He knows” Tom confirms. “He’s too proud to let me advise him on whatever he’s planning, but I know he isn’t reckless enough to start a cross-country bombing campaign.”

“You sure of that?” I ask, a wry smile cross my face.

“I guess not!” He admits, and again we laugh, aware of the ridiculousness of our conversation, gossiping like schoolgirls about blowing up buildings, eyes glazed over with a marijuana haze. Tom takes another hit, handing the cigarette to me. I follow suit without question, the coughing that follows not as harsh as before.

“I pressed the button” I admit unprovoked.

“Greg said that” he acknowledges.

“I guess I’m still not entirely sure why, but, for some reason it felt right.” Mr. Tom nods hearing this, and I’m reminded that he shares my situation. “How was it for you?” I ask then. Mr. Tom looks to me, realizing that my smile references his moment of explosive glory. A similar grin creeps cross his face as the image of that night dancing in his mind.

“Intoxicating. The culmination of everything. This incredible mixture of fear and adrenaline and everything else… it was just… beautiful.” In my mind I press the button, watching in awe as the sky rains fire, Tom summing up the feelings I’ve left unsaid. “It was perhaps the greatest moment of my life. I felt for the first time this intense clarity… that thrill, the thrill of watching the world burn…” he stops suddenly, as it upset with himself. ”No” he says angrily. “Don’t glorify what I did. I know Greg does, I may have even encouraged it, but I’m no hero. Maybe once I tried to convince myself otherwise but no longer. What I did was far from noble.”

“You fought for something you believed in, that’s noble.”

“No. I fought because I was too afraid to accept the truth” he tells me bitterly.

“And what’s that?” He shakes his head sadly, turning to me intensely.

“Let me put it this way, how many types of people are there in the world?”

“Millions?” I question.

“Two” he corrects me. “Creators and destroyers. The two fundamental forces of the universe. All of mankind is defined by these forces… torn between them in an eternal paradox.” I nod slowly, listening as he continues explaining this theory. “Now the force of creation is obvious in man, who; like any other life form; has been granted the instinctual desire to exist. This is the definition of life at its base level, the desire for both self-preservation, as well as the desire to both create something beyond oneself, to procreate. And it’s this kind of immortality that guided most early men, whether they were building tools to help plow the fields, or carving great monuments of stone. All of these things are simply perversions of our want to live, even beyond death.”

“Alright”  I agree. “So man, at his core, is a creator?”

“It’s hardwired into us” he agrees with a nod. “The chemicals coursing through our bodies propels us to fulfill these actions. And yet we all know that at some point man evolved beyond his simple animalistic instincts. We gained the burden of logic, and with it became the only creature in this known world able to rationalize the world, to understand truly our own mortality.” He continues on without pausing, powered by the hazy lack of restraint which drug use inspires. “See, it was with logic and reason that man looked out at the universe for his gods and found nothing. This curse of knowledge brought us to the harsh and cold truth that we are all alone, that any meaning we might’ve applied to our actions is entirely subjective and ultimately pointless. And that’s the paradox of man. Deep down we all know that our acts of creation are meaningless, try as we might to deny it all men are aware that the only constant in this world is death and decay.”

“But still we create”  I argue. “Isn’t that enough?”

“You know the story of Cain and Abel?” He asks. I nod, the bible having been one of the many tomes to grace my bookshelf back home.

“I thought you weren’t a religious man” I challenge.

“Of course not, but the story was written by men. Men who knew the duality of man. Cain and Abel, the sons of the first man. Cain was a gardener, Abel was a shepherd. When it came time to present god an offering, Cain offered creation, the crops which he had grown. Abed offered destruction, the death of his flock. Which man did god favor?”

“Abel.”

“And Cain saw this. He saw that destruction was the only thing worthy of celebration, and so he murdered his brother.” I look to Mr. Tom, his eyes wide with the terror of existence, a man who had confronted his mortality long ago and accepted the blackness he found there without question. “We are the sons of Cain” he tells me. “And knowing this, we have a choice. We can choose to be creators and succumb, like animals, to our natural impulses. We can build huts and construct tools and fuck until the world is heavy with the weight of our progeny. Or we can embrace the dark void of the universe. Recognize that destruction is the only constant in the world, that all things must come to an end. Some men, the heroes of this world, the creators, they keep recklessly hoping to find a glimmer of hope in that darkness. And then there are men like myself, disbelieving of the light, wanting nothing more than to watch it all burn.” He lets this thought linger, rubbing his red eyes as he tries to do what man should not, to rationalize the world. “That’s the battle within everyone of us then. The war between these two sides, between the noble act of creation and the rational act of destruction. I wanted so desperately to believe I was the former. That I had fought to save something, to save the world. And yet as I watched that tower go up in flame, watched as hundreds of lives were snuffed out by my works, I realized what I truly was.”

“The destroyer…” I confirm. Tom laughs, a terrible choking thing that burns with a bitterness I’ve not heard before.

“What’s why I taught Greg” he tells me. “Not because I thought he could save the world but because I thought he’d be the one to destroy it.” He takes another slow drag on his joint before snubbing the thing out and tossing it away, stopping suddenly to put a fist to his mouth, as if to burp. Instead he coughs violently, smoke spilling from his throat out into the air. “Christ…” he sputters.

“You alright?”

“I’m fine” he assures me, still hacking out the last of it as he laughs. “I don’t normally get high like this” he explains away. “Maybe a quick toke after school lets out now and again, but I never had the constitution for much more than that. My old girlfriend turned me on to the stuff.”

“What happened to her?” I ask.

“Who knows?” He giggles, long gone from the world of common restraint, the euphoria so apparent on his face. “God I loved that girl once, but after the war, the things I’d seen. I couldn’t dream like a normal man anymore. All I dreamt of was destruction. I still remember the exact moment everything changed. I was defusing a bomb when suddenly, the fuse triggered. Now it was probably just a coping mechanism, something my panicked brain devised at that instant, but instead of being afraid I instead felt this intense sense of euphoria. It felt like my body had become detached from the physical, like I was seeing the world for the first time. And in that moment I felt myself torn to pieces. I could feel the explosion ripping through me, my body burning away to nothing. But I was completely at peace with it, with my mortality, with the inevitable call of death.” Mr. Tom takes a long pause, his words drifting away on the summer wind.

“And the bomb?”

“A dud” he tells me, chuckling. “But that feeling never left me. I realized in that moment just how fragile the world is, that at any point the nukes could start flying and we’d there’d be nothing we could do about it. That we’d all be vaporized before any of us even got the chance to make peace with our gods…” I look up at Mr. Tom to find him gazing off into the distance wearing the look of the mortal dreamer. The same far off look Greg got sometimes, those nights when he stared out into the night and found nothing but darkness. ”It’s starting” Mr. Tom says suddenly, my eyebrows raising as he points out at the black sky, me turning to witness the single sliver of light streaming towards the heaven’s, exploding then into a sparking multicolored blossom. In that moment I’m back in the woods with Greg, watching homemade bottle rockets try to break the surly bonds of earth, their colorful death illuminating the world around us for the brief beautiful instant.

“July 4th…” I murmur to myself, suddenly aware of the patriotic date. Watching as the brilliant firestorm in the sky celebrates the same country which had turned my current companion into a gunpowder fetishist. The same country he had once sought to destroy.

“Sometimes” Tom starts, not taking his eyes from the light show. “I can still feel that bomb tearing me apart.” I think of my illusionary lover, there beneath the old gnarled tree. The two of us grasping each other tightly as the bomb explodes in the distance, stripping our flesh from the bones, burning us to ash.

“How does it feel?” I ask, our faces painted with the colors of each exploding flower. He pauses before turning to me, eyes hard and serious as he meets my gaze.

“Better than sex.”

I nod, knowing exactly what he means.

“How do you know all this?” Jude asked. The old man smiled, answering simply:

“Because I was there.” 

Pacing back home, proudly carrying a newly purchased box fan, all my senses seem to be in overdrive, brought to life by the burning summer sun hung low in the sky. I’m drunk on sunlight, feeling as though the brilliant resource has burned its way through to my core, bodily systems now propelled by volatile levels of unfiltered UV Radiation like some sort of uninspired superhero. In my mind I see my origin story told in comic panels, my four-color self escaping from the fate that claimed my mortal parents, easily ripping my way out of the wreckage as I stand in awe of the only witness to my rebirth, the burning yellow sun from which I pull my powers. Maybe that’s my true identity. The only survivor of a doomed alien race. No recollection of who I am or how I’ve come to exist on this strange lonely planet. Sent from the stars to save humanity.

Then again, I doubt Superman ever helped blow up a high school.

Its late as I return to the house, opening the front door to find Oswald bounding down from his window perch, scampering across the carpet to greet me with a curious mew. Placing my purchase aside for a moment I happily bend down to scratch the overheated kitten behind the ears, him purring at the long overdue attention. “I come bearing gifts!” I declare then, gesturing dramatically at the box beside me. The cat looks at me helplessly, and I realize a visual demonstration might be in order.

I hastily rip open the cardboard prison which traps my new appliance, tossing aside an unnecessary amount of packaging before setting the thing upright. As I grab the cord and attempt to locate the closest outlet, Oswald moves curiously forward to brush his face against the plastic mesh of the fan exterior, trying to discern the purpose of this strange new appliance. Plugging in the fan I laugh, the sudden blast of air threatening to knock the surprised kitten off his feet. Oswald hastily scampers behind the sofa, poking his head back around the corner hesitantly to confront this new foe. I shake my head at the comedy before taking a seat on the carpet, smiling as I align myself directly in front of the air current, closing my eyes, focusing my senses. I can feel the path of the current, the cool air crashing first into my forehead, then breaking apart and spreading out like a thin veil across the rest of my being. For a brief moment I exist only in this tiny pocket of the world, a place far away from the overwrought symbolism and meaning men vainly attempted to apply to their lives. A peaceful empty bubble of nothingness. Neither happy nor sad, neither proud nor defeated. Simply alive.

Later, returning from the kitchen with a can of cherry cola, I notice Oswald has worked up the courage to confront the fan. The kitten lies peacefully a few meters from the rumbling source of cool air, comfortable though still wary, opening an eye every few moments to make sure the strange object hasn’t advanced on his position. I chuckle at the sight, before flopping down on the couch and reaching backwards to retrieve my chosen reading from the end table.

I long ago ran out of legitimate material to read, having exhausted the entirety of Tom’s collection of literature both classic and contemporary. What remains then is an odd mixture of printed works, a sprawling un-categorized assortment of old car manuals, cover-faded comic books and horror magazines, and a strangely comprehensive collection of vintage spanking erotica. Sprinkled amongst this however, is the true keystone of Tom’s collection, stacks of subversive counter-culture material, photocopied manifestos hastily compiled for distribution among revolution-era fanatics, rusting staples barely able to hold the creased and stained tomes together. The themes are common: anarchy, civil unrest, revolution, a combination of rambling anti-government rhetoric and pipe-bomb recipes.

At first I was dismissive of these writings, unable to make much sense of the outlandish conspiracy theories and half-baked political idealism contained within. However as I read on, I find myself oddly fascinated by this window looking out on the unspoken war, a period of civil unrest which our own government barely acknowledged as having taken place. With the once free net now under the watchful eye of big brother, the print industry had briefly come back to life, once-abandoned presses put back to work churning out anarchist pocket bibles for those fighting to restore free information. All of this would culminate in the Bakersfield bombing, something the history books told us was an unforgivable terrorist act launched by a small group of unstable anarchists, the major offenders hung while the minor participants were granted limited amnesty by their wise and forgiving government. Here though I found a much more telling portrait of the war, presented through the eyes of those who fought it. A breakdown of neo-Capitalism’s failures on page 21, a guide on how to convert standard firearms to full-auto on page 22. On the front pages: “Praise to the Bakersfield Bastard,” “All hail the New Salvation Army.” Praise to the martyr Sandy Jacobs and scorn to the turncoat scoundrel John Federman. Down with the broken democracy, which makes a slave of the working man, where the rich pose like gods. A new age is coming; it is almost in our grasp.

Praise to the revolution.

“Morons!” I hear Mr. Tom yell, looking up over the booklet to find the disgruntled educator shoving the front door aside with a foot, throwing his schoolbag in the corner. “C’mere you little bastard” he says as Oswald bounds his way, kneeling down to pick up the kitten. Oswald purrs loudly as Mr. Tom pets him generously.

“Something wrong?” I query.

“Damn administration” Tom gripes, bending at the knees to let Oswald jump to the floor. “They say all the summer school kids aren’t meeting goals, aren’t ready for that stupid SCOT bullshit. What do they expect! It’s summer school, these are the nitwits that couldn’t pass the course in the first place. And now they say we have to stay behind longer to help them along, get the district’s scores up. All unpaid of course!”

“Sounds rough.”

“Yeah well… that’s the life of a teacher for you. They give us a peasant’s budget and expect us to make miracles happen. Hell, in India every schoolkid gets a free reader just for showing up. And we’ve got textbooks talking about how global warming might be a problem.”

“It was the same at my school” I assure him. “Most anything I learned I had to learn on the net.”

“Great…” he sighs. “Our kids so desperate to learn they’ve got to rely on a network of idiots and perverts. What a country…” It’s then that Tom notices the papers I’m holding. “Eh…” he groans, almost embarrassed. “Whatcha readin’ those old relics for?”

“I dunno… it’s all pretty interesting really. They didn’t teach us much about the revolution in school.”

“Yeah well, I supposed they’ve got their reasons for that…” Mr. Tom muses. I look up to find him curiously examining my scalp. “Got a haircut” he observes finally, standing over the couch.

“I did.”

“Looks good.” He rubs my shorn skull playfully, me trying my best to brush him away. “Like the Hitler youth or something.”

“Thanks” I respond sarcastically, him laughing as he stops into the kitchen to pull free a liter of orange juice.

“I’m serious.” He pauses his thought to take a greedy gulp from the carton, wiping his mouth on an arm. “What’s the occasion?”

“Nothing really.”

“You know…” he starts, returning to the living room. “In Japan the samurai used to cut their hair when they lost a duel. You lose a samurai duel?” I smirk.

“No, nothing like that. I just felt like a change I guess… was getting pretty long anyhow.” Mr. Tom nods at this. “Also uh…” I start, almost reluctant to admit it. “I went out today.” Mr. Tom turns to me with a shocked look on his face, and for a second I’m worried he’ll be upset. “The air conditioner broke–” I try to explain. “I was, you know, dying in here.”

“You went out?” He clarifies.

“Yeah… just to the pool. And Wal-World where I bought the fan.”

“The pool? What pool? The municipal pool?”

“Yeah.”

“The public municipal pool?” He says slowly. I feel cornered. I’d somehow assumed this wouldn’t be a problem, what with Greg parading about in public without a second thought. But what had I done to assume that kind of privilege for myself? I was in no position to have taken the risk, and I consider the best apology for the situation.

“Listen… I–”

“Good!” He declares suddenly, much to my surprise. Mr. Tom flops down in the worn armchair beside the couch, seeming oddly excited. “Really, that’s good!”

“Uh… thanks?”

“How’d it feel?” he asks in a giddy tone. “You know, to get back out there? Sneak back into society?”

“It felt…” I pause, searching for the right word to describe the flood of transcendent emotions I’d confronted that morning, the long and cacophonic rebirth which had brought me back into the world. Knowing I’ll never find the words, I settle for “Good.” Mr. Tom smiles knowingly.

“Yeah…” he says with a nod, the awkward pause that follows forcing me to crane my head about in search of a mammoth. “Jesus, it really is hot in here” he murmurs, pulling away his shirt collar. “I know tonight is pizza night but there’s not much worse than a sweaty slice of pepperoni.” I laugh at this, Mr. Tom pondering a fix to the situation. It comes to him quickly, eyes lighting up as he claps his hands together in enthusiasm. “I’ve got it. We should eat out.”

“Really?”

“There’s a pretty decent diner not too far from here. Well… it’s a diner anyway, decent might be stretching it. Passable might be a better term. Passable.”

“You think that’s a good idea?” I’m apprehensive, wondering if he’s forgotten my status as a wanted felon. “I mean, you know… what if–”

“Hmm?”

“I mean…. what if someone recognizes me?” Mr. Tom laughs at my apprehension.

“Hell, I barely recognize you with that haircut” he insists. “Besides, you already had your coming out party. Don’t tell me you’ve lost your nerve now.” I chuckle at the apparent challenge, my teenage brain eager to bend to the will of such peer pressure.

“Alright” I concede.

“Great!” he exclaims, tossing me the car keys. “I’ve gotta wash up real quick. You go get the car started, crank the A.C.” I nod and move towards the door. I take a few steps before a thought hits me.

“What about Greg?” I ask. Mr. Tom shakes his head at my apparently errant question, disappearing into the bathroom.

“Screw him!” He yells. It’s as good an answer as any.

—

“Listen, don’t bother to read through that thing” Mr. Tom instructs, me awkwardly flipping through the ridiculously comprehensive menu in abject horror. “Places like this that try to do everything, usually end up doing most of it wrong.” Tom’s taken me to a retro “1950s” diner, which a hundred years past the point now knows nothing about the 1950s other than Elvis clocks and paper hats. If anything, the theme is more a convenient excuse to avoid purchasing the costly menu-tables standard to most family restaurant chains, letting customers order food and drinks with as little human interaction as possible. Horrifically aware of our server’s impending return, I long for the comforting distance offered by such soulless technology.

“How the hell does anyone make a decision in a place like this?” I ask. “I feel like I’m going to have a panic attack.”

“Listen, just pick something simple. Anything complicated they’re just going to screw up someh– hello there!” Mr. Tom exclaims suddenly, the cheery waitress re-entering the scene.

“Well have you boys decided yet?” She asks, Mr. Tom nodding eagerly.

“Oh yes” he confirms. My eyes are glazed over as I frantically flip through the pages, hoping her attention is focused on my dining companion. “I will be having the Bacon Cheeseburger, while my friend here…” he motions in my general direction.

“Uh…” I stall, hastily scrambling through my options. Countless glossy pictures of over-saturated menu options stare back at me, the hard glare of ceiling lights reflecting off the menu’s heavy laminate almost blinding. “I’ll have the chicken parma–” I look up to see Mr. Tom, angrily shaking his head and mouthing the word ‘no’ out of sight of our clueless waitress. “Erm” I clear my throat. “I’ll have the meatlo–.” More frantic head shaking. “The tuna mel–” Mr. Tom’s head threatens to break free and roll across the floor. I’m running out of time. I look up, exasperated. “The bacon cheeseburger?” I manage to get out.

“Are you sure?” she questions. Wouldn’t want you to change your mind!” Mr. Tom laughs at the good-natured joke, something which stands in stark contrast to my own awkward chuckle, me pondering the ramifications of her simple ribbing on the psychological game currently in play. My uncle had hated to eat out, a luxury we only engaged in on ‘special occasions,’ something usually defined as the times that he had some sort of bizarre coupon-stacking scheme to try and exploit.

“People in the service industry are the greatest manipulators of our times” he would angrily declare between sips of his carbonated soft drink, angrily waving away any server who approached without having been electronically summoned. “The fallacy of the gratuity system means that each patron is equal parts customer and employer, the once simple act of service transformed into some sort of bizarre social economic experiment. The purpose is no longer just to bring the customer their food, but instead to create the illusion of a genuine relationship with each patron. How horrible is that? People forced to feign connection with perfect strangers in return for their wages, and us customers forced to entertain this fallacy! How can anyone stand to play such a game?” My uncle always tipped generously and usually complained about it the whole ride home.

It may not have helped that he met his ex-wife while she was still a waitress. An entire relationship based on the illusionary connection generated between drink refills.

“I’m sure” I declare.

“Alright then, two bacon cheeseburgers” she confirms cheerily. “How would you like those cooked?”

“Medium” we both answer with dramatic timing.

Anything else I can get you boys?” this cheeky college-aged brunette asks, smiling as she attempts to force eye contact. An attempt to elicit sympathy, forcing me to recognize her as a fellow member of the human race. I don’t fall for the deception, unwilling to form any false bonds with this well-meaning girl.

“Another Cherry Coke” I say simply.

“A refill for me as well” Mr. Tom chirps in. The waitress smiles, gathering our empty glasses from the table and trotting off towards the soda fountain. My uncle would be performing calculations in his head as to the significance of this act in relation to the sum worth of their brief relationship. I was too busy pondering the ramifications of my food selection.

“The burgers are good” he promises. “Not many places that can screw up flipping a burger.” I nod trustingly.  Mr. Tom was an educated man, who must’ve been aware of the seriousness of his mealtime assertiveness. This simple act of guiding my selection could either be the start of a beautiful friendship or a lifetime of mistrust. I hope for the former.

The waitress returns with our drinks, placing them down on the table with the precise movements of a seasoned minimum-wage earner. I nod courteously as she presents us with a fresh set of straws, an action that would’ve disappointed my uncle but appeals to my base sense of civility. Taking the newly delivered straw from the table I instinctively tear the top part of the paper covering away, putting the exposed plastic tube to my lips and blowing. The paper wrapper fires off at a sharp downward angle and strikes Mr. Tom in the arm, him too busy flipping through the fake-retro jukebox selection to notice. I briefly wonder where I picked that straw trick up, an action I’d performed almost entirely on instinct. Possibly another phantom memory, a remnant of my former life.

“So how’d you become a teacher?” I prompt suddenly, eager to drown out the silent hum of fluorescent lighting with minor talk. Mr. Tom turns from the jukebox and shrugs.

“I guess I just sort of fell into it” he thinks to himself.

“You been teaching long?

“I started a year or so after the revolution ended.”

“Ah.” This intrigues me. “Did you fight?”

“In the revolution?” He clarifies. I nod, him obviously a bit hesitant. “Yeah… I mean. Well I wasn’t on the front line, not by any means. But I played my part.”

“I thought they wouldn’t let people with amnesty status become teachers. Worried you guys would indoctrinate the youth.” I sip my soda.

“I never applied for amnesty” he admits. My eyebrows raise. “Truth is I actually knew some people within the system who were able to scrub my records. Reset my file so it looked as though I’d been studying abroad in Europe while all that nasty revolution business was going on” he looks around for a moment, before lowering his speaking voice and declaring with a grin “To be honest, I don’t even have a teaching degree.”

“What?!” I exclaim. “How the hell did you get away with that?”

“Like I said, they fixed my files. As far as the world knows I graduated with full marks from Ohio State.”

“Ohio State” I remark. “You can falsify attendance at any college in the country and you choose Ohio State.” He pulls the straw from his drink, pointing it at me like a instructor’s pointing stick.

“The idea is to prevent people from asking questions. Yale, Harvard, people like to check up on that sort of thing. Ohio State, most people will take at face value.”

“Fair enough.”

“Besides, I like to think I’m more than qualified even without the degree” he asserts. “You should meet my supposed colleagues, morons all. Higher education is a joke, it’s all just a business. There’s a few that maintain standards, the Ivy League schools mostly. But the rest are little more than diploma farms at this point.”

“Maybe you’re right.”

“Of course I am, they’re lucky to have somebody of my caliber in there for god’s sake. I mean, you should see what qualifies as an English department. Half of these teachers wouldn’t know Dostoevsky from Kafka, too busy teaching ‘Advanced Transgendered Afro-American Studies’ or whatever politically correct nonsense they can come up with!” He rolls his eyes. “Meanwhile I’m stuck teaching this S.C. bullshit, passing around a roll of masking tape so kids can try and keep their copies of Catcher in the Rye from falling apart.”

“Do you have any higher education?”

“I went to college, sure. It’s not like I just came up with the whole teaching idea, I was studying to be a teacher, before I got drafted.”

“You were in the army?” I ask, intrigued.

“Iran. Worst two years of my life.”

“Jesus…” I mutter. “At least you’re still in one piece.”

“A few shrapnel wounds” he admits, almost boasting. “But no, I got out of that hellhole long before the bomb hit.” Adding: “Thank god.”

“What did you do? You know, like… what was your job?”

“Explosive ordinance disposal” he spells out. “Bomb squad.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah…” he says with a sigh. “Wasn’t fun, not by any means.”

“So how’d you wind up with that job?”

“Some aptitude position bullshit” he gripes. “Which I always assumed meant I wasn’t fit for anything else, but that’d I do an excellent job of getting blown to pieces. I mean, my fucking god, I would’ve loved to sit in an air-conditioned tent and pilot drones. Hell, I would’ve been happy as a cook! Yet somehow I wind up pulling the fuses out of roadside explosives. What a gig…”

“I thought they had robots for that sort of thing,” I muse. Mr. Tom laughs.

“Trust me, that’s what I had thought as well. But the technology was crap back then, still is today from what I hear. Unfortunately the MIT kids designing the things failed to recognize that the middle east offers a rather different set of hazards than the New England woodland where they were testing. Sand gets in the gears, heat fries the electronics… hell most of the things break down after only a few hours of field use. I mean, we used a bot if we happened to have a live one kicking around, but 99% of the time it was just some poor bastard in a sumo suit.” He laughs softly, thinking the whole sad situation over. “Worst part is, nobody gave a shit about the bomb guys. Iran was a war of toys, America’s chance to show off what we do best: war. So we had guys running around in exoskeletons with electronic HUD helmet displays, and we had combat drones which could snipe a guy at a thousand yards, all this shiny new tech meant to rain holy fire down on the infidels. But people don’t realize how little any of that shit mattered. That’s what really drove me nuts. The military heads were always talking about how combat was evolving, about how America was going to change the face of warfare. But the bomb never changes. Some of the most powerful weapons ever designed can be put together by any Iranian kid with some extra fertilizer lying around, using whatever bomb recipe he finds on the net. The bomb is everything in war, and I can’t imagine that changing anytime soon.”

Before he can continue on this point our meal arrives, two porcelain plates piled high with food, a slick mountain of meat and cheese that leaves me questioning if anyone in this country understood the concept of “portion control” anymore. At Mr. Tom’s request the waitress returns shortly with a bottle of malt vinegar, to which he nods his head in appreciation, mouth too stuffed full of food to offer a proper “thank you.” She smiles and leaves us to our meal, my eyes briefly following her shapely behind as she goes to run her subconscious psychological mindgame at a different table.

“Dig in” Mr. Tom orders.

“I don’t know where to start…” I look the greasy mess over, a brown mixture of blood and animal fat slowly oozing down the side of the bun, forming a pool of waste which slowly erodes at the french-fry shores of Babylon.

“At least now you don’t have to listen to me rant about the war any longer” Mr. Tom jokes.

“No, really. This is fascinating to me” I assure him.  “I’ve never talked to anyone who was a solider before. Aside from those career adviser army guys.”

“My generation escaped that nonsense” Tom says with a sad shake of his had. “I’ve met the guy they’ve got stationed at my school, one of those all-American patriot types. Really buys into the whole ‘greatest army in the world’ thing. I made the mistake of telling him about my service, and now all he wants to talk about is the good old days of kicking Arab ass. What do this guys do anyway? Just sit you down, tell you to be all you can be?”

“In so many words, yeah.” I don’t elaborate, busy searching for a way to best hold the massive burger sitting before me. After a few half-attempts at gripping the giant hunk of American grub staring back at me, I take the pitiful way out and pick up my knife, moving to cut the damn thing in half. I glance around, half expecting to find some blue collar type sneering at me from a corner booth. Thankfully no one seems aware of my shame.

“Outrageous…” Mr. Tom mutters sadly. “Though I guess you’re lucky in a way. I didn’t even get a say in it, just a short letter telling me I’d been selected to serve my grand patriotic duty to the state. I think I much would’ve much preferred telling some smug jarhead asshole to piss off.” He stops to again lift the heavy burger to his lips, meat juice dribbling from the corner of his mouth as he quickly chews and swallows. “I mean, my god. I was a writer you know? A delicate little artist, already addicted to a sizable number of prescription medications. I had no place on the battlefield.” I nod, both of us munching away at the pile of food. As the various fats and proteins fall effortlessly through my gullet; endorphin levels peaking; I realize Mr. Tom’s meal suggestion was quite agreeable. “You know what they say about war is true, about how it changes a man?”

“You’re changed?” I prompt.

“Oh yeah. I went in a dangerous neurotic, and I came out a dangerous neurotic who knew how to build bombs.”I laugh at this.

“You seem to be doing alright.”

“Seriously though, war fucks you up. Those old revolution leaders you see on the wanted posters? A lot of them are the same story as me. Smart thoughtful kids, who would’ve been more than content to exist peacefully in their little corner of the world, churning out crappy pocket novels or whatever else. Instead they went to war, confronted their mortality. Came back with their eyes wide open, ready to wage war against the system.”

“You kill anybody?” I ask with a stupid childlike curiosity. Mr. Tom sighs. “I’m sorry, that’s a shitty question.”

“No, I didn’t kill anybody. Not during the war anyway” he admits.

“Seriously, you don’t have to talk about it” I assure him.

“No, this is good” he assures me. “I never get to talk about this with anybody. Not sure if you noticed, I’m not much of a people person. Cats I like. People, I can take em’ or leave em.” He takes a sip of soda before continuing. “I saw people die, lots of em’. That’s the thing about bomb duty. The causality rate for EOD guys is 1 in 5, you try not to make too many friends. Doesn’t really make sense to get attached to people when they might be scattered in a bunch of bloody pieces a few moments later.” I nod. “That was the unspoken rule” he says firmly, pointing a french fry my way. “You don’t have a name, you don’t have a family, nobody cares where you’re from or what you do. We’re just there to do the job.”

“You didn’t even know their names?”

“We had nicknames. Dumb shit like Flintstone, who was this real caveman looking fucker, and Luther, who was this white kid who loved hiphop and rap and everything. And Bowie, who for awhile thought we named him after the knife, but got kind of pissed when he found out it was cause he looked like a fag.”

“That’s bad” I chastise.

“I know!” he admits, both of us laughing at the lack of correct politics.

“What’d they call you?” I ask.

“Shakespeare” he admits, chuckling. “They gave me a lot of shit because I was always reading off-duty, or scratching notes into this spiral notebook I carried around. Luckily I got spared a lot of flack since there was this one kid in our unit who was an even bigger nerd than I was. He hadn’t even been drafted, the dumb son of a bitch actually enlisted.”

“Really? Why the hell would he do that?”

“Believe it or not, it’s because he was a huge comic book nerd. Turns out he’d seen some of the new tactical suits they were giving the frontline guys, and he thought by joining up he’d get a chance to wear one, be a real superhero.” I shake my head in disbelief at this. “I know!” Mr. Tom exclaims. “Trust me, he caught a lot of shit when he told us this. Unfortunately for him, the only thing us bomb guys got to wear was those bulky sumo suits, which made you look a lot less like Superman and more like an obese astronaut. The worst part is he wanted a cool nickname so bad; he kept asking us to call him ‘Iron Man’ or ‘Captain America’ or something.”

“So what’d you call him?”

“We called him Melvin!” Tom exclaims, cracking up.

“Melvin?”

“I don’t know why, it just stuck. Thing is though, Melvin never complained. No matter how much we fucked with him, he didn’t care. He just wanted to serve his country. Never hesitated to put on that sumo suit and waddle off, ready to save the world.” Mr. Tom sighs before continuing. “After a while we couldn’t give him shit anymore, he was too good, made us look like idiots every time he came back, holding a pile of fuses and grinning like an idiot.” I shake my head, the somber mood giving me a clue as to where this is going. “So, two weeks before I’m set to leave I catch some stomach bug, end up puking my guts out in field tent. Later that day I find out that Melvin took my shift and got blown to bits.” He shakes his head bitterly.

“Jesus…”

“Yeah well… that’s just how it goes I guess” Tom says with a sigh, reclining against the red plastic booth cushion. “I was pretty tore up about it for awhile, spent a lot of time trying to come to terms with it all. I still haven’t, not really.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“Trust me I know. Law of averages right? But it still doesn’t make any sense to me. Bad pudding saved my life, imagine that? Not any quick thinking on my part, not some sort of warrior’s instinct. Just an expired cup of chocolate pudding. If you ever wanted a definition for the arbitrary nature of death, there you go.”

“At least you made it back in one piece.” Tom laughs at this.

“One piece, my body sure. But  I was so shell-shocked, it was like I was in a coma or something. I remember I still had my big spiral notebook full of all my notes, that was going to be my thing. I was going to write this great war journal, be some sort of literary hero. After Melvin though, I didn’t want it anymore, I didn’t want to pretend to be a hero. Then one night, I broke the unspoken rule, and I looked up Melvin’s obit on the net.”

“Oh no…” I murmur.

“Yeah. I shouldn’t of done it, but I did. I read that thing over and over, I memorized it. I read about the family he left behind, a wife and a little girl. I read about his mother and father, all the pointless details about his years as a boy scout and his high school athletic records and whatever else. It’s horrifying you know, a man’s whole legacy reduced to three paragraphs of text buried in the archive of some hometown newsfeed. Until finally, I couldn’t keep thinking about it anymore. Hopped in my car and drove five states over to his grave, standing over it and  laughing myself to tears.” Mr. Tom pauses, cracking a sad smile. “Right below his name, etched into the stone: Iron Man. He must’ve been telling his family one hell of a story in those emails home, that they would actually go and put that on his grave.” Mr. Tom shakes his head sadly, chuckling at the thought.  ”But he deserved that; he deserved to be called whatever the hell he wanted. Melvin wasn’t like most of us, a bunch of dumb kids just waiting to get home. He went into that war because he wanted to be a hero, wanted to serve his country, whatever that means. Instead he got blown to bits a million miles from home. A few months later and Iran goes and nukes their own capital city. Tens of thousands of innocents dead.” Tom grips his forehead, letting out a pained sigh. “Melvin deserved better than that. Everything he’d fought for, everything we’d fought for, all of it so goddamned pointless.”

“But they had a nuke” I offer, now the devil’s advocate.

“They did, and so what? China’s got nukes  and India’s got nukes, and we’ve got nukes. That’s the problem, is thinking that we can close Pandora’s box if we fight long and hard enough. But we can’t. So we accept that we have the ability to end the world  and we work to fix the future so that we never have to use it. The sum of all money America’s spent on war could’ve  bought every kid in this country a college education, could’ve fed and clothed most of the third world.   But that’s not how America thinks anymore. We don’t know how to build, we only know how to destroy. That’s what I was fighting to change.”

“That’s when you joined the revolution?”

“Yeah. I got home from Melvin’s grave, burned all my notebooks that same night. Just sat there and watched them burn. The next morning I starting training again, trying to get back into fighting shape. Eventually one of those guys I served with got me involved with one of the shotgun militias, training in secret on weekends while living off the money I’d saved up in the service. That was the funniest part. Using my government training and pay to building bombs to destroy them.” I shake my head in disbelief, trying my best to take in the bizarre life story of a man who before this point I had never really known. He chuckles at my surprise. “Weird, huh?”

“Yeah” I say, placing emphasis on the word to clarify just how weird it is. ”So you built bombs?”

“Well, not right away. At first, our little group didn’t really have any idea what we were doing, just wanted to stir up some trouble. We talked about a violent overthrow of the government but I don’t know how many people were really committed to that at first. I think we all figured we’d cause some trouble, scare some people, and then we’d get tired of playing revolutionary and go back to our normal lives. But as more and more groups began starting up, more and more people joining the cause, we kind of realized that maybe it was possible. Maybe we really could fix this country, take control back from the useless figureheads who were piloting us towards Armageddon ” Mr. Tom pauses for a long while, nervously sipping at the bare remnants of his drink, straw coughing and sputtering as it struggles to collect the scant droplets of soda still remaining. “So yeah, I building bombs. Small ones at first, but bigger and bigger as our targets became more and more important. Until one day I’m contacted by the head of the resistance, who sends me a set of building schematics. Two big buildings, forty floor skyscraper, asks me to build bombs big enough to bring them both to the ground.”

“What buildings?”

“The NetSafe Industrial Complexes” he says in capitalized letters, sighing as he spells it out. I look at him confused the name not ringing a bell. “Of course, you probably know this event by a different name: ‘Bakersfield.’”

A thought strikes me then, as I look back up at the man sitting across from me. The smiling middle-aged English teacher, the mild-mannered cat lover who griped about his job and enjoyed cheeseburgers. The man I only now recognized as the one whose throne we’d usurped as the most wanted criminal in the country.

#3, the Bakersfield Bastard. A monster hiding in plain sight, just like me.

“Can I wrap this up for you boys?” I barely register the words falling from our waitress’s over-painted mouth, watching as she gathers up plates still piled high with food, still in a numb shock as I contemplate the gravity of this revelation.

“That’d be great, thanks” Mr. Tom confirms.

“Is there anything else I can get you both?”

“I think I’m about ready to enter a food coma already” Mr. Tom jokes, looking in my direction with a smile. “How about you?” It takes me a moment before I remember the appropriate canned response.

“I’ll be fine” I lie.

These nights I find myself stare upwards at a still unfamiliar ceiling, tracing the decades of blameless cracks and stains, the features of these blemishes constantly shifting in and out of focus. Mr. Tom’s been kind enough to set me up in the guest bedroom, Greg apparently content to crash on the couch. Yet despite the hospitality, I’m still unable to calm my nerves, lost in a haze of anxious paranoid daydreams, my fevered mind continually dredging up illusions with which to haunt me. There in the darkness I entertain these horrors with an appropriate level of casual terror, each passing car an armored police wagon about to come to a screeching halt outside my window, each miscellaneous creaking of the old house truthfully the sound of a highly trained SWAT team preparing to smash through the front door and savagely beat the whole lot of us into submission. These late night lapses of sanity have stricken me with a terrible case of insomnia, tossing and turning in bed as dark suited government agents shuffle about in the closet. Closing my eyes as the riot police gather around my bedside with clubs at the ready.

It’s been about a month since we joined the F.B.I.s most wanted list, and I can only assume there now exists a sizable contingent of people whose only defined purpose in life is to put a bullet in my head. Greg had forced me out of one of my midday bouts of sleep deprivation to watch as our bounties were announced, me watching as a grey-haired law enforcement official took his position at the center of the screen, sternly holding our portraits up to the camera. If I’d known my awful yearbook picture would one day be broadcast worldwide, I’d likely have taken the time to shave my pubescent half-stache.

“The two kids you see here are public enemy number one” he’d said, thick ridiculous mustache bouncing as he’d talked. “The bounty is being set at fifty million U.S. dollars.”

The words had fallen from his mouth in a slow southern drawl that made them sound almost magical. Not fifty million U.S. dollars, but fif-ty mill-yan yoo-ess daw-lers. Greg must’ve noticed my jaw drop, applying his own strange interpretation of our sad situation.

“Look at it this way” he’d said with that dumb grin of his. “Your life is worth more now than ever before.”

Despite myself, I’d smiled at this thought.

Unfortunately my newfound worth has done little to curb my fears, giving me no peace from my waking nightmare. It doesn’t help that Greg hasn’t allowed the living room screen to be turned off even once since we’ve arrived, happily drowning in the endless feed of fear-mongering disinformation, trolling internet feedsites for the latest smattering of uncivil public opinion. Every expert of law enforcement, child psychology or demolitions has us to thank for their now steady job running the news circuit, each spouting their hypothesis about how two seemingly normal American teenagers could be driven to  this act of terrorism.

To be honest, I don’t even have an answer myself.

I try my best to remain ignorant of the media circus, too overwhelmed to entertain the hours of finger-pointing and calls for justice, maybe even hoping that if I ignore it long enough it will all go away. Yet there’s one image that still calls to me, that causes me to pause by the screen, to glance over Greg’s shoulder to see what new music track the footage of our destruction has been synced to. Even in their awestruck state following the blast, my classmates had the presence of mind to record our terrible act for posterity. Within a day there were at least thirty or so videos of the scene making the rounds, every possible angle well covered by the various electronic devices my peers carried. These videos were accompanied, of course, by a thousand or so amateur photographs, many of which contained my cheeky schoolmates posing like gang members in front of the school’s smoldering remains. However, only one person had been lucky enough to be recording at the actual moment of destruction, and I imagined this unknown student and her family would be set for life after recieving the insane payout the networks were giving for access to the footage.

It was quite an awful shot really, the director recording in the much-maligned ‘portrait’ view, interviewing her excited friend about summer plans. Then, over the subject’s shoulder we see a telltale flash, a telling gasp the last sound heard before the cheap American-made speakers blow out.  When the light fades, all that remains is that flickering landscape, black smoke curling forever towards the sky, the great fires of hell risen up to claim the living.

I couldn’t escape this clip if I tried, each news stations happily replaying this rare piece of eyewitness footage as many times as can be fit between the commercial breaks. I didn’t blame them. Even despite the poorly compressed video file, it was the most powerful image I’d ever seen broadcast in my lifetime. The first image in a long while that reminded us that; even after decades of trampling rights in the name of security, endless wars fought to secure our borders, and the fall of the last great revolution to ever challenge the great and indestructible US of A; the kingdom could still fall.

That beautiful fire, burning onwards forever. This was the mental image that distracted me long enough to find those brief moments of thoughtlessness in which to drift off, overtaking my questionable fantasies of burly men in uniform beating the shit out of me with police batons. My hysterical mind easily overtaken by that pixilated firestorm rising from the ground. Closing my eyes I can still see it perfectly, the roaring wall of fire growing ever larger, overtaking all of my senses. The sound of burning and crackling foundations growing increasingly louder, the catastrophic sound ripping me apart.

Then, suddenly, the fire parts, and I find myself again in that familiar scene, standing beside my lover. She waits for me as she always does, sunlight flowing through her hair, somehow smiling at me from beyond a featureless veil. This time however, the set has changed. The soft forest ground beneath our feet has been stripped away, revealing the burning sands of a wasteland. The once proud oak tree stands decrepit, its gnarled black branches offering no shade from the blood red skies. Then, before I can even speak a word, there’s a flash on the horizon, the burning sun disappearing behind the white hot flash of a nuclear explosion. We embrace there beneath the shadow of that massive mushroom cloud, lost in our perfect moment, the roar of the screaming world engulfing us both. And before our bodies burn to dust she whispers in my ear–

[[Unintelligable]]

I bolt upright, grasping hurriedly at my chest as I exit the dream, my tardy grasp of reality late to assure me that I haven’t yet been obliterated. My hand stops on my chest, feeling my heart as it slams against the filthy sweat-covered t-shirt hanging loosely from my bony frame. I find a brief moment of ambiguous mental peace then, pleased to find myself still among the living, though; having lived through another retelling of my tragic end; unfortunately aware of my own horrible mortality.

The nihilistic mood is short lived, a series of abrupt popping noises from the living room sending me into a terrified panic. In my surprise I stumble from the bed, losing my footing and landing rather ungracefully on the bedroom carpet. A million thoughts are run through my head. Gunshots? It seems like a reasonable conclusion. Panicked at the thought, I search for my own weapon, something with which to defend myself against the grizzled bounty hunter now assuredly making his way through the apartment. I hastily grab the first thing within reach, what feels like a bat of some sorts, and slowly rise to my feet.

Outside I hear nothing, the silent assassin treading softly across the rug. I realize quickly that there’s no avoiding confrontation, no chance of escape in the short window of time I have before he finishes clearing the other areas of the apartment and finds me trembling in the darkened bedroom. Realizing this, my instinct takes over, and with a pitiful cry  I find myself awkwardly attempting a charge into the heat of battle, jumping to my feet and bursting through the door in a panicked rage. Not a second beyond the door does the lunacy of my actions become quite apparent.Unfortunately, there’s no turning back now.

“Meow?”

My brief moment of masculine bravado is cut short when I realize there is no enemy waiting to be conquered. The apartment is empty, save for the lone gunman himself:  an adorable six-month old kitten named Lee Harvey Oswald. It’s then I notice the smoke rising from the newly broken air conditioner, one which pops and sputters as the plastic fans grind to a halt. Breathing a sigh of relief I move to relinquish my weapon, looking down to witness the unknown bludgeon still held firmly in my right hand, finding a roll of Christmas themed wrapping paper.

With a shake of my head I playfully bat the kitten on his head with my branded Frosty-the-Snowman killing tube, flopping down on the couch and looking towards the broken air conditioner with dismay. As the first bead of sweat drips from my brow, I realize this is going to be a problem.

In a different timeline I’ve been trained as an electrical engineer, a skillset which makes me more than able to fix the assumedly minor electrical problem presented. Back in the real world I’m simply another unskilled underprepared product of the public school system, trapped in an enclosed box of unrelenting humidity. If Greg would’ve been able to fix it, I’ll never know, my cohort off on his own unknown adventure.

Heatstroke kills 300 people a year, usually the elderly, or infants left locked in cars by under-educated parents. I figure that as a red-blooded American male, I could stand a bit of heat.

Two hours later and my bravado has all but faded, surrendering to the power of the great sun and begging forgiveness for having ever doubted his wrath. Oswald looks up at me pitifully, almost as if to ask if I; gentle god, provider of wet food and ear scratches; would be so kind as to forgive whatever kitty sins he may have committed and cease this punishment. I wish I could communicate to him how ineffectual us gods can be. I think to let Oswald outside, but remembering Tom’s stern warning about letting his only son be corrupted by the neighborhood strays, I find myself unable to help the poor feline.

In my hope to “beat the heat” I’ve opened all the windows in the house, even going so far as to remove the dark coverings we’d put up to prevent the wandering eyes of passerby. Still, I find no reprieve from this burning prison, the sweltering heat dancing on my skin, sliding across my body. I’m convinced as each drop of perspiration runs down me that my skin has begun to melt, flesh slowly falling away from muscle and bones. And in the midst of my misery I can feel something tearing at me, a strange and unspoken desire I can’t quite place. The nagging feeling that there’s an obvious answer to my plight that I just can’t seem to make sense of.

My eyes go wide when I realize:

The water is calling to me.

In the bathroom I twist the shower knob to medium cold, listening as the once silent porcelain chamber is filled with the unrelenting hiss of water pressure fired through the stainless-steel showerhead. As I disrobe I grab Oswald from where he attempts to drink from the toilet, tossing him carelessly through the doorframe and slamming the door shut, the crashing waves drowning out his protests, individual beams of water spitting furiously at the tub below. In the back of my mind something screams that this is not enough to sate the ritual, that this tiny sanctum is a poor replacement for the oceans and rivers and lakes and countless other bodies of water to which man has given names. I pray this thought will fade, trying to lose myself in the endless flow of my primordial origins. My melting skin is stripped away by the cascading waters, and I can feel myself being deconstructed, my illusionary concept of self slowly losing form, returning to the immaterial world. I do nothing as the water slowly erodes away the layers of clay, pieces of me falling away and swirling towards the drain. Until finally, there’s nothing left and I’m exposed for what I am. The man without definition. The purposeless fool wishing someone would finally tell him who he was.

“You’re a Cuban sleeper agent.”

“Yeah?” I ponder, not looking up from the pages of the book I paw through. “That so?”

“Castro founded a secret super soldier program within the U.S. borders fifty years ago” says Greg. ”Generations of gene-manipulation and cloning later and we’re the result.”

“We’re allies with Cuba” I rebut.

“Raised underground—“ Greg counters. “Bred in tubes to destroy the American way of life, completely unaware that the global politics of the surface world had rendered our mission useless” he taps at the screen in front of him for emphasis, looking backwards at me, saying: “It’s all here on this website.” I grin at that last part, glad to know the facts are coming from a reputable source.

This particular scene takes place a few weeks prior, an era where the American air conditioner worked with Swiss-levels of precision, myself relaxing on the couch with some light reading as Greg surfs the web for the latest news of our cultural importance. One of the odd side effects of our newfound stardom was our unlikely interjection into a variety of conspiracy theories, various nutjobs devoting great amounts of their time to cooking up bizarre explanations of how we were somehow linked from everything to the Kennedy assassination to the rising popularity of ‘Moxie’ soda. Greg occasionally liked to fill me in on some of the more outlandish theories, and I played along best I could.

“I miss the tubes” I muse wistfully. Greg laughs. Oswald takes this opportunity to jump up beside me in search of attention. I’m forced to oblige, lightly scritching him behind the ears as he purrs.

Mr. Tom’s been teaching a summer class, meaning for the better part of the day we have the house to ourselves. Despite this, our interactions have been rather limited. Greg’s consumed himself in his writing, hard at work on some secret document which he refuses to let me read. Each day he settles in after breakfast in front of the laptop and continues writing until Mr. Tom returns in the late afternoon, only interrupting his work to occasionally inform me of whatever dumb new thing he’s found on the internet. I’d press him for details, though its clear Greg was in no mood to share with me whatever it is he’s working on.

To be quite honest, even if he had allowed me to peruse his draft I doubt I’d of had time to fit it between the heavy summer readings I had already prescribed for myself, a stack of material already queuing on the end table beside me. We human beings are the only creatures flawed enough to recognize our own mortality, and our rather pitiful attempt at a coping mechanism is to preoccupy ourselves with useless activity. My distraction of choice is reading, filling the endless summer days with choice selections of fine literature. As an English teacher, Mr. Tom has a sturdy wooden bookcase filled with every manner of prose, a rare collection of un-scanned material, old leather-bound classics mixed in with trashy pocket novels and comic books. I flip through each of these offerings regardless of content, not in pursuit of any higher scholarly truth, but simply to pass the time.

“You hear what they’re calling us now?” Greg asks, still facing the workscreen.

“Who’s calling us what now?”

“The public, the press – they gave us a nickname.”

“What are we, in a band? Why do we have a nickname?” I gripe.

“They always give the good terrorists nicknames, it’s just a thing. The Unabomber, Chemical Ali, The Bakersfield Bastard” Greg rattles off.

“What’re we?” Greg cracks an obvious smile.

“They’re calling us The Connecticut Ghosts,” he reveals, and though I don’t look up from my book I already know he’s smiling in praise of our new moniker.

“Where on earth did they come up with that?”

“Some FBI documents leaked, apparently some higher up is furious that they can’t locate a couple of teenagers. Said quote ‘why can’t we find these fuckers? They aren’t ghosts!’”

“And now we are.”

“Mmhmm” Greg agrees.

“I bet you love that don’t you?”

“Has a certain ring” he admits. I pick up a nearby magazine and fling it his way, him amused by both my dismay at our pop culture relevance and my lack of aim. As we return to the silence though, the feigned normalcy of this lazy summer day, I find myself strangely uneasy. I recognize how complacent I’ve gotten, the ease in which I’ve slipped into the convenient delusion that all is right with the world. I look towards Greg, wondering if he has any true grasp on our situation. Hadn’t there been talk of a plan? That was what had spurned me onward through our peril. Yet whatever Greg’s strategy might be, it’s nothing that’s ever been spelled out for me. Heck, we still talked about our status as wanted felons almost as if in the third person, as if we were somehow unconnected to it all. Even our interactions have been of little significance, casual conversation taking place between the constant tapping of keys and microwavable dinners shared with Tom in front of the living room screen. At the outset I assumed everything would be answered in due time, though today the unanswered is gnawing at me more than usual.

“So what now?” I ask finally, putting my book down. Oswald is curled in a neat ball on my stomach and as I pet him from the head downwards he mews and curls tighter.

“What’s what now?” Greg responds, not looking from the monitor.

“You know…” I don’t have the right phrasing for it but struggle onwards anyhow. “I mean, was this your plan?” Greg tries to respond with another question though I continue rambling. “Seriously, what do we do now?”

“Can’t you see I’m writing” he responds lazily.

“Jesus Greg” I retort, losing my patience. “I’m serious.” The staccato tapping of computer keys goes silent, Greg spinning towards me in his chair so as to address my inquiries.

“What is it you’re asking?” he asks finally. I pause before blurting it out.

“Why’d you blow up the school?” Greg laughs like a bastard.

“C’mon” he growls, getting up from the computer. “What is this?”

“Why’d you blow up the school Greg?”

“I can’t believe you” He cackles, shaking his head sadly. “Firstly, I didn’t blow up the school, we did.”

“I didn’t–”

“You did, we both did.”

“But…. I mean, I didn’t know what I was doing!”I protest.

“And yet you pressed the button” he responds simply. I falter momentarily when I realize he’s right, a sinking feeling growing in my stomach. “Why this mood from you? Blowing up the school is the greatest thing we’ve ever done.”

“Why? What did it accomplish?” I ask bitterly. Greg again shakes his head in disbelief, unwilling to even address my criticism. “Fine” I acquiesce. “Maybe we blew up the school. But I still don’t know why.”

“Stop that.”

“Stop what?”

“Stop this, stop the whole act, the whole innocent thing. Since we’ve gotten here you’ve pretended to be so disaffected by all of this, acting like you’re just some clueless bystander or something. But you know full well what we did, you knew all along. So stop acting like I’m the one to blame, like I’m some sonuvabitch whose gotten you in a fix. I know full well why I blew up that school, for reasons I don’t ever have to justify to you. Now why you blew up the school, that’s something you’re going to have to figure out for yourself.”

This harsh outburst puts me to silence, leaving us awkwardly facing each other. It’s an anger I’ve never seen from Greg, one that leaves me too dumbfounded to retort. Greg chuckles then, spinning back around in his chair, waiting a few moments before tapping away with precise rhythm at a single key. The noise is terribly noticeable given the tense mood, the steady beat slowly losing tempo before stopping completely. “Writer’s block!” Greg comically declares then, jumping up from his chair and storming past the couch.

“Where’re you going?” I ask, worried.

“I’m heading out!” he announces, already towards the front door. Hearing this I jump to my feet, hoping to dissuade him with angry logic.

“No, no, no– you’re not going anywhere. We are wanted fugitives—“

“Just gonna get some fresh air” he reasons, already throwing a spiral notebook and various writing implements into a ratty schoolbag.

“Greg” I state coldly, trying to reason with him. “You can’t go out there. Our faces are on the news every night; you think no one’s going to recognize you?!” Greg’s eyes light up at my challenge.

“Don’t need to worry about that–” He tells me. I watch incredulous as he fishes around in the coat closet, re-emerging a pair of cheap boxy sunglasses and a neon orange hunting hat which reads ‘King of the Bucks.’ “See?”

“You’re going to get us arrested” I plead with him.

“You worry too much. All this stress, it’s no good for you. You should get out, enjoy the summer while you still can.” Greg stops for a moment to bend at the knees, Oswald running forward for a quicj scratch behind the ears. As he stands again he finding me exasperated beside the door, desperate to persuade him to keep our cover. ”Greg–”

“C’mon, you heard what they said” Greg reasons, pushing past me. I watch incredulously as he opens the front door, revealing briefly the glowing portal to the outside world from which we’d been hiding for so long. He looks back for a moment, still grinning like an idiot as he tells me:

“We’re ghosts.”

—

I  emerge damp from the shower maybe an hour later, grabbing one of the nearby sea-green towels and, after wiping myself dry, draping the ocean colored fabric over my head. Lost within these damp confines, I realize I’m miserable. Greg was right, my disaffected attitude has gotten me nowhere. I’m entirely responsible for my predicament, and my attempts to find blame in my compatriot were beyond shameful. I think back to that moment in the schoolyard, looking at that button and for the first time being aware of my own destiny. Yet all I’ve done since that day is tremble like a coward, that once burning resolve far gone from me now. I think of my discarded drugs, the sweet release they offered me, and realized what a fool I’d been to ever abandon them. To have believed I’d somehow evolved beyond my weaknesses.

As I take the towel from my head I find myself face to face with the bathroom mirror, my double hiding behind a sheet of fog. I wipe the perspiration away with a hand to examine my doppelganger for flaws, half expecting to find him laughing at my failure. There he was: the great star of this trashy pocket novel called life, the slow and boring everyman who knew nothing about anything. The nightly television newsmen called him a scoundrel. The gibbering masses of the net endlessly debated his purpose. Yet all I saw was a confused and useless teenage kid, forever trapped beyond the looking glass.

I stare emotionlessly into the man in the mirror, him staring right back into me. Watching as he takes the pair of hair clippers in his hand, nervous electric buzzing screaming rage at the world.

—

I sit anxiously atop my garish beach towel, convinced the screaming neon colors and obnoxious sailboat imagery have the entire cast of this strange play staring at me. I try my best to remain nonchalant, though I can’t stop myself from glancing around at my fellow pool vacationers in fear, waiting for my inevitable discovery. Inside I fight desperately against a panicked impulse to flee, my rational self ready to give up on proving Greg’s ill-though hypothesis, desperate to retreat back to the relative safety of that hellish apartment.

It’s then that I hear a soft plastic thud to my right, turning to see a beachball taking a bad bounce off the rim of the pool, the poorly inflated sphere landing on the damp concrete. My eyes go wide as the ball is caught by a light breeze, rolling in a lazy angle towards me as I curse it silently. Of course, it grinds to a halt right in front of my towel. Outwardly I crack a dumb smile. Inside I begin screaming.

“Hey!” I hear someone yell. I look up with what must be the bug-eyed grin of a madman. I find a small group of Latino teenagers looking towards me, the one closest to the lip of the pool calling out to me. I can see the flash of recognition in their eyes, can see the words ready to escape their lips. “Can we get the ball, man?” one asks. I remain stoic, still smiling like a dullard as I reach for the object in question. I toss it weakly, the youths scrambling to grab their thrown toy from the air. However one keeps her eyes on me, and I watch in horror as she goes to speak, sure she is ready to reveal the demon in their midst.

“Thanks!” She yells.

That’s it.

“Thanks.”

I sit back shocked, sure it must’ve been a fluke. Yet my unmasking never comes. I find myself letting out a choking laugh of relief, my breath short as I contemplate the situation. Me, the great villain of the nightly newsfeeds, the perpetrator of heinous crimes against the state, the perverted of freedoms and enemy of democracy. And I am completely invisible, the most minor of disguises enough to fool the world into accepting me into its disfigured ranks once more.

This epiphany hits me like a brick to the head, one so simple that I curse myself for being so dumb as to believe this hidden identity of mine was somehow unique. I, in some strange semblance of grandiose self-importance, had believed myself to be special, the great demon walking amongst the flock. The sad truth was one I should’ve known all along.

We were all freaks, every last one of us, each wearing a disguise no more convincing than my own. For the first time I could see beyond the veil of normalcy, and I watch contently as the actors parade their true selves about in front of me, observing with fascination the horrors of my fellow man. The young well-toned athletic doing laps on the 6^th lane has a fetish for dressing up in women’s clothing and asphyxiating himself. The teenage kid playfully shoving his friends about in the shallow end was just ten when he pushed his retarded brother down a flight of stairs, before returning to watching cartoons. The middle-aged mother keeping watch over her precious children is a frequenter of the local BDSM dungeon, spending weekends being beaten into submission while chained to a wooden cross. Even the children were future deviants, destined to eventually commit unspeakable atrocities of violence and sexual misdeed. All of us criminals and perverts and blasphemers. All of us hiding in plain sight.

The worst mistake one can make is to believe in humanity. People throw their lives away trying to save their fellow man, preachers screaming from the top of pulpits about how we’ve strayed from the path, fire and brimstone awaiting the whole lot of us. It’s  true of course, all of us are terrible sinners, destined for the hellfire. Everywhere I look I can see the truth in this, our true natures hiding behind the façades we all put on. All of us so consumed with our own imperfections, unable to move forward without drowned in our insurmountable shortcomings. But the truth is that each of us is just as damaged as the last, the flaws we tried so hard to conceal no more blasphemous than those of our brothers. If anything, our true sin is trying so hard to pretend that we’re normal. To believe that somehow we could be saved.

Because in the end, beyond all the pretense and assumed knowledge, we un-savable. Eons of evolution had passed and the result was something no more complex than the protozoa dancing in our Petri dishes, masses of filthy animals driven only by our desire for cheap entertainment. We’d tried to pretend otherwise at one time, but these days there are no misgivings. We’ve traded our greatest works of art and literature for five second clips of men being hit in the testicles with sporting equipment, abandoned romance and love for cheap lurid pornography, spilling countless generations of potential children into damp socks without ever looking back. And that was what scared me the most, knowing that we would never change. That we could put a man on the moon and still have no idea what had motivated us to do so. That a billion years from now we’d still be as ignorant and as confused and as lonely as we ever were. If we even made it that long.

Yet, even knowing this. Knowing that each of us is little more than a disgusting mass of sub-atomic particles, so wretched and horrible that we can’t even acknowledge how wrong we are. Even knowing that someday the sun will explode, and all the accomplishments of man burning to dust in an instant. Knowing all this, somehow–

I still have hope.

“Adult swim is over” the lifeguard announces in his static-laden loudspeaker voice. I watch quietly as the excited children all scamper up from their printed cartoon-character towels, abandoning juice-boxes and Ziploc baggies of goldfish crackers beside tired mothers as they scramble to return to the water. I watch as they splash and yell and try to soak up as many memories of summer fun as they can before the short season comes to an end. Someday they’ll be older, this day forgotten in the midst of more important memories, none of them remembering that beautiful moment when adult swim ended and the world came alive again.

In the bathroom I watch as the man in the mirror takes an electric razor to his head, the clippers tearing away patches of dense overgrowth. The harsh electric vibrations ripping at his scalp, tearing pieces of him away. I watch at the house as he stands in the burning doorway, scratching a kitten behind the ears before stepping breathlessly into the light. And I watch as he gets up from his beach towel, staring deeply into the blue waters and catching a glimpse of himself for the first time in a long while.

“No running!” I hear the megaphone yelling behind me, but it’s too late, grinning like a madman as I break into a sprint towards the pool edge and leap. The sound of my cannonball’s vacuum gurgles behind me as I sink into the cold depths of the deep end, a content smile slowly sliding across my face.

Born again.

Nero remained silent as he piloted the tiny craft through the silent reaches of space, almost as if unaware of the destruction left in their wake. His steady calm was a stark contrast to Jude’s numb stupor, the latter boy still in shock from their near brush with death. His mind replayed the escape over and over, remembering how Nero had daringly cut an impossible path through the clouds of wreckage, somehow outrunning the cascading shockwaves of destruction which had engulfed everything that they touched. Jude still wasn’t sure how they had made it out alive, though they had, the two of them likely the sole survivors of that horrific battle.

Only then did Jude begin to consider what the consequences of his actions might be. One of the empire’s great flagships had been reduced to elementary particles, the gigantic freighter torn apart by the mass-collapse of its own core. Worse, the Alter could not be blamed for the destruction, as the violent chain reaction had triggered by a polarity burst fired by his own hand. Though the risky effort had both vanquished the invaders and ensured their own escape, the collateral damage was too high to be simply forgiven by the Empire’s high tribunal. Even now a scouting team was likely tracking the coordinates of their tiny craft, looking to capture the rogue pilots responsible for Calisto’s fall.

Jude realized then that they had become outlaws, and would never be safe in Empire space again. Never able to return home, or see their families. Nowhere for them to go.

“Don’t worry” Nero says, somehow reading Jude’s mind. The anguished boy looked up, confused to find that dumb hopeful smile of Nero’s. Telling him:

“I know where we’re going.”

I’m awoken by a sudden absence of uniform motion, surprised; as the car engine sputters to a stop; to find that I’ve been sleeping. There’s the taste of a bad dream that pulls at me, something inexplicably troubling though undefined in shape. Thankfully, blinded by the harsh sunlight streaming in through the car windshield, I find my anxiety briefly assuaged. I retreat behind the car’s sun visor, assessing my disheveled condition in the small mirror I find there, finding that  I look like hell but knowing that really isn’t anything out of the ordinary.

It’s then that I recognize the  lingering smell of sulfur that tingles the back of my nose, my undefined nightmare suddenly sharper than a million megapixels.

I’d scream, though I’m too horrified to process speech.

Checking the car’s infoscreen I realize it’s been just a few hours since our moment of triumphant destruction, yet the momentary thrill I’d experienced has now entirely drained from me. I’d spent the majority of our mundane escape in stunned silence, watching vacantly as miles of endless concrete rushed along beneath us before passing out, too tired to try and process the flickering jumble of panicked thoughts running through my mind. As confident as Greg seemed, I knew quite well the gravity of our situation. We were not some pair of immortal action movie stars, our actions conveniently forgiven once the credits began rolling. This was real life, and our little act of domestic terrorism had very obvious and direct consequences. How could I have been so foolish as to celebrate that burning scene? What had I expected? That we would simply vanish into thin air, our sins left unpunished? Even if the authorities were too dumb to notice the long list of demolitions related offences proudly adorning Greg’s juvenile record, there were also the countless eyewitnesses who would place us at the scene, classmates and faculty likely all too eager to point out the odd disappearance of the crazy kid and his weird loner friend.

“Where are we?” I ask tiredly, looking around only to realize that Greg’s already pulled his door open and begun exiting. I begrudgingly follow suit, rising to my feet with a tired groan. Outside, we both instinctively raise an arm to shield ourselves from the deadly UV radiation, turning from the sun to take notice of the only landmark in sight: a strangely unfriendly one story house standing beside a similarly styled two-car garage, the brown aluminum siding on both cracked and stained with age. Before I can again ask Greg about our current whereabouts, I’m suddenly startled by something brushing against my leg, yelping in fright.  I jump backwards as Greg laughs, looking down to find a stray cat meowing fervently. Looking around I realize there’s a swarm of stray cats approaching, all likely hoping that us intruders have brought along some food. Looking up from the mass of felines I see Greg thrusting his arm into a large bag of dry cat food inside the darkened garage, throwing a great handful of it on the ground for the cats to fight over.

“Looks like we’ve defeated the security system” Greg tells me.

“Who are you talking ab–?” I try to question, but Greg motions for me to remain silent, leading the way towards the house. I realize then why the house appears so sinister, with all the windows having been covered in dark curtains, making it impossible to see within. I watch with dread as Greg slowly grips the front doorknob, bolt squeaking as it slowly slides free of the door jam. Greg holds a breath as he cautiously follows the inward swing of the door, being careful not to let the knob turn back into place. Suddenly, he falls to his knees, caught by a swift kick from within the apartment.

Then, there’s a gun to his head.

I fight the urge to cry out as a sharp twinge of adrenalin shoots down my spine. The unknown gunman has a pistol pressed firmly to Greg’s temple, the man’s tall frame almost entirely invisible within the darkened house, save for a glowing pair of thick framed glasses, eyes hidden behind the reflection of the burning sun at our backs. As much as I know I should react, I find myself unable to do more than stand there frozen in panic, my fight or flight instincts having beaten each other to a standstill.

“Looks like you’ve got me” Greg admits. The figure seems pleased at this apparent admission of surrender, a sinister grin crossing his darkened face.

“Any last words?” He asks.

“Shoot coward” Greg spits. “You’re only killing a man.”

The man laughs and pulls the trigger, my eyes wide as I wait for the shot to ring out, for Greg’s corpse to slump to the floor as the gunman turns to rip bullet holes in my pasty white skin. Instead, I witness several stiff blasts of water strike Greg in the face, him laughing as he rises from his knees, trying to flee the assault. The gunman steps out of the shadows, laughing as he continues to soak Greg, several cats running forward to witness the commotion. I’d breathe a sigh of relief, but the truth is I doubt I’ve got one in me.

“You stupid son of a bitch!” This mysterious man yells, running forth and grabbing Greg from behind in a bear hug. “Christ, it’s been too long.”

“I missed you too” Greg gripes, trying to escape the embrace.

It’s then that the middle aged man with the thin-rimmed glasses and aloof boyish face looks up at me, smiling stupidly as he lets Greg go. “And this is your partner?” Before I know what’s happening, I’m accepting a handshake, caught off guard by the man’s surprisingly firm grip and impossibly earnest smile.

“Meet Tom” Greg tells me.

“Mr. Tom” the man corrects, returning his hand to push his glasses back up the bridge of his nose. “Now, please tell me you aren’t here to blow up my house.”

Having been so long since I’ve heard it, I almost don’t recognize the sound of my own laughter.

—

“This little stunt of yours caused a serious stir” our apparent host informs us with a chuckle, walking past me with a pair of half-empty paint cans in each hand. The current order of business is to clear out the garage, making room in which to hide our bastard clunker of a getaway vehicle. I help as best I can, lugging decades of useless junk around while trying my best to mask my natural inadequacy for physical labor. “They’ve gone ahead and evacuated all the schools, the airports, government buildings…”

“What’s the government saying?” Greg asks, the two of us struggling with a rusty old weightlifting bench, slowly maneuvering it towards the gravel driveway where we dump the thing unceremoniously.

“Not much yet. News media are suggesting it was the Chinese.”

“Of course.” Greg rolls his eyes.

“Is it safe for us to be out here?” I wonder, trying to hide the nervous cracking of my voice with a cough. “I mean, couldn’t the police be looking for us right now?”

“Doubt it” Greg posits. “It’ll be at least another day or so before anyone even notices we’ve gone missing. Given the hysteria, maybe even a week.” As much as I hate to admit it, he may be right. We weren’t exactly noteworthy students, and I doubt there’s more than a handful of teachers and classmates who know us as anything other than “those weird kids.” My own legal guardian didn’t really keep an eagle eye on me, and Greg’s own parents barely seemed to even acknowledge his existence, usually too busy ignoring each other. Actually, due to their frequent negligence I was usually the one forced to forge the signatures on Greg’s numerous discipline reports, signing off on infractions ranging from simple fights and cussing to producing volatile explosive mixtures in the chem lab.

Some people call these sorts of things “warning signs.”

“You know, you could’ve messaged ahead” Mr. Tom points out. “Given me some sort of warning.” I feel the need to apologize to our distraught host for the inconvenience we’re obviously causing, though I’m still trapped in the odd social ambiguity that arises when interacting with a friend of a friend. Halfway between a total stranger and a good acquaintance, the tone of interaction ranging from mild comfort to screaming anxiety.

“Eh” Greg grunts, disregarding the reprimand as he continues carelessly tossing assorted bric-a-brac out of the garage. “They’ll be pulling the phone records eventually, would’ve traced your number.” His observation is surprisingly apt. Why he always pretended to be an ignorant dullard I’d never guess.

“There are unofficial channels” Mr. Tom points out.

“Still too risky” Greg replies. “Besides, I thought it’d be more fun to surprise you.”

“Surprise!” Mr. Tom laughs at this, shaking his head in disbelief. “Yeah, I guess you could call it that.”

“Lot of strays around here huh?” I mention, stopping my work momentarily in order to pet one of the many cats watching us work. The calico cranes its head upwards to better accept my affectionate touching.

“Don’t get me started…” Mr. Tom gripes. “I started by feeding a few of the little bastards once in awhile, now there’s a goddamn cat commune in my backyard. Better than having animal control put them to sleep though.”

“You’re such a cat lady” Greg says with a laugh.

“Hey, don’t complain! I’m taking you strays in aren’t I?” Greg shrugs, conceding the point. From one of the unsteady wooden shelves aligning the garage Mr. Tom grabs a screwdriver, tossing it my way. “Here, get those plates off” he directs, pointing me towards the car. I nod and set about the task, taking a seat on the gravel driveway and prying at the rusted orange screws. As Greg continues to lug the rest of the bodybuilding equipment out, Mr. Tom takes a long sigh, hands in his pockets as stands beside the garage door and surveys us two teenage miscreants. “Ay yi yi…” he mumbles, shaking his head disdainfully.

“Something wrong?” Greg asks from inside the darkened garage, before yelling “Rosebud!” and roughly tossing an old broken winter sled our way. I turn just in time to see the Flexible Flyer explode into an assortment of wood shards and metaphors for lost childhood, the assembled cats all dashing off in surprise. Based on their interactions I’ve been led to assume that Mr. Tom is a former mentor of Greg’s, that much is obvious. What I can’t figure out is how Greg ever fostered a relationship with someone in a position of authority, or how any levelheaded adult figure could stomach Greg’s antics.

“You’re really serious about this?” Tom asks.

“Of course” Greg replies, exiting the garage, wiping off filthy hands with an oil rag. He grins then, noticing Tom’s concern. “C’mon, aren’t you proud of your old student?”

“Don’t joke around” Mr. Tom instructs. “Hell I’m putting my life on the line for you here.” Greg waves away this idea with a grunt, Mr. Tom’s eyes going wide. “I’m serious! You’re terrorists now. I’m aiding and abetting terrorists. One wrong move and they’ll have us all lined up for execution in the public square.”

“Glendale doesn’t have a firing squad” Greg mutters, tossing more assorted crap onto the already cluttered driveway. “Or a town square for that matter.” I listen in on the conversation from my gravel seat, pretending to working at a stubborn screw while occasionally petting the orange tabby strangely obsessed with pressing his nose against the bent metal plate.

“Very funny” Tom acquiesces. “But c’mon, what’s your plan? You’re just going to bum around Glendale until the heat dies down?”

“Pretty much.”

“But there’s your problem Greg!” Mr. Tom exclaims, capitalizing on this apparently flaw in logic. “I don’t think you understand the scope of this. This is the biggest domestic terrorist stunt in over two decades; biggest one since Bakersfield. It’s not just going to ‘blow over.’ Hell, it’s been twenty years now and they’re still hunting down the old revolutionaries. Executed another one just a few months back if you remember.”

There’s a knot in my throat as I think back to the event in question. They’d apparently found him hiding in some cabin in the far north of Canada, another of the countless revolutionaries who had survived the war and tried to forge a new life beyond the borders of the good ol’ USA. Back in the day this would’ve been a bit of bureaucracy involved, a decade of trials and appeals. Now the whole process took a month or so, a quick puppet trial before the full televised execution, done primarily to sate the bloodlust of some of the more fervent patriotics. It was quite the event, kids at school abuzz with chatter about watching a man die. It wasn’t like this public executions were regular events, we’d been in middle school for the last one, and though any of us could still download footage of that particular event without any difficulty, somehow it paled to the idea of being present at the exact moment of death, watching live as a soul was extinguished.

Disgusted as I was with the excitement surrounding it all, I couldn’t help but watch. Twenty years later and he hardly resembled anymore the sharp eyed college boy on the wanted list, a downtrodden sad man with a middle-aged paunch and haggard beard. Then, without even a chance to speak he was wheeled into the endgame chamber strapped to a hospital gurney, the lethal injection administered behind closed doors, the camera crew allowed to enter twenty minutes later and reveal what happened to those who participate in crimes against the government, crimes too serious to be afforded any real mention of in our history textbooks.

I’m suddenly horrified to realize I can’t even recall the man’s name, nor any of the other revolutionaries who’d been afforded the same sad end. Would that be us? Was our foolish act enough to inspire some legacy to survive us? Or was it just another pointless act of circumstance to be washed away by the ebb and tide of history? My herostratic fame denied to me, my death televised as a Sunday evening distraction to a public who had long since forgotten who I was.

Mr. Tom looks Greg over, searching for some hint of emotion from his former pupil. “Honestly” he asks, still shaking his head sadly. “What are you going  to do?”

Greg says nothing at first, and I wonder if maybe he’s been trumped by Tom’s overbearing sense of reason. However he simply shrugs, answering: “The same thing you tried to do.” Suddenly, Greg looks to me, a smile crossing his face as he sees my confusion, turning back to Tom with a renewed confidence. “Except we’re not gonna fail.”

Tom looks at Greg in disbelief, mulling over his proud statement. “Kids these days…” he mutters finally, turning away from Greg to survey the garage, seemingly eager to change the subject.  “Alright… looks good! Let’s park this thing and get you boys something to eat.” The both of us smile, having earned our host’s acceptance, Greg quickly clamors into the driver’s seat of the car, sparking the engine to life. I wipe the traces of dust and gravel from my jeans as I stand,joining Mr. Tom beside the garage, watching as he helps guide Greg in backwards.

“A little to the left!” He yells, gesturing with his arms. “And don’t hit any of the damn cats!”

“Tell them to move!” Greg yells out his window.

“Hey…” I mention, speaking up for the first time. “I know Greg’ll won’t say this– but thanks.”

“Don’t mention it” Mr. Tom responds, refusing the sentiment as he continues waving Greg in. “Just do me a favor… make sure he doesn’t blow up anything else for awhile.” I grin stupidly at what I interpret as a joke, the smile fading as Mr. Tom shoots me a glare.

“I’ll keep an eye on him” I offer pitifully. He smiles, patting me on the back.

“Gonna be a long summer” he remarks.

He couldn’t have been more right.

As waves of enemy fire screamed past the pod’s hull, Nero narrowed his eyes in concentration, dodging swiftly through the dense collection of wreckage littered around the battlefield. Jude meanwhile was trying his best not to throw up, the insane maneuvering too frantic for the ship’s gyro-stabilizers to keep up, Jude’s cockpit lurching in every direction as Nero recklessly pushed them ever closer to the proposed target. 

“There’s no way I can make a shot like that!” Jude yelled up to the cockpit, nervous sweat dripping down his neck.

“Yeah well, I’ve got my hands full flying this thing!” Nero yelled back. “You took targeting, right?!” 

“I flunked out of targeting! I’m not trained for something like this!”

 “Well, you ain’t got much of a choice!” Nero responded harshly, disregarding the mechanic’s apprehension as he turned back to the front shield,  Jude crying out as both boys simultaneously spotted the broken starfighter tumbling directly towards them. Nero cursed, putting the craft into a sharp dive, the fallen ship’s remains scraping against the hull as it passed overhead. However, before either boy could breathe a sigh of relief, a sudden volley of lasers tore into the fighter’s wing, the ship shaking violently from the impact. Jude winced, closing his eyes tight and waiting for the inevitable barrage of secondary fire to cut through the hull and kill them both. Opening his eyes a moment later and finding himself still among the living, the boy felt honestly surprised.

It was then that Jude looked outside, noticing that the uncountable bursts of polarity fire had somehow stopped moving, appearing now as long ribbons of frozen light painted atop blackness of space. In that moment his ability to interpret time had somehow slowed to a crawl, making him suddenly aware of the individuality of each wave of light his eyes intercepted, recognizing that the ever-shifting pointillist picture called “reality” was nothing more a convenient lie. It’s then that he spotted the target, tears forming in his eyes as he bore witness to its beauty.

There it was– the exposed core of the Calisto, a swirling blue-white ball of theoretical physics. It’s stabilizers blown, this brilliant battery had begun to pulsate erratically, its light engulfing everything it touched. Jude looked around at the frozen battle raging on all around him,  knowing that Nero was right. As reckless as it seemed, this their our only chance. Jude blinked hard, time rushing forth to greet him as his eyes opened again, the once infinitely long slivers of light now arriving at breakneck speed. Jude immediately grabbed hold of the firing column, swinging his gunner’s pod over into full view of the core. Gazing into the center of the spinning sky-colored marble, he found himself thinking back to target practice, to the numerous drills he’d failed to master.

“There are three steps involved in the gunning process!” The instructor had barked over the com, his gruff hostile voice ricocheting around the inside of Jude’s simulation helmet. “These steps are both the simplest thing you will ever learn in the Corps, and the most important thing you will ever learn in the Corps!”

“First!” He’d yelled, “Line up the target!”

The fighter took a sudden shot to the aft bow, shuddering violently as various emergency systems kicked in. Jude ignored the flashing warning lights of his control panel, making tiny adjustments to the targeting bearings in order to bring the core into the center of the reticule. Lining it up, slow and steady.

“Second! Adjust frequency!”

Jude twisted the firing column into range, looking for a green signal from his targeting computer. He was barely aware of Nero frantically yelling over the com for him to take the shot, though Jude was too lost in the comforting stimulus overload to notice; bathed in the warm red glow of the emergency alarm, basking in the strange harmonic drone of the warning sirens blaring all around him. And before him, that brilliant star, burning eternally in the night sky. Jude briefly wished he could stay lost in that moment; forever standing on the edge of a quantum state, neither here nor there.

“Third!” His illusionary drill sargeant began, though Jude didn’t need any further instruction, gazing out at the unblinking eye of the universe while silently mouthing the final command:

“Press the button.”